Atheism has a big race problem that no one’s talking about, Sikivu Hutchinson, Washington Post, June 16, 2014
White atheists have a markedly different agenda. They are, on average, more affluent than the general population. Their children don’t attend overcrowded “dropout mills” where they are criminalized, subjected to “drill and kill” curricula and shunted off to prison, subminimum-wage jobs or chronic unemployment. White organizations go to battle over church/state separation and creationism in schools.
They largely ignore the fact that black nonbelievers face a racial and gender divide precipitated by rollbacks on affirmative action, voting rights, affordable housing, reproductive rights, education and job opportunities. With the highest national rates of juvenile incarceration, as well as suspension and expulsion in K-12 schools, African American youth in particular have been deeply impacted by these assaults on civil rights. According to the Education Trust, “If current trends continue, only one in twenty African American students in the state of California will go on to a four-year college or university.”
But when we look to atheist and humanist organizations for solidarity on these issues, there is a staggering lack of interest. And though some mainstream atheist organizations have jumped on the “diversity” bandwagon, they haven’t seriously grappled with the issue. Simply trotting out atheists of color to speak about “diversity” at overwhelmingly white conferences doesn’t cut it. As Kim Veal of the Black Freethinkers network notes, this kind of tokenism exhibits a superficial interest in “minorities, but not in minority issues.”
The Missing Clause in Scalia’s First Amendment, Scott Lemieux, Lawyers, Guns & Money, June 17, 2014
I suppose there are people who are offended by individuals engaged in public displays of religious faith the way that Scalia is offended by rock music and Stravinsky — kudos to Scalia’s hapless clerks for not including or omitting any reference to the kids today with their baggy pants and hippity-hop music — although I’m confident that their number is much smaller than Scalia thinks. (As Dahlia Lithwick observes, Scalia’s constant sense of religious persecution is a major theme in new Scalia bio.) But irrespective of how common it is to be offended by other people expressing religious beliefs in public, it’s completely irrelevant to this case, since nobody thinks that the public displays of religious belief by individuals can be limited by anything but the same neutral space, time, and manner restrictions that might apply to the public playing of music.
