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trotsky

(49,533 posts)
Fri Dec 2, 2016, 03:44 PM Dec 2016

Black atheists matter: How an increasingly vocal group of freethinkers is taking on religion

http://www.rawstory.com/2016/12/black-atheists-matter-how-an-increasingly-vocal-group-of-freethinkers-are-taking-on-religion/

...Who are the new black atheists and what is behind their recent growth? First, let’s briefly look at the ‘old’ black atheists.

As long as people have proclaimed the existence of God, others have rejected the idea of a deity. Among African Americans, the earliest evidence of atheism and agnosticism comes from 19th-century slave narratives. Peter Randolph’s Sketches of Slave Life (1855) and Austin Steward’s Twenty-Two Years a Slave (1857), for example, posit that the brutality of slavery drove many blacks to become atheists. Likewise, prevalent proslavery religion turned many enslaved blacks away from Christianity and religion in general.

...

New black atheists are not content to personally reject religion but instead have a goal of spreading freethought to the broader black community. For example, the author Sikivu Hutchinson and the founder of Black Nonbelievers, Mandisa Thomas, argue that religion hurts the black community by promoting sexism, patriarchy and homophobia. They claim that black churches have failed to address drug addiction, housing inequities, health disparities, lack of employment opportunities and other pressing social problems facing black Americans. Rather than adopting religious solutions such as abstinence-only education to a problem such as teenage pregnancies, black atheists call for more sex education and access to birth control.

Today, new black atheists are more likely than ever to be women. While there have been prominent black women freethinkers such as Hurston, Larsen and Alice Walker, until recently it had been much more likely for men to openly embrace skepticism, rather than women. New black atheists reject the politics of respectability that have held sway in the black community since the early 1900s. These politics demand that black women must be chaste, temperate, industrious and socially conservative. Above all, they must be religious. They must always portray the race in the best light.
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