Abstract
In a culture in which black women have some of the highest rates of religious observance, black feminist atheist humanists face multiple challenges. Historically, slave-era misogynist and racist stereotypes have marked black femininity as threatening, hypersexual and other. These toxic images of black femininity reinforce the drive toward a respectability politics based on faith, heteronormative gender roles and patriarchal family structures. Although black feminist atheist humanist praxis might fundamentally “disrupt” binaries of gender, race and sexuality, black women non-believers still struggle to create viable alternatives to faith in hyper-segregated communities of color where organized religion provides social welfare infrastructure, political solidarity and visibility.
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Notes
- 1.
Elizabeth Higginbotham, “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race”, Signs, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Winter, 1992), pp. 251–274.
- 2.
Ibid.
- 3.
According to the Pew Research Center, “Religious ‘nones’—a shorthand we use to refer to people who self-identify as atheists or agnostics, as well as those who say their religion is ‘nothing in particular’—now make up roughly 23% of the U.S. adult population…a stark increase from 2007.” Michael Lipka, “A Closer Look at America’s Rapidly Growing Nones,” Pew Research Center, May 13, 2015 (http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/05/13/a-closer-look-at-americas-rapidly-growing-religious-nones/).
- 4.
Ari Goldman, “Black Women’s Bumpy Path to Church Leadership,” The New York Times, 1990 (http://www.nytimes.com/1990/07/29/nyregion/black-women-s-bumpy-path-to-church-leadership.html?pagewanted=all&mcubz=1); It’s estimated that black women comprise between 1 and 4% of black clergy. See Sandra Barnes, “The Alpha and Omega of Our People: A Sociological Examination of the Promise and Problems in the Black Church,” in Juan Battle, Free at Last?: Black America in the Twenty-First Century (Routledge: New York, 2006), pp. 149–172.
- 5.
Pew Religion Research Forum, “A Religious Portrait of African Americans”, January 23, 2009 (http://www.pewforum.org/2009/01/30/a-religious-portrait-of-african-americans/).
- 6.
Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation Poll of Black Women in America (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/nation/black-women-in-america/).
- 7.
Ibid.
- 8.
Maya Rockeymoore, “Black Female and Broke”, Forbes Magazine, 2017 (https://www.forbes.com/sites/janetnovack/2015/09/30/black-female-and-broke/).
- 9.
Khan Jaw, et al. “Women, Race and Wealth”, Volume 1, January 2017, Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Equity and Insight Center for Community Economic Development, 1 (https://www.insightcced.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/January2017_ResearchBriefSeries_WomenRaceWealth-Volume1-Pages-1.pdf).
- 10.
Ibid.
- 11.
Ibid.
- 12.
Ibid., p. 3.
- 13.
The term “single variable” refers to traditional analytical approaches that do not consider the multiple factors informing identify formation, social development and subjectivity. Single variable is the opposite of intersectional approaches which frame identity formation, et al. through a dynamic lens which is more inclusive of non-dominant communities.
- 14.
Pew Research Center, “A Survey of LGBT Americans”, June 2013 (http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/06/13/a-survey-of-lgbt-americans/).
- 15.
David M. Barnes and Ilan H. Meyer, “Religious Affiliation, Internalized Homophobia, and Mental Health in Lesbians, Gay Men and Bisexuals”, American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, Volume 82, Issue 4, October 2012, 505–515.
- 16.
Recent depictions that are critical of certain elements of the black church (e.g., homophobia, sexual predation, prosperity gospel exploitation) such as the 2016 TV series Greenleaf and the 2012 film The Undershepherd come to mind.
- 17.
See Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820–1860,” American Quarterly, Vol. 18, No. 2, Part 1 (Summer, 1966), pp. 151–153; Jeanne Boydston, “Cult of True Womanhood” (http://www.pbs.org/stantonanthony/resources/index.html?body=culthood.html).
- 18.
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Dover: Boston, 2001), pp. 113 and 115.
- 19.
Ibid., p. 22.
- 20.
Bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), p. 160.
- 21.
Paula Doress-Worters, Mistress of Herself: Speeches and Letters of Ernestine L. Rose (New York: Feminist Press of the City University, 2008), p. 227.
- 22.
Carol Kolmerten, The American Life of Ernestine L. Rose (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1999), p. xvii.
- 23.
Rose , for example, has never enjoyed the status and renown of her fellow activists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. See Bonnie Anderson, The Rabbi’s Atheist Daughter: Ernestine Rose, International Feminist Pioneer (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 8–10.
- 24.
Ibid., p. 8.
- 25.
Sikivu Hutchinson, “Ten Fierce Atheists: Unapologetically Black Women Beyond Belief”, Huffington Post, March 23, 2016 (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sikivu-hutchinson/10-fierce-atheists-unapol_b_9532692.html).
- 26.
Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun (New York: Random House, 1959), p. 51.
- 27.
Ibid.
- 28.
I make this argument in my article “This Far By Faith? Race Traitors, Gender Apostates and the Atheism Question”, Black Agenda Report, 2009 (https://www.blackagendareport.com/content/far-faith-race-traitors-gender-apostates-and-atheism-question).
- 29.
Hutchinson, 2016.
- 30.
Noah Berlatsky, “The Women of #Black Lives Matter”, The Atlantic, January 27, 2015 (https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2015/01/women-and-blacklivesmatter/384855/).
- 31.
George Hutchinson, In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line (Cambridge: Harvard College, 2006), pp. 56 and 280.
- 32.
Ibid., pp. 281.
- 33.
Nella Larsen, Quicksand (New York: Dover Publications, 2006), p. 123.
- 34.
Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road (New York: Harper Collins, 1995), p. 148.
- 35.
I’ve written about this schism in Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics and the Values Wars (Los Angeles: Infidel Books, 2011) and Godless Americana: Race and Religious Rebels (Los Angeles: Infidel Books, 2013).
- 36.
African American girls have the highest rates of domestic sex trafficking in the US. See Human Rights Project for Girls, “The Sexual Abuse to Prison Pipeline: The Girls’ Story”, Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality, 2015 (https://rights4girls.org/wp-content/uploads/r4g/2015/02/2015_COP_sexual-abuse_layout_web-1.pdf).
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Hutchinson, S. (2018). Respectability Among Heathens: Black Feminist Atheist Humanists. In: Pinn, A. (eds) Humanism and the Challenge of Difference. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94099-1_3
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