› Richard Dawkins' family shown to have owned slaves
this is why i have an issue associating myself with other atheists. Richard says “oh, my money wasn’t obtained that way”, “my fortune is completely self-made”.
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Ok, but what does this have to do with atheism?
i suppose that wasn’t shown on my part…
it has to do with atheism because i am Black and an atheist. most atheists have a very narrowed view of the world. i find it absurd that he can speak about injustices done by the church and other Abrahamic religions in general, yet when it is shown that he has direct correlations with slavery, he attempts to remove any responsibility. while noting numerous times in The God Delusion (great book, nonetheless), the ways in which an injustice such as slavery was sanctioned in the Bible. not to mention that many prominent atheists often eschew ideas which overtly or covertly are quite racist and/or eurocentric.
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Oh, ok. That makes a lot more sense to me.
And I think you’re pretty much spot on. I think it’s wrong to hold Dawkins personally responsible (and I’m not saying you are, but that’s just how your post reads) for his ancestors owning slaves, though. It’s not like he can change that. That said, though, the idea that he’s entirely a self-made man is false. For starters, no one is entirely self-made. We’re social creatures who rely upon one another to progress through life.
Being an educated, white, upper middle-class male certainly affords him unwarranted privilege, as it does the rest of the educated, white, upper middle-class male population in the western world. But while he enjoys that privilege (and who wouldn’t?), he seems to operate under the erroneous idea that everyone else on the planet is equally privileged.
But the fact of his ancestors owning slaves does nothing to undermine the validity of his scientific and philosophical exploration. He is, nevertheless, a pompous jackass who’s benefited from illegitimate labor. (Illegitimate meaning forced and without compensation.)
i think that as nations that have inherited the issues regarding slavery, racism, systemic dehumanization (which is still going on), we have to be open to speaking and making concrete changes to get past these things. Dawkins has been shown to be a descendant of slavery. and as opposed to him possibly using this as a platform to speaking about, educating himself and possibly others about our shared past (of which he got the shiny, gold end of), he instead acts as if he has no connection whatsoever to that, and even jokes about how little DNA he received from that side of his family.
yet i, and most other Black people living in the Americas are here because of slavery. most of us are living in poverty and ghettos because of oppression from generation and generation back…back to slavery. there are a slew of issues we as Black people and people of color in general can trace to colonialism and slavery. i find it very problematic that only people of color (largely) speak about slavery, racism, the slave trade, etc., when it is white people who have to do the most work at getting past these issues.
Dawkins could give a monetary donation to an HBCU, the NAACP, or any organization based in Jamaica. or he could simply educate himself on the current consequences of the slavery. but he isn’t doing any of that. he is simply stepping back and removing any connection.
it’s the same ol’ issue with white people and their half-assed attempts at forgetting about our bloody past without having to put any work into it. yes, let’s all live in this country as if we’re in some fuckin racial utopia…post-racial society, right. but don’t dare bring up how most of the rich white people who inherited their money got it from my ancestors centuries of unpaid slave labor. France will apologize to Haiti, but they damn sure won’t share any of the wealth they acquired off the backs of Haitian (or Senegalese, or Cote D’Ivoire, or Burkina Faso, etc.) slaves.
when he (and others) try to act as if our current situations have no connection to those of the past, especially when we’re talking about slavery, then i do most definitely hold him responsible. he inherited a past that he has to answer for. of course it doesn’t undermine his scientific endeavors. it just undermines him as a person who, i feel from now on, has no right to even mutter the term “humanism”.
