Home | Find An Ethical Society | Become A Member | Contact | Donate
facebook
twitter
youtube



  • Who We Are
    • Mission & Vision
    • Ethical Humanism
    • History
    • Member Societies
    • Meet Our Leaders
    • Staff, Board & Committees
  • What We Do
    • Connections Forum & Calendar
    • Sunday Platform Talks
    • Ethical Action
      • Ethical Action News
    • Ethical Education
    • Conferences
      • AEU 105th Assembly on Zoom
    • Awards
  • Ceremonies
    • Seasonal Festivals
    • Weddings
    • Baby Namings
    • Coming of Age
    • Memorials
  • Our Community
    • Become an Individual Member of the AEU
    • Find an Ethical Society
    • Ethical Community
    • Children’s Programming
    • Youth of Ethical Societies (YES)
    • Future of Ethical Societies (FES)
    • National Ethical Service
    • Allied Organizations
  • Events & News
    • Events
    • News
    • Bart’s Blog
    • In the Media – AEU
    • In the Media – Societies
    • Press Kit
    • Ethical Action News
  • Resources
    • Articles
    • Books
    • Ethical Action Reports
    • Ethical Culture Journal
    • Archived Newsletters
    • Platform Talks
    • Resolutions
    • Statements
  • Contact
    • Support the AEU

Blog Post

0

Humanism and Anti-Blackness

27 Feb 2018
Emily
Ethical ActionNews

by Bart Worden, Executive Director of American Ethical Union, originally published on TheHumanist.com

How do you explain the lack of success of Black Americans since the Emancipation Proclamation? What do you say about the high levels of poverty, joblessness, low educational attainment, and high rate of arrests and incarceration relative to their white counterparts? And how do you explain the relative success of white Americans? What do you say about their significantly greater wealth, rate of employment, educational attainment, and significantly lower rate of arrests and incarceration relative to their Black counterparts?

Often the responses to these questions start with identifying insufficiencies in the African-American community and ruminate on what can be done to improve it from within. But what if the primary causes of the varied levels of success are the behaviors of the dominant element of American culture, namely the behavior of Europeans and their descendants toward non-European people? Shouldn’t we be worrying over “the white problem”—the concerted and systematic effort to create and maintain an underclass through the far-ranging and persistent use of violence and the threat of violence?

Humanists are inclined to champion the progressive values of freedom, opportunity, security, and responsibility and will raise strong objections when any of those values are compromised. But for most of us, our freedom, the opportunities we have to choose from, and our relative safety have been gained on the backs of people whose freedom, opportunities, and safety were severely impeded. And we fail to accept responsibility for our role in promulgating an unjust and oppressive system.

As a white, college-educated, heterosexual, cis-gender male of above-average height, I am a member of the oppressing class. But as a liberal, progressive, professional social worker I had for years convinced myself that I was not personally racist and also believed that the trajectory of our nation’s civil rights was “bending toward justice.” But a proliferation of police killings of Black citizens changed my perspective. Before high-profile cases such as Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, and Sandra Bland, there were:

  • Police officer Christopher Ridley, shot by an officer from a different police department when he tried to break up a fight between two men;
  • Danroy Henry, a college student shot by police when driving away from a bar after a different officer told him to drive off;
  • Kenneth Chamberlain, a sixty-eight-year old man shot and killed by police who had responded to his medical alert;
  • Ramarley Graham, a teen pursued by police after purchasing marijuana then shot in his bathroom when trying to flush it down the toilet.

 
The rules of engagement changed when Black people were involved, and so did the stories provided by media coverage. No matter how egregious the act, the police were given the benefit of doubt and the victims blamed for their deaths.

Concerns over policing led me to read Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness which opened a whole new vista of injustice. Outraged, I signed up to attend an Undoing Racism workshop offered by the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond and learned how social service agencies, such as the one that has employed me for over thirty years, contributed to the very problems I thought were being eased by highlighting deficiencies, labelling people as problems, and siphoning off dollars to pay the salaries of white administrators like me.

It became crystal clear that I (and white people like me) need to accept responsibility for the damage done by racism and white privilege and must do what can be done to repair the harm. I joined a number of social justice groups and participated in marches. I encouraged family, friends, and colleagues to get involved in anti-racist efforts.

I also kept on the lookout for rich educational opportunities. A master class, “Humanism and Anti-Blackness,” recently offered by the American Humanist Association’s Center for Education, encouraged participants to take a hard look at the history of structural racism and its continued impact on our culture and on the people who live in it. Our instructor, Dr. William Hart, helped participants appreciate how anti-Blackness came to be such a powerful and persistent force in the United States. From enslavement to Jim Crow to mass incarceration, our nation’s history reveals that people of European descent actively promoted a tragically successful campaign of mass kidnapping, brutalization, and commodification of millions of Africans and descendants of Africans whose forced labor as enslaved people formed the backbone of the United States’ rise to economic power.

To prepare for the class, participants were expected to read four books: Edward E. Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, Nicholas Guyatt’s Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation, Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, and Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route.

The books brought to light many highly disturbing accounts of cruel and inhumane behavior on the part of whites in their interactions with people of African descent, and showed the depths to which people would go to use enslavement as a means to economic gain. This was especially clear in the rapid expansion of cotton farming in United States where white Americans deftly exploited greed and people’s willingness to use brutally inhumane practices as a means to financial success.

As Baptist writes:

From 1783 at the end of the American Revolution to 1861, the number of slaves in the United States increased five times over, and all this expansion produced a powerful nation. For white enslavers were able to force enslaved African-American migrants to pick cotton faster and more efficiently than free people. Their practices rapidly transformed the southern states into the dominant force in the global cotton market, and cotton was the world’s most widely traded commodity at the time, as it was the key raw material during the first century of the industrial revolution. The returns from cotton monopoly powered the modernization of the rest of the American economy, and by the time of the Civil War, the United States had become the second nation to undergo large-scale industrialization.

Anti-Blackness provided an avenue for treating Blacks as subhuman and denying their human and civil rights. As exceptions to the “all men are created equal” ideal put forth in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, Black Americans were excluded from the protections of law, and, since they were considered property, their enslaved bodies were subject to the laws slave owners relied upon to protect their “investments.”

Anti-Blackness and its companion, white privilege, have thus been a key factor in the success of whites as well as the disenfranchisement of Blacks. But while whites have been quick to assume responsibility for the goods that have come our way, we have been disinclined to acknowledge our responsibility for the evils of enslavement and have instead laid blame upon the victims of oppression and undermined avenues of positive change.

How can the harm done by anti-Blackness be repaired? It’s too late for the millions who were taken from their families, brutalized by the lash, or died at the hands of enslavers. But perhaps we can at least acknowledge the evils of the past and begin to pull down the structures we’ve created and sustained in our time. That won’t be easy. We’ve been conditioned to accept white privilege as normal, to believe that we’ve somehow earned the wealth we have and that those who have less haven’t tried hard enough.

The first step is to learn about white privilege and anti-Blackness, then work to stay awake to their presence and consequences. The consequences are there to see: housing segregation, biased criminal justice, poorly funded public schools, unfair lending practices, etc. The harder part is acknowledging your complicity and owning the responsibility to press for change in yourself and in our institutions.

The American Ethical Union has been working to repair the harm done by structural racism and white privilege. Our Ethical Societies are hosting documentary screenings, organizing learning circles, and making partnerships with anti-racism campaigns. For example, the Washington Ethical Society is holding discussion groups in March on Professor Anthony Pinn’s When Colorblindness Isn’t the Answer: Humanism and the Challenge of Race (Humanism in Practice) before his April 29 talk there. Our societies would welcome your participation with our efforts. The AEU also looks forward to working on racial justice with the other organizations who, like the Washington Ethical Society, had representatives take part in Dr. Hart’s class: the American Humanist Association, the Society for Humanistic Judaism, the Institute of Humanist Studies, the Congress of Secular Jewish Organizations, and the International Humanist and Ethical Union.

And, even if you aren’t yet up to joining in person, sending money to underfunded grassroots groups can help them amplify their voices for change… and that’s something all of us can do.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

*
*

Sign up for emails from AEU

Select list(s) to subscribe to


By submitting this form, you are consenting to receive marketing emails from: American Ethical Union, 2 West 64th Street, New York, NY, 10023, https://www.aeu.org. You can revoke your consent to receive emails at any time by using the SafeUnsubscribe® link, found at the bottom of every email. Emails are serviced by Constant Contact

Recent Posts

  • Seeking Program and Communications Coordinator
  • Week of 9/14/2020
  • Week of 8/17/2020

Upcoming Events

All Ethical Societies Platform “Replacing Magical Thinking with Rational Discourse: How can freethinkers help restore democracy?”

31 Jan 2021 | 11:00 am

Youth of Ethical Societies 2021 Conference

05 Mar 2021 | 07:00 pm

Facebook Feed

American Ethical Union
American Ethical Union
The American Ethical Union calls for nontheist participation in National Inaugural Interfaith Service.On Thursday January 21st, the Washington National Cathedral will host a virtual presidential inaugural interfaith service to mark the inauguration of Joe Biden as president. While presented as an opportunity to bring the whole nation together, and while part of the “America United” inaugural activities, one large community will not be represented at all: atheists, agnostics, humanists, and the nonreligious. Millions of Americans today make meaning and express their personal and civic values without reference to a god or traditional religious beliefs. These Americans deserve a voice, and should be included in formal interfaith programming like the Inaugural Service. Read our full statement here: aeu.org/resource/aeu-calls-for-nontheist-participation-in-national-inaugural-interfaith-service/ ... See MoreSee Less

23  ·  

Photo

View on Facebook
· Share

Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Linked In Share by Email

American Ethical Union
American Ethical Union
Today, as the nation continues to recover from an attempted white supremacist insurrection at our capitol, we are reflecting upon this quote from the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. #MLK #MLKDay #MLK2021 #king #martinlutherkingjr #today #EthicalCulture #ethics #2021 ... See MoreSee Less

3  ·  

Photo

View on Facebook
· Share

Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Linked In Share by Email

American Ethical Union
American Ethical Union
AEU Statement Regarding the Events of January 6thYesterday, we watched in shock and horror as a violent mob attacked the US Capitol, forcing their way inside and occupying areas of the building for hours in an attempt to disrupt the certification of electoral votes submitted by the states. By the end of the day, 4 people were dead, 52 members of the seditious mob were arrested, and 14 police officers were injured. It took the assistance of many additional federal law enforcement personnel and the National Guard to remove the attackers from the Capitol and clear the way for the Joint Congress to resume its work.Fortunately, the Joint Congress was resolute and refused to let the interruption derail our democracy, working through the night to certify the electoral vote counts for all of the states. However, this episode was an attack on democracy itself, instigated by a sitting president whose actions have severely undermined respect for and trust in the very system that put him in office. Mr. Trump has shown only contempt for the democratic process and is a danger to our country. People who are in a position to remove Mr. Trump from office ought to proceed in haste as this president has repeatedly shown readiness to incite violence and mayhem, and also continues to demonstrate an obsession with the electoral results to the seeming exclusion of other national concerns. Our democratic system of government must be protected from his influence.As Ethical Humanists, we are called upon to repudiate the anti-democratic tendencies that have gained an unwelcome foothold in public life. Our country will need us to elicit the best from one another and ourselves in the months and years to come.#Jan6 #ethicalhumanism ow.ly/uxes50D2Gzn ... See MoreSee Less

2  ·  

Photo

View on Facebook
· Share

Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Linked In Share by Email

American Ethical Union
American Ethical Union
Share your voice! The AEU is seeking volunteers to contribute to our World Human Rights Day Project. Learn more here: ow.ly/YGDC50CYYPL ... See MoreSee Less

2  ·  

Photo

View on Facebook
· Share

Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Linked In Share by Email

Twitter Feed

Tweets by @EthicalUnion

Instagram Feed

ethicalunion

The American Ethical Union calls for nontheist par The American Ethical Union calls for nontheist participation in National Inaugural Interfaith Service.

On Thursday January 21st, the Washington National Cathedral will host a virtual presidential inaugural interfaith service to mark the inauguration of Joe Biden as president. While presented as an opportunity to bring the whole nation together, and while part of the “America United” inaugural activities, one large community will not be represented at all: atheists, agnostics, humanists, and the nonreligious. 

Millions of Americans today make meaning and express their personal and civic values without reference to a god or traditional religious beliefs. These Americans deserve a voice, and should be included in formal interfaith programming like the Inaugural Service.
Today, as the nation continues to recover from an Today, as the nation continues to recover from an attempted white supremacist insurrection at our capitol, we are reflecting upon this quote from the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. 

#MLK #MLKDay #MLK2021 #King #MartinLutherKingJr #Today #EthicalCulture #Ethics #2021
Load More... Follow on Instagram

Sign up for emails from AEU

Select list(s) to subscribe to


By submitting this form, you are consenting to receive marketing emails from: American Ethical Union, 2 West 64th Street, New York, NY, 10023, https://www.aeu.org. You can revoke your consent to receive emails at any time by using the SafeUnsubscribe® link, found at the bottom of every email. Emails are serviced by Constant Contact

BtnDonate

American Ethical Union | 2 West 64th Street, New York, NY 10023 | Phone: (212) 873-6500 | office@aeu.org