I’m reminded of an episode of Family Guy:

Lois Griffin: Oh, Meg, I think you’re just trying to fit in by pretending to be something you’re not, like the time Peter pretended to be racist to get out of jury duty.
[cut to Peter serving on all-white jury]
Peter Griffin: Awful lot of honkies in here…

(I wish I could have found the video)

While I’m not entirely sure what we could be doing to attract more people of color to FFW, I think the draw of christianity to African-Americans is understandable. Right or wrong, whether embellished or accurate, christian leaders have been pretty successful at accentuating the struggle of the oppressed and powerless, both in the christian mythology and history of the church. It’s not hard to see how an oppressed group could relate to this mindset.

Perhaps a good place to start would be this Point of Inquiry interview with Norm Allen, executive director of African Americans for Humanism.

Given that atheism is strongly correlated with with high IQ and educational attainment, it seems to me this is getting into walking-on-eggshells territory. I’m not going to say another thing.

@Michael B.: Well, as Greta Christina noted, one positive thing FFW could do is to simply bring in more women and people of color as speakers. Simply by presenting diverse faces you change the community perception of the group. It’s just a start but it’s a way of signaling that, hey, this group isn’t just about a bunch of white guys.

Religiosity is higher among women and African Americans or so I’ve been told.

I hope we are not doing anything to discourage participation with FFW. I love the idea of bringing women and minorities to speak but I am not going to stop a white male from speaking if it is on topic.

I don’t have the count but there are more women in the group then I thought we would have and we started with. We have several intelligent female regulars. Browse our facebook fan page and it is even more diverse. Go ahead look at it… and come back

Next, the CAA of IPFW student organization does have more women and minorities participating. That is a great news.

Also, the Skeptically Speaking podcast/live radio show covered this. I don’t think it has any answers but it was a good listen and from the perspective of women who went to TAM. See http://skepticallyspeaking.com/episodes/19-gender-the-skeptical-community

@Andy D.: It doesn’t matter if you aren’t doing anything to discourage women and people of color from participating (that’s just expected), what counts is whether or not you’re actively working to encourage participation. Nobody is saying that you should eschew opportunities for programming by white guys but rather that you have an obligation to seek out programming by women and people of color. Otherwise you’re saying, “Eh, that’s just the way it is. What can ya do about it?”

Oh, and saying “Hey, we’re not biased. Why, we’ve got half a dozen or so women members,” is perilously close to infamous, “Why, some of my best friends are black/women/Hispanic/et cetera,” argument.

Wow, Leo- That is putting words in my mouth that I certainly didn’t say or imply.

OK just the facts. My count of FFW FB fans is 53 males to 45 females. I don’t think we have a serious gender problem although we could do better. (I could be off by one or two). We have a obvious problem with diversity of race not gender. I count at least 2 non-white fans. Although, it is anecdotal I think the campus CAA group is even more diverse.

Also, we are quite diverse and open in terms of homosexuality and bi-sexuality.

@Andy D: But how many actual FFW members are women or people of color? If 1/2 of your FB fans are women but only a handful of your actual members are perhaps indicate that there’s room for improvement? That perhaps there is a larger number of female nonbelievers who aren’t being served by FFW? Again, it isn’t enough to just say, “I’m not biased.”

@ Andy: Campus CAA is redundant :p CAA = Campus Atheists and Agnostics

@ Leo: I think your comment about the “some of my best friends are…” mentality isn’t really accurate from the comments, at least not as they appeared to me… However aside from that I think you’ve got some really great points, instead of taking a passive approach to the speakers and letting it wind up mainly being white guys talking it makes a lot of sense to be more proactive and seek out other speakers who aren’t white males…

Well we will have to run the numbers. I picked what is easy to measure and you can see the pictures.

Leo- you haven’t been to a meeting in a long time and we have had considerable growth and attention from many people of all ages and genders now attending.

Plus, this isn’t a diversity group, it is a science and skepticism about religion community. I don’t want to discourage any race or gender from that. We are organized around the mission statement and we need to build bridges from there.

I am surprised no one has said that it has been all white males talking in here… Ladies we would love to hear from you….

Alrighty, men, I’m going to say the thing you’re not supposed to say. Atheism and Agnosticism are largely based on rationality and logic. Some would say that these principles are not the strong suite of the female gender. Now clearly this isn’t the case for all women, but especially in high-stress situations, instinctively we ladies tend to seek comfort rather than explanation.

@Andy D. said:

I am surprised no one has said that it has been all white males talking in here

Why do you think that’s so?

Plus, this isn’t a diversity group

So FFW has no obligation to reach out to women and people of color? You’re sort of making Greta Christina’s point for her.

@Andy W “Haha- I don’t mean to gang up, but.” That statement makes me want to open up and have a loving conversation.

The undeserved world of the Gates Foundation? Are we applying to Bill Gates Foundation now? Yeah, I was thinking of that when talking to you guys… Is that really fair for the gang up comment? I do agree with you in the end.

As I have said already, I have no problem trying to open up new members from other communities but I will not turn away a white male speaker either if he is an appropriate presenter. The mission comes first and yes I said we can reach out to minorities. I am ok with doing what we can to help with diversity. I have to say this though that the group is more diverse than you are giving credit.

Moreover, we are not a diversity unity group for the sake of diversity. That sounds like a hippy drum circle. (I like drum circles btw). Go to the about us page and read the mission statement. We should not care what a person’s sex, race, age, religious roots,and/ or sexual orientation happens to be… even if they are a white male.

@Leo- Please stop putting words in my mouth. The mission comes first. That’s all. We have done quite a lot for freethought in the fort and will continue to do so.

@Rachael Howard- Thanks for speaking up. We know many women who are rational like the ones who come to FFW, CAA and many others… There may be something to what you said about security with women in general. Well, if we keep building a safe welcoming community overall and then hopefully more and more women will join…

I had a coworker who was black and agnostic but he said to me that he would never ever come out to his family because his grandmother would kick his ass. There are strong social stigmas in that community that would be hard to overcome. I hope I am wrong and we will be there for anyone who seeks us.

@Andy D said:

…but I will not turn away a white male speaker either if he is an appropriate presenter.

That’s the second time you’ve said that which makes me think that you’re afraid that by seeking out more diverse speakers that will somehow preclude white male speakers. Now, I know there’s a word for that, if only I could remember what it was…

@Leo- How about we try the word “nice?”

I was actually thinking of a word that started with ‘b’.

Maybe instead of arguing the fact of what has been done or not done by the group to promote diversity, we should discuss what could be done in the future, or possibly where outreach could happen to make it a more eclectic mix of ethnicities and genders.

Henry Ford said it quite well:

“Coming together is a beginning.
Keeping together is progress.
Working together is success.”

Both groups are extremely underrepresented in atheism at large. Hardly an isolated phenomenon. I would guess that this trend is even more extreme amongst authors/speakers on the topic, but I can’t back that up. This is not to say that we should give up on engaging one, simply pointing out that doing so may prove rather difficult.

@Randy: I hardly think it’s appropriate quoting a Nazi sympathizer and notorious anti-semite in a thread talking about promoting diversity in atheist/skeptical organizations.

And trying to discuss what could be done to do so is exactly what I was trying to do before Andy D. dug his heels in and essentially dictated that promoting diversity was inimical to FFW’s mission statement. Because, you know, that would be reverse discrimination or something.

@Tony: Trying to get women and people of color as speakers is on the the tip of the iceberg. It’s only one thing that can be done. And while FFW may be an atheistic organization, there are plenty of women and people of color who are scientists, doctors, engineers, academics, etc. who have interesting things to say about interesting topics. Not every speaker has to talk about how great it is to not believe in something.

Diversity within organizations like FFW doesn’t just happen. If you’re just sitting there lamenting about the lack of women and people of color in your org, that’s not going to help change the situation. The first thing that you need to do is to make that change a priority and then start working to actively make your org friendlier to underrepresented demographics.

@Leo- Ok let’s start over. My heels are not dug in. I am politely asking you to stop fox newsing me… (I made a new verb.) Say what you are for without reading into things I said or saying that what I said means x without me actually saying x. I haven’t done this to you nor will I.

I have repeatably said we are more diverse (yes, we have more work to do) in terms of gender and sexual orientation than most originally thought. I have acknowledged we have a problem with diversity in terms of race. Yes, we can do better. We will. The group has only been officially running with officers for under a year.

“Not every speaker has to talk about how great it is to not believe in something.”

Leo, This simply isn’t accurate, if you would go to the meetings, you would see what is happening with other events such as the science cafe coming up. Hello? Science and skepticism are what this group is about. I agree that not every speaker needs to be an atheist or be against religion. Look at the schedule we are bringing in the executive director of the Indiana ACLU in October. I have no idea if he is an atheist or not. I don’t care. I know he is male but I don’t know his race. He will speak on civil rights… That is good enough and I think it will be one of our best meetings. The meeting is also open to other local members of the ACLU who are not FFW, too. I am sure some of them will be religious.

Simply put I want to include as many people as possible of every background who jives with the mission.

Also, in terms of gender, (and overall content) both Katie and Rae have been writing for the website and participating in FFW. And they have been doing a great job. (Frankly so have all the contributors, regardless of gender). It is all volunteer. I bet we will start getting more people overall which has been the trend lately. Let’s do more.

Andy W:
Wow. You have assumed all sorts of offensive things about me.
My point was that the issue is touchy because people will jump to conclusions, like the one you apparently jumped to.
If IQ is defined by the score one obtains on a standard IQ test, then my point stands. Obviously, there is plenty to debate about the meaning, if any, of IQ.
You have come very close to calling me a racist. My black grandmother might disagree.
I thought “abusive personal messages” were off-limits here.

@littlejohn: I have to say I read your original comment the same way Andy W. did. Pardon both of us if we’re misinterpreting you, but I can think of no good reason to bring IQ into a discussion about promoting diversity… ever. Could you clarify your point?

I think that FFW is probably more diverse gender-wise than a lot of other atheist/skeptic/freethought groups. As Andy D. said both Rae and I write for the blog and there were a number of women at the last meeting.
Of my online mommy friends, only one other is involved in any local group. Some of them live in places so small, there just isn’t a group, others are not out to friends and family and fear being outed by accident, others simply are not “joiners”.
One of the more interesting things about my group of friends, is we tend not to talk a lot about religion, or science or philosophy, even though that is what brought us together. We talk about husbands, ex-husbands, kids, food, movies, etc. Every now and then when a teacher puts up posters of Jesus in a public school classroom the topic comes up but otherwise, it doesn’t really come up in conversation.

Well, educational level is directly correlated with economic class. Poor people can’t afford college. Lower income families include a much higher percentage of minorities than the general population. Low income also tends toward increased religiousity.

Following a train of statistical relationships from freethought to education to income to race shows an unfortunate trend, but is in no way racist.

@Andy & @Tony: According to the latest Pew Forum On Religion & Public Life’s, table of Educational Distribution of Religious Traditions, some 3% of Buddhists, 3% of Unitarians, 8% of Atheists, 5% of Agnostics, and 10% of Secular Unaffiliated never finished high school.

23% of Buddhists, 16% of Unitarians, 28% of Atheists, 22% of Agnostics, and 35% of Secular Unaffiliated have only a high school education.

I chose to look at the stats for those groups because they can be considered to be the most sympathetic to freethought ideas, although in the case of Buddhists and Unitarians certainly not every person who identifies with those religious affiliations would approve of FFW.

I chose to look at only those without a high school education and only a high school education as those are the groups most likely to be experiencing extreme poverty. They are also good indicators of socio-economic class, although not as strongly. Altogether, these two groups represent 50% of the total U.S. population (14% and 36% respectively).

If we restrict ourselves to Atheists and Agnostics then, that means 19.8% of the total population have only a high school education or less AND are Atheist or Agnostic. (.08*.14 + .05*.14 + .28*.36 + .22*.36)*100.

Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but these numbers mean that very nearly 20% of the poorest 50% of the population identify as either Agnostic or Atheist. Compared to the population at large, we need to look at Atheist, Agnostic and “Nothing in particular” to get to a mere 16.1%.

Thus while people with college diplomas and post-docs do not believe in god at a much higher rate than those with only a high school education or less, lack of belief is the fastest growing among the least educated. If that doesn’t sound like a reason to do outreach to those communities, I don’t know what does.

@Andy,

Nope, just a perception. Born out of the anecdotal observation that the most fervently religious people I know also tend to be the least wealthy. Upon further reflection I may have put the cart before the horse. The devout (especially Catholics) tend to do economically inadvisable things like tithing and having more children than befits a comfortable standard of living.

@Leo

Sorry it took so long to catch up on this, I by no means was trying to bring in anti-semitism into the conversation, I was simply quoting words to live by, that I had recently been told by someone concerning working with people.
I am a recent fan of this site and happenings of the group, and hope to have the time to make it to a meeting soon. While I believe that diversity is a great thing to have in any group, I also think that unity in a cause is also desired, and a basis for diversity. People of all backgrounds will be more apt to join a cause if they know that the people that they stand with are there because of the cause. If people are going back and forth about the and how many of this gender, and how many of that race are in a group, it tends to give people a vision of feeling like a quota.
Like I said, I personally think that diversity is a great thing to have, but when it comes around to it I’m just happy to have found somewhere to read about and discuss things with like minded people. That was something I did not have before I found FreeThought Fort Wayne, and it is something that I look forward to being a part of on a daily basis.

~~Correction

*forth about how many of this gender

@Randy: Who’s talking about quotas? What we’re talking about is how groups like FFW can reach out to other than white males. Yes, FFW has a goodly number of active female members. Hurrah. It does need to be commended on that but neither should it rest on its laurels. Every organization has an ethical obligation to reach out to under-served communities. Yet it seems many of the commenters here are either making “Some of our my best friends are…” type arguments (“Oh, but FFW has female members.”) or are arguing that there is no need to increase representation from women and people of color.

Look, I don’t think anyone in FFW is overtly bigoted. And FFW’s demographics are an artifact of its founding members who happened to predominantly (with one or two exceptions who I don’t believe are with the group any longer) white males. That’s not sexist or racist. But to do nothing to change the demographic toward one that is more representative of the community at large is to ignore the elephant in the room.

And I would say immoral.

Ok, I could say A LOT right now, but I’m just going to address a couple things.

First, Leo has a point about actively reaching out verses simply not discriminating. You can make claims all day that FFW does not discriminate (and as a member who is a woman, I believe this is true). However, acknowledging that there are more obstacles and less incentives for women and minorities to participate in groups like FFW and actively trying to make some accommodations to reduce these is necessary. This can be difficult when the group is mostly white and male because there is simply less knowledge within the group as to how to do this. Even if we as a group understood all the reasons why there is a need to reach out (which we obviously don’t by some of the comments above), knowing HOW to reach out is another thing entirely. Perhaps, just educating ourselves is the next step.

That being said, I do think FFW is still a fledgling organization and we as a group are still resolving plenty of issues that come with that. FFW has taken on a lot of activities and projects in an attempt to simply be visible, and I think we’ve done great so far at that. However, we run the risk of spreading ourselves too thin and burning out the members who are the most active. Also, with a group of freethinkers, you have many differing opinions on what should be priorities, but I think we can all agree that membership should be at the top. Without members, we don’t survive. Simple. We need new members and we have to retain the members we have.

I’m far too exhausted at the moment to address some of the reasons why this is an issue within the entire Agnostic/Atheist movement. It’s midnight, and I’m suppose to be at work in 4 1/2 hours. I’ll continue later, if I have the time.

Andy,

My previous post re: anecdotes referred only to the quoted premise.

@Rae: Absolutely. Very well said. I guess I just don’t see it as a zero-sum game though. Spending time and energy on promoting diversity within the org does not necessarily detract from any other thing. It can be as simple as just kicking around ideas for how to do that among an informal gathering of some of the members. Nor does it imply that action must be taken right now. Ultimately though, I think this is an issue that must be addressed. I would further suggest that, in fact, crafting a strategy to address these issues will pay off in the end by actually amplifying FFW’s membership rolls.

What I find distasteful is the idea that merely not discriminating is as good as acknowledging that there are barriers to participation for some groups of people and then figuring out how to reduce those barriers. Mind you, I’m not saying that’s your view. It is the general vibe I got from this thread, and indeed, it’s the what I see happen every time this issue comes up in both the larger atheist and skeptical communities.

Anyway, I’ll shut up for now before Andy D. has an aneurysm.

@Leo

I think that the word I was looking for was demographic not quota, which changes the context a bit.

Maybe I would have a better scope, were I able to make it to some meetings.

Hi all –

Great exchange on how to make FFW more diverse. Just my opinion, but as an outsider looking in, this organization has accomplished quite a bit in a short period of time. I think the fact that many are actively looking for more creative ways to expand and draw more diverse people into the mix is great.

I believe the future is bright – more and more people are starting to open up to the idea they do not need religion to have a meaningful and enriched life.

On a side note, whenever I travel north of FW on HWY 3, its always nice to see the FFW sign by the side of the road. Whoever thought of the idea to sponsor the highway clean-up, hats off to you !

@Leo – Going back and reading my post, I can understand how you came to the conclusion that I thought acknowledgment and action were somehow equally responsive to the issue. I meant to say almost the exact opposite, and that developing solutions is the next step, but I think we need to educate ourselves before we can do this effectively. I was writing that post late at night with very little sleep and probably deleted something and forgot to fill in a gap while editing.

The casual conversations about this have been going on for awhile actually. Probably the last year or so. I’ve felt there has been a consistent concern to draw a more diverse membership.

@Rae: Oh, no, I didn’t think you were equivocating acknowledging the issue and taking action at all. I did get that from a couple of the other comments on the this thread, but not from you. And educating oneself is taking action. At least it is the first step.