Tauriq Moosa - January 25th, 2009 in Commentary 0 votes Vote Up! Vote Down!

Are you black, white or Asian? Are you Arab, Dutch or Spanish? Are you Reformed Hassidic Jew or a Secular Protestant? Are you an “atheist” or an “agnostic”?

When my parents moved into their second house during apartheid, they were faced with typical bureaucratic nonsense. The National Party, then the ruling party and the continuing antagonist to human rights, had assimilated the ultimate forms of racism into politics. This meant unreason had poisoned the very foundations from which a society grows, its fruit withered before it could grow, its leaves never to open. The documents my parents had to fill out were an example of your typical rotten fruit grown under the darkness of irrationality.

The question they faced was this:

WHAT RACE ARE YOU?

My father shrugged and simply ticked the box “COLOURED”. According to their actual ID documents, both my parents were “INDIAN”. This, they told me, was the first and only time they had lied to their government (as much as they despised the apartheid government, it was still their government). This brazen display of ignorance listed itself on the rest of the page, running parallel to open boxes to define oneself: “WHITE” “BLACK” “ASIAN”. If my father had not opted for “COLOURED”, my parents would not have been allowed to live in their desired area.

HL Mencken, reporting on racist policies in the USA some years before, said of these policies:

Is such a prohibition, even supposing that it is lawful, supported by anything to be found in common sense or common decency?

But this is not about apartheid or racism; it is about labeling. Consider the questions at the beginning of this article. Race is a good entry point to highlight some particular brands of unreason regarding labeling. Perhaps it is simply my sensitivity to notions of “race” but I find them all to be quite unhelpful and stupid.

And I am not the only one.

In the 1994 book (ironically the same year apartheid ended), The History and Geography of Human Genes , the authors state:

[F]rom a scientific point of view, the concept of race has failed to obtain any consensus; none is likely, given the gradual variation of existence.

Commenting on this quotation, Michael Shermer says: “In other words, the concept of race is biologically meaningless.”

Think about it for a moment: Yes, you can say you are Indian though you live in, say, South Africa. You can say you’re Indian because your grandparents were both from there. But which grandparents? And how far back are we allowed to go to call ourselves Indian, Asian or Arab? What if, as in my case, it was only your great-grandparent who was originally from India? And what if your maternal grandmother is “white”, which is also my case?

It seems to me quite arbitrary to assign a random number of grandparents or great-grandparents, to put a full-stop after their names, and proclaim oneself their nationality. I was born in South Africa – that’s all that should concern anyone. Why does “race” matter, why is it even on surveys, forms, etc.? I have yet to find a satisfactory answer is to how indicating your “race” (which one? Your mothers? Your fathers? What if you are “black” but your mother is white? Are we judging simply then by pigmentation? If that’s the case, why is it in the survey or form at all?) What does the colour of one’s skin indicate about one’s abilities as a worker or employee in the environment? This is to forget the individual human who we should judge as a fully-formed human being, consciously – not according to some non-evidenced based category (horribly, astrology does this too, with 12 random signs; this is another form of torrid prejudice in my opinion).

There is much politics surrounding this: For example, in South Africa, there is a policy to empower “previously disadvantaged groups”. Thus, in deciding between a “black” or “white” candidate, the employer should choose the black one to win favour from our government. This is not the place to debate the pros and cons of this policy, but it certainly indicates the elaborated intricacies of “race”. Yet in this case, it is not judging by his “skin colour” but by the candidates disadvantaged past.

Anyway, enough of race. What of labeling ourselves in this so-called battle of reason versus faith? I myself loathe the term “atheist”. It is unhelpful: We shouldn’t use it. Too many co-thinkers have attempted to formulate ways of integrating atheists or assimilating nonbelievers, or referring to atheism as a mentality, a mindset, a world-view, a philosophy. “Atheism” really and truly is nothing. The reason I find the term unhelpful is its superfluous nature: Everyone is an atheist.

Presumably no one reading this believes in Fidi Mikullu, the African god. Therefore, we both, dear reader, are atheists. The latest kid to hit the scene, that Yahweh character, is no more special than Fidi in existing. Certainly the Old Testament indicates a vindictive, puritanical, homophobic, racist misogynist but adding such adjectives does not make him exist more than Fidi. And simply because more people believe in him, those who do not are somewhat estranged. It’s why the requisition of the term “atheist” is so strange: When we call ourselves atheist, for some reason the logical assumption is a “nonbeliever in the monotheist god”.

But why? Why is he so special, just because the majority of the world believe in him? We need to address this immediately and forcibly elaborate to those who would leap to the conclusion that we are atheists of their particular god. Hence, I find the term “atheist” a silly label; we are, as Sam Harris stated (in a similar and better appeal than my own current one), drawing a chalk outline and stepping into it, killing our ideas off for our antagonists.

Not atheist. We should not label ourselves anything and I find it hard to deal with people who would willingly mine a term from my depths. We give labels and more often than not they turn out to be gravestones for further conversations. Buried beneath the soil of unremitting stereotyping, labels can do nothing but fester and quiver in their tombs. So I say: Let them have their graves and let us build a garden. We need to allow sentences, ideas and reason to breathe. It will not do so, encumbered by labels and terms, and unhelpful connections – such as the atheism of co-thinkers and the atheism of Stalin.

I do not call myself a humanist, either. The only one I find helpful, strangely, is the anti-theist position. This, basically, means I am glad that all the monotheisms have no evidence to show their supernatural claims, of heaven, hell, their god, etc. to be true. As a corollarly, I would be unhappy if these claims of the theisms were true. When even the “good” ideas are shown to be undesirable, this usually engages believers in far more fulfilling ways then simply nonbelief. However, I am still weary of labels.

The use of labels must end and the clear, concise explanation of ideas and reason must prevail. We must stop digging in the graveyard by night, conjuring defeated labels like necromancers. We should gently pluck the shrubs from a garden of constant elucidation, of flowing ideas and of ever-growing discussions. Without labels, stereotyping will whither; and perhaps then the full-stops will be erased and conversations can begin.

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Tags: anti-theism, atheism, labels, race, religion