A Better Apology for the Slavery Billboard

This is absolutely something that people don’t get in the world. That an apology that blames the victim is a notpology. I did not personally find the billboard offensive when I first saw it because I did read the fine print but I shouldn’t be expected to find a message that isn’t obviously stated.

Seriously, a simple “Our bad, we’re sorry” would have been better than an apology with the caveat that says “it’s not really our fault you can’t read”

Hmmmmm. So tell me, how does one apologize for being a hypersensitive dipshit that goes on lengthy crusades over their own perceptions of how a billboard, that didn’t last 48 hours anyway, should have been?

“I have no idea who was actually offended or why, but I’m going to guess wildly and everyone should heed my opinion as fact!”

You know, I thought that was exactly the kind of thing we were trying to move people away from…

The mouseover message on this communication-related webcomic really says it all: http://xkcd.com/1028/

There’s nothing racist about the billboard, and the people who claim that it is, is only trying to divert other people from what the main message really is –that the bible is rubbish when it comes to saying anything about what morals we should have, or how the world works, or generally about anything at all.

FYI Here is the American Atheists statement from March 9:

We want to thank everyone for sharing their opinions with us about the “Slaves, Obey Your Masters” billboard. While we certainly respect the opinions of those who disagree with our tactics, we respectfully disagree with that opinion. We are unapologetic about the billboard and stand behind it 100%. There will be no apology from American Atheists for saying what needed to be said: sometimes the truth is offensive.

By all means, continue to talk about it and hash it out among yourselves, but we have said all there is to say on the issue and will say no more.

We are moving on to our next project and look forward to putting up more billboards!

Thank you for your support!

Source: http://atheists.org/content/moving-next-project

 I try so hard to be tolerant of all walks of life, but why do Christians make it so difficult to even deal with them on a serious level? All they have to do is shut their traps and stick to themselves like the majority of other faiths in this country. This righteous, self entitlement is getting very old.

 but it isnt their fault that people radically misinterpreted a very simple clear message.

Isn’t it about time atheists stopped apologizing every time our message is misunderstood by people who freak out at the very mention of the word ‘atheist’ or the even the idea that atheists actually do exist? They want to write letters and complain? Let them. Can we please, as a whole, grow a backbone finally? Poorly executed? There was nothing wrong with the billboard.

 No, it doesn’t. It avoids entirely the issue of people who are programmed to misunderstand, people who are unwilling to understand, and people who freak the freak out at the very mention of the word ‘atheist’.

 I agree. If we were completely neutral in our ability to understand, that billboard would not be controversial in the least. The problem is partly a predisposition to oppose the underlying message (atheism) when the overt message is a church/state violation glorifying one particular religion’s holy book.

Spanish Inquisitor

 What I find hilarious where the blame goes. Its the bible verse which give the image its context, yet it gets none of the blame.

Oh, and about your gf having more respect for a Muslim faith, that is only because she doesn’t live in the  Muslim country and see how they really are. I lived in a Muslim country for 3 years initially when I left the US. The things that go on there……that are justified by religion……honestly make America look like Disneyland at the moment. 

She’d also be laughed at for having an opinion, because she’s just a stupid woman. Ahh, how cute, did the little cockroach have an opinion? Someone slap her so she’ll stop that s**t. 

There’s a taste of Islam for her. Only a masochist female would become a part of that religion intentionally. (I’m female, btw)

It sort of is. People can’t just say things and ignore likely interpretations.

It should be evident to people designing this billboard that a lot of people won’t even get past the image because of the trigger or message that it alone conveys.

Hence, talking about how the bible message is the problem misses the point. The issue isn’t people of faith misunderstanding the billboard, it’s people of all sorts, especially african-americans, encountering an offensive image that makes it harder for them to even get to the message part.

No,  “I am sorry that you are all such idiots” is the proper response. 

They were quoiting from the Bible. If the quote is offensive then the people apologizing should be the authors. Since that’s not possible then it should be the people who, to this day, support a book that promote such barbarism.

Not that I think that you should have to apologize for offending. People need to get over it.

Except that the Egyptians that built the pyramids were not salves.

The fact is wee need more billboards like this to point out to people that their holy book says crap like this. 

 Basically, what you’ve just said implies that atheists must water down their message to such a degree that nobody–Christians, Muslims, Jews, etc.–could never ever in a million zillion years take offense to.  In this context, the only message that could be possible is silence. And you know what? I think there’s been enough silence.

Christians, Muslims and Jews all get offended even at the very mention of the fact atheists exist. Christians and Jews don’t want atheist billboards in their areas, and Muslims just throw a temper tantrum and set the world on fire every time somebody says something they don’t like. Everybody blames the atheists then.

Where I live in Canada, every other street corner has a church sign promoting some nonsense, and no one says boo about it. In the US, church density is even more so than here.

Well, you know? The hell with them. It takes two to communicate, but when one party fills its ears with sand and sticks its fingers in for good measure, and then *WE* are supposed to back down and cringe and fawn at their injured sensibilities? To hell with that.

 So, as a Jew from the Old Country(tm), am I supposed to be offended when someone wants to use an image from Dachau, for example, to showcase the evils of Nazism? Offended to such a degree that I call it antisemitism and demand the sign’s removal?

Let’s see. An an organization representing a demographic that is largely white puts up a billboard advocating its cause in a neighborhood that is predominantly African-American. The billboard has a picture that is extremely offensive to African-Americans. The group in question appropriates African-Americans’ struggles for its *own* message, all the while completely ignoring the role that Christianity has played in the civil rights movement and African-American’s struggles to be recognized as fully human.  The message completely ignores the role the the church has played in providing some semblance of a social safety net for a community of people that white America largely doesn’t care about.

You know what message this sends? A bunch of privileged white people are telling a bunch of people of color what they should do with their community and their belief systems. A bunch of privileged white people are telling people of color to ditch an institution that has served as one of the few sources of support in a white controlled country that has done its best to incarcerate and kill people of color. This group of atheists is doing the same thing white people have done for ages now: they are a group of white people telling people of color that they know what’s best for them.

THAT was the message that was sent. Oh, I know, the poor white people at the atheist club didn’t meeeeeean it that way. Well you know what, that’s the wonder of privilege. White privilege means that you don’t even have a friggin’ clue as two what side of town people of color live in. So, you place your broken-assed advertisement in their neighborhood and act upset when your message is “misinterpreted”.

BULLSHIT.

Your racial privilege is showing and dare I say it? The fact that very few people in the atheist community have recognized the problems I’ve delineated above is a function of RACISM. You are being racist. Period.

 I’m sorry you’re an idiot too. The quote was from the Bible; the illustration clearly was not.

If I were going to change nothing else about the billboard, I would have changed the race of the man in the collar to a white man.

Nice ad hom. Hope you’re proud of yourself. 🙂

(And no, mine wasn’t an ad hominem. It was a statement of fact. The only way you can make an argument that that billboard is racist is if you are severely lacking in intellect and/or comprehension skills.)

 “Ad hom” and “statement of fact” are not mutually exclusive. If you weren’t such an idiot, you might have realized that.

Prefers “constructive dialogue with the religious”. 

Produces multiple posts devoid of actual arguments merely calling people idiots. 

No the illustration was from the 17th century US, where the bible was used to justify that slavery.

 Biggest picture on the billboard, first thing people see – a person in chains.
Second-biggest thing on the billboard – a quote from the bible endorsing slavery.

The obvious message that most people would read out of that is “the author of this billboard endorses slavery, and is trying to use the Bible to support it”.

There is other text on the billboard, but those are the two most prominent parts, and together they form what is a pro-slavery message. If someone is already religious, the typical meaning of “A quote from the bible to back up opinion X” is to back up “opinion X”.

Now, since we know the agency who put it up, we know that that is not the intended meaning. But it is, in fact , the meaning that many people would see when they see this billboard.

This argument is innately racist because they are appropriating
the experiences of the African diaspora to fit an agenda which they
claim is for liberation. Billboards like this erase the fact that the
Scientific Community has also deliberately contributed to the
destruction of PoC. Not just Western Christianity.  This Billboard also
contributes to the Whitewashing of Christianity, making it seem as
though it has no connections to African peoples, when it does. I’m not
“sticking up” for Christians and their bullshit, but I am demanding the
people who pride themselves on reason and ethics and humanist liberty to
actually practice what they preach.

See, White society only gives a shit about Black people and our
cultural experiences in a White Supremacist society if it can be used
for their benefit. They use our ancestry as “proxy” to promote their
agendas while simultaneously marginalizing us and then expecting us to
be “honored” by their gross acts of appropriation. Cases in point? “Gay
is the New Black”. “Woman is the Nigger of the World” and White vegans
making comparisons between the enslavement of Blacks and the conditions
of animals on meat farms.

Read the rest of the article here, which was inspired by a comment to this post.

 The problem wasn’t the quote, it was the choice of clip-art.  Take away the art, and there is no room for misinterpretation or racist connotations.

Sikivu Hutchinson’s wrote an article that describers her take on the billboard in question.

Some quotes from her article:

As I wrote in my 2009 article The White Stuff,
 “It’s cartoonishly pro forma when white folk, ignorant of these
historical traditions, swaggeringly insist that atheist discourse is
implicitly anti-racist, anti-sexist and anti-heterosexist because one,
we white people say so, and, two, hierarchy is something only those
knuckle-dragging supernaturalists do. It’s paint-by-the-numbers
entitlement time when the so-called new atheist “movement” is resistant
to the charge that racial and gender politics just might inform who
achieves visibility and which issues are privileged in the broader
context of skeptical discourse. It’s not PC to point out that traditions
of scientific racism, secularism, and Judeo Christian religiosity went
gleefully hand in hand for much of the West’s enlightened history.”

Douglass prefaced his critique by contrasting the corrupt Christianity
of a slaveholding nation and the so-called benevolent “Christianity of
Christ” practiced by African slaves in liberation struggle.  Yet he was
also critical of the hypocrisy of a nation that rationalized slavery
based on secular Enlightenment ideologies of individual liberty and
democratic citizenship for white men.  Slaves and the descendants of
slaves gathered, organized, mobilized and resisted white supremacy in
church communities because they were and continue to be some of the only
socioeconomic, political, and cultural spaces widely available to black
people.  Post-racialists say that’s past history, pimping the delusion
that “we” can all lock arms in Kumbaya and move on, slamming by on the expressway out of the “inner city.”

Slavery, with all its attendant evils, was not only universally accepted in ancient times but also considered a fundamental institution, indispensable to civilized society. More than half the people seen on the streets of the great cities of the Roman world were slaves. And this was the status of the majority of “professional” people such as teachers and doctors as well as that of menials and craftsmen.

 Science was also used to justify that slavery. Economics was also used to justify that slavery. In addition to being used to justify slavery, the Bible was also used to energize the abolition movement.

If the Pennsylvania legislature had declared 2012 to be “The year of science” and some creationists illustrated a quote from Christoph Meiners with this drawing, people might misunderstand that billboard too.

We local leaders in the atheist /freethought movement are all unpaid volunteers, and most of us untrained or inexperienced in the savvy ways of marketing and public relations.  We do the best that we can, and I applaud Brian Fields and his group for what I think is a great billboard campaign.  The original apology was more than adequate in my estimation.

Dave Bentley
President
Arkansas Society of Freethinkers
http://www.ARFreethinkers.org

 Why? How does that relate to US history at all? This is in America where African Americans were slaves.

I suppose you could change it to a woman because women were slaves too, just not in the same way. — Although, sadly, many people probably wouldn’t be as likely to care. But changing it to a white man in America would just be plain silly.

 You aren’t discussing the logical merits of their arguments, you’re simply calling them idiots, hence ad hominem.

“I am calling them idiots because their criticism is idiotic” is a vapid tautology, and once again, mere name calling with no discussion of merits, hence ad hominem.

I’m sorry you’re still an idiot.

If you’re offended by the billboard, you’re not paying attention.

 exactomundo, timber.   spot on.

did anyone think about asking a person of color their input on the billboard, before putting it up?  does anyone else here on this forum give a rats behind about how people of color interpret this or feel about it? 

not only does the supposed intellect of this demographic of atheists who supposedly are logical, devolve when their -isms are called out.  but they also devolve into little children using such playground insult-slinging as “idiots” and “who cares”.  really?  if you are soooo proud of how morally superior you are, why the heck do you cling to your put-downs – the taste of that petty emotional pay-off seems to be worth a whole heck of alot more to you than actual moral improvement of yourself or others.

i am an atheist, and i speak up for us in my community.  however, i also speak up for the other -isms and dislike disrespect or asshat behavior wherever i see it.  this is one.  this kind of behavior, is EXACTLY why I, and I’m sure others (such as people of color and women), stay away from atheist gatherings.  because of the absolute ignorance of how each of them participates in -isms, struts around like a bunch of roosters, and defends their -isms with supposed “logic” so they don’t have to do any more extra work, but can enjoy their mud slinging at others. 

it’s time that we all really look hard at ourselves and EDUCATE ourselves on how to BUILD RELATIONSHIPS, especially in communication.  and to educate ourselves on these -isms.  otherwise, it’s just another group encouraging discrimination, in the name of atheism. 

Your suggested apology includes, “[Our billboard] was meant to condemn slavery.”

No, it wasn’t. It was meant to use the now common moral understanding that slavery is wrong in an attempt to condemn the scripture that advocates it.

Of course if scripture advocates something, that something can’t be wrong, even if it’s slavery. Plus that image… So you’ve got quite a mixed message there. Trying to explain it on a billboard is probably too tricky.

Better would be (warning! bible reference!):

     Historical Christianity approved of slavery.

     Remove the log from your eye at atheists.org

Or simply:

     Historical Christianity was immoral.

     Find out why at atheists.org

Both sans pictures, with the front page of the site featuring a bold link to a page of the various immoral positions–including on slavery–taken by the “divinely-inspired” bible writers.

I suggest including the modifier (“Historical” here) and the past tense, to soothe the many Christians who don’t take their scripture quite so literally. You shouldn’t condemn someone for believing something they don’t actually believe.

(Anyone is free to use the above without credit.)

Your vehemence is unnecessary. You’re not wrong – your argument does apply. However, I did see people condemning the billboard as advocating slavery, proving there were people who completely missed the point, and their claims of racism are not valid. It is to those people who an apology would seem unwarranted, unless they saw the billboard after it had been defaced and were making a complaint without knowledge of the full context.

Yeah, like I wrote in the discussion about one of the other articles, if you’re upset about this billboard, that’s good. It has caught your attention, that’s what it’s supposed to do. If you then study it closer or investigate what the billboard is all about and you’re STILL ranting about racism, then I have no more sympathy for you. You’ve taken the time to read about it, to look closer at it, to think things through. If you, at that time, still comes to the conclusion that it’s about racism, then You’re Doing It Wrong(TM)!

I think, “We’re sorry you’re all such idiots,” is fine and accurate.

Not just in the past tense, either. I mean I’ve had discussions with such people which seem to boil down to “Well, America doesn’t really like slavery, but since the Bible had no problem with it, it’s not intrinsically evil or anything… there must be occasions when it’s acceptable, or it wouldn’t be there in God’s Perfect Word.”

IE, some Christians really are willing to accept slavery in the here and now, although you can practically hear them choking on the cognitive dissonance. But if you can’t question the Bible, and one or the other is wrong, and it can’t be the Bible that’s wrong…

So if I were designing the next billboard, I think I’d have to start on a premise to plant the seeds of doubt – something that could flower into the realization that the Bible isn’t the infallible Word of God. Something to get people to start thinking critically, since as someone noted in another post, you can’t be an atheist without having skepticism. The more people think critically, the less likely the flimsy insanity of the Bible holds up, which invariably must make one start to doubt religious leaders too.

What would that be, though? Pointing out contradictions? Hard to fit a bunch of text together and still be legible from a difference, but nothing sounds more insane than someone trying to explain away blatant contradictions (like how Moses has three fathers – “The other two names were nicknames!”)…

Just because I didn’t mention any arguments in that particular post doesn’t mean that my position isn’t based on any, or that I haven’t mentioned any elsewhere. 

I’m starting to be concerned about your intellectual capabilities now. This isn’t hard stuff.

Still willing to accept your apology. 🙂

This is why we all need to educate ourselves on communication, and how to build relationships, and how to understand -isms and how they manifest.  Exactly.  Because a message requires a communicator and a receiver.  And it contains more than just words – such as tone, body language, and pattern, over time.  In addition to context, and personal reference.

To say “oh they just misinterpreted”, oversimplifies the issue, deifies the self and gives the self an excuse to be lazy, and dismisses the other.  Superior, man.
 
To say  – “oh look – these people agree with me, and these don’t.  Oooobviously those that agree with me are right, and those that don’t are wrong and I don’t have any need to listen to anything they have to say”.   Awesome.

What is the ultimate goal here?  Do you care about others at all?  If so, then you’ll try to find ways to build communication, listen, and build relationships, and consider where others are coming from.  And how your own actions and patterns of communication/actions come across.  And will want to try to improve that, — that’s the real hard work.  Even when you don’t understand and get caught up in your high on slinging personal attacks around.

This billboard was a mistake.  The press that it has gotten has been negative, and given those who discriminate against atheists – wittingly or not – a reason to want to stay well away from them.  The image used was extremely graphic.  It was extremely insensitive.  It appropriated the hardship of a people in this country, without thought, in ignorance.  We all get to look forward to further conversations from folks when they learn we are atheist – “oh you mean like that slavery billboard?”   And we’ll get lumped together – just like we lump the religious together.

Personally, I think we’d do much better to reduce the pattern of being so negative, and externally referential in our identity.  So many messages atheists use reference “others” – “those” christians (are horrible because xyz) “those” etc etc.  We are “not” that and “that” is horrible because xyz.
How about – we “are” … xyz – a statement that is totally self-referential.   And something positive about what we are.  And what we aim for as individuals and a community.

And, if we want to fight against being discriminated against, then we had better do a far better job on educating ourselves about discrimination overall. 

 [and very entertaining to read as well.  😛  ]

No, the image wasn’t really that graphic. I’ve seen history books with much more graphic depictions of slavery. It presented a historic fact, how can that be insensitive???
Like I said above in my reply to timberwraith, people are deliberately reading more things into this than there is, all in an effort to be offended and to claim victimhood.

Pointing out how “good” we are doesn’t touch on the fact that a lot of the messages in e.g. the Bible are downright horrible, so how is that going to get people to investigate what their holy book actually says?

NO ONE IS BEING DISCRIMINATED AGAINST HERE! How hard is it to understand that simple fact?

I didn’t write what I wrote as an attack on you, merely as an
explanation/example of why I could see you holding the position you do.

Really? Reread what you wrote. You are back-peddling from the actual nature of your response.

I’ll say this again. Using a person’s honestly shared words regarding the impact of oppression upon her life as a means of invalidating her observations regarding oppression is a really low thing to do.

This happens in other contexts, too. Whenever someone responds to problematic attitudes regarding some form of oppression, a member of the majority group will use the vehemence of that response as an excuse to dismiss what the person to say. Read exchanges between US nonbelievers and US Christians. Or LGBT people and straight people. Or black people and white people. It’s a very common pattern. The dominant group has the luxury of remaining calm in the face of challenges to their base of power… because they are the ones with power.

For me, this has been building for some  time. The sheer ignorance I’ve seen displayed toward women, people of color, and people of religions that are oppressed in my country (the US) is incredibly angering. The vehemence of my response is one that has accrued over time. For a group of people who have declared themselves to be rational and deep thinking, there should be no excuse for this, yes? 

Unfortunately, the albatross around new atheist’s collective necks is one of demographics. Atheists are largely white, male, and from previously Christian backgrounds (especially in the US).  In spite of the reduced levels of privilege shared by nonbelievers, the demographic origins of atheism accord large degrees of privilege and ignorance. This produces massive blind spots in the movement. It’s a problem that new atheists have only recently (during the last year, actually) begun to address. Currently, the response is deeply lacking.

Besides that, I’ve provided the words of other people, in addition to mine. Atheists have been criticized for this “faux pas” by many others, as well. You can circle the wagons and dismiss your detractors as emotionally damaged, as religiously biased, or simply as idiots. Nevertheless, the deepening damage to the public visage of non-believers is there and that’s cold, hard reality. Owning up to the actual social problems underlying this billboard would be the rational, humane thing to do. It would also be a good public relations move as well. Unfortunately, like so many other groups of people, you are choosing the path of hurt egotism and ignoring valid criticism. The church does this. Why not atheists, too?

 You say tomato, I say tomahto.  Yours is the only relevant pov????   Just because you saw something in a history book, and that something else is in the bible, gives you carte blanche, bedamned the totality of outcomes and everything else involved in the message? 

Others are the ones who have to change their actions, emotions, and points of view, but you aren’t?

You get to tell others that their offense is an “effort” to claim victimhood?  You are the one who gets to define all that, and you are the one who gets to tell someone else how to feel and what’s important? 

My, aren’t you all-knowing and powerful.

One more thought. There’s a growing body of research that shows evidence for the huge negative impact that oppression has had upon LGBT people: increased levels of drug and alcohol abuse, elevated levels of psychological problems, elevated levels of teen pregnancy, decreased levels of physical health, and on and on.

The Christian right in the US use this research as a means of dismissing LGBT people us unstable, dysfunctional individuals who can not be trusted. They have used this research as a means to show that queerness is, by its very nature, unhealthy.

So, GentleGiant, should anyone trust the words of someone like me? I’m damaged, dysfunctional, and untrustworthy, correct? I’m delusional (a popular term amongst new atheists). My words are meaningless, right? The impact of straight people’s hate and violence has rendered my view upon the world to be empty and without import.

Guess what? There’s also a body or research which shows that non-believers who live in religious societies experience decreased levels of well being and social integration.  They tend not to thrive as well as the more powerful, better integrated religious majority does.

It would seem that neither my words nor the words of nonbelievers are valid. Straight, white, middle/upper class Christian males are the arbiters of truth, for they thrive more readily than any of us (at least, here in the US).

If you get to play this game, then why shouldn’t anyone get to play the game? Let us bow our heads in reverence for our social betters. They know and see the solidity of worldly knowledge.

 I dunno. Maybe I don’t have the insta-insult self-actualization gene, but I don’t feel it necessary to freak out every time I see a billboard that seems, at first glance, may seem to be offensive.

*shrug* That’s a standard response. When challenging a group of people on their prejudiced behaviors, the observer is often told that s/he is being hateful.

Call our racism and you are labeled a racist.

Call out sexism and you are labeled a sexist hater of men.

Call out society for it’s treatment of the poor and you are labeled as a hater of rich people.

Call the excesses of organized religion and you are labeled a hater of god and religious people.

It’s a common pattern, old and familiar.