Greta Cristina has made a list of prominent atheists of color to reflect the diversity of the atheist community:
If you’re helping to organize an atheist conference, and you want your conference to be more diverse and more reflective of the makeup of the atheist community? If you’re an atheist writer or activist, and you want your quotations/ citations/ blogroll/ etc. to be more diverse and more reflective of the makeup of the atheist community? If you’re simply part of the atheist community/ movement, and you want to be more familiar with the work of a wider range of atheists, a range that’s more diverse and more reflective of the makeup of the atheist community? Hopefully, this list will help.
By the way, person of color is used primarily in the United States, so here’s a brief definition from Wikipedia:
a term used, primarily in the United States, to describe all people who are not white. The term is meant to be inclusive among non-white groups, emphasizing common experiences of racism. People of color was introduced as a preferable replacement to both non-white and minority, which are also inclusive, because it frames the subject positively; non-white defines people in terms of what they are not (white), and minority frequently carries a subordinate connotation.[1] Style guides for writing from American Heritage,[2] the Stanford Graduate School of Business,[3] Mount Holyoke College,[4] recommend the term over these alternatives. It may also be used with other collective categories of people such as students of color or women of color.
Aside from getting more diversity in the atheist movement, Greta wants to address the impression (at least in the US) that most, if not all, atheists are white Americans. She addresses the issues and problems related to this in two separate posts.
As far as I know, there are two Filipinos on that list: me and Maggie Ardiente, director of development and communications, American Humanist Association; editor of Humanist Network News (AHA’s weekly e-zine). Filipino Freethinkers is also included on the list of organizations.
If you know of an individual or organization that should be on that list, please help Greta out by leaving the details in the comment section of that post.
pardon, but I recognize Dan Barker on the collage, how is he "of color"?
From Greta: Dan Barker is Native American. Specifically, he is a member of the Lenni Lenape (Delaware Indian) Tribe of Native Americans.
ah, cool trivia. and looking forward to seeing your mug in the final collage 🙂
Upon reading further, I'm having a hard time thinking of good nominees locally. The criteria seems to be requiring that the person actually be active in the atheist movement instead of just incidentally happening to be atheist. What about Dean? He's pretty well known in the blogosphere.
Can we nominate artists? Like Taiwanese popstar Stanley Huang? He released an album called "Atheism" with the title track "Atheist Like Me" http://youtu.be/1W_sL7k3VKc