You’re an Individual Who Has Identities
But the ‘Free Inquiry’ is still defending Richard Dawkins
There’s a new editorial, “Identitarianism Is Incompatible with Humanism,” in the June/July 2022 issue of Free Inquiry. The title is a mouthful. Using article’s two epigraphs to unpack its title, Robyn E. Blumner means to convey that a person ought to be primarily defined by their individual merit or, perhaps, by how they work cooperatively for some universally shared wellbeing, but, in any case, we should avoid defining them by their race, gender, or other groups to which they may happen to belong.
Blumner is executive director of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science, a division of the Center for Inquiry, of which she is president and CEO. In this essay, she is relitigating a controversy over a tweet that Dawkins made last year.
Last Year’s Tweet
If you want the background, you can read this long article I wrote in April 2021 when he made the tweet. Thousands of people have clicked, and it was mentioned on a TikTok, which leads me to believe the article remains helpful in explaining the issue.
