The Last Lunch

Tables for 20 were reserved at Brocach and I arrived just ahead of Lane, PZ Myers, his Trophy Wife™, and another woman named Sue. One group of tables was already occupied by several Internet Infidels and the Pharynguloid sect sat an adjacent one. And people kept on coming. Since this meetup was coordinated via the Net, the crowd was much younger than the average convention attendee who tends to be gray-haired. There were lots of college kids who are involved in freethought organizations on their campus. Brought together by the common bond of godlessness, Minnesotans and Cheeseheads reveled in perfect harmony.



That's a group of folks who were relegated to a satellite table because of the great turnout. Here's my table:



In the front row you have Lane on the left and a couple from Minnesota whose names I cannot recall. The gentleman was very nice and gave me a Get Out of Hell Free card. In the back row from left to right there is another couple folks from our neighbor to the west; turned away from the camera is Chris Hallquist, a UW student here in Madison whose blog is called The Uncredible Hallq; in green is Amy, an aspiring school teacher and fellow Madisonian. Although she was not able to attend the convention, she did join us for lunch. We sat next to one another for most of the meal and I discovered that, like me, she is a big Doctor Who fan and she loves the 8th Doctor, Paul McGann. Finally, there's Prof. Myers on the end. I am able to write this owing to the fact that P.Z. didn't hear my sarcastic quip about Richard Dawkins not framing a recent comment correctly. (This is humorous to readers of Pharyngula.) I found out that Richard Dawkins will be here in Madison come the spring to speak and I hope to see him. Another highlight was meeting a fellow cheesy heathen who hailed from Eau Claire. Having lived up the way, it was fun to catch up on what was happening in an old stomping ground.

On Friday The Dulcinea (who is bi-racial for those not in the know) asked me to take note of the racial diversity at the convention over the weekend so let me say a few words about the demographics. Had I been more diligent in my photography, you would be seeing a group that is much more diverse than the "average" FFRF convention goer. Most of these folks are white and middle aged or older. As far as age goes, this is perhaps not unsurprising. Young folk probably don't have the money to travel to the convention while people closer to my age often have small children to attend to. Older folks established in their careers have the resources to make the trip and don't have to worry about children being taken care of. As for gender, I'd say attendees are mostly men but there was a significant percentage of women. It wasn't like a progressive rock concert where there is usually just a smattering of the fairer sex usually just tagging along with a boyfriend or husband. The FFRF has a female co-president, women sang at the opening ceremonies, and there were three women who were given awards and/or spoke at the convention. Men may write the books which get the most attention from the press but women really are co-equals in the whole secularism pursuit.

When it comes to race, however, things at the convention were very white. But, while chatting with Matthew LaClair, I was joined by a woman who had emigrated from China and had earlier been given directions to an ATM by a black woman. At lunch as college kids poured in to join us, I recall seeing one woman of color as well. The crowd wasn't purely white geeky heathens like me, it's just that there's weren't very many people of color.

One thing that makes gauging the demographics of the godless was the fact that Christopher Hitchens was there. How many people were attending to see and hear the big name on the bill? If there was no best selling author, what would the make-up of the crowd have been? The crowd this year was much larger than the last convention I attended two or three years ago and I am unsure if the percentage of people of color was greater or whether there were more of them purely because attendance had shot up. But I do feel that there were more younger folk this year as a percentage and not just actual numbers. This is a very positive development because the Foundation's 80 year-old members aren't going to be around much longer and probably aren't using the Internet as a tool to organize and to find out what is happening in the world. I don't mean this as an insult but there were multiple times when Katha Pollitt brought up some incident and audible groans of surprise came from the audience. I highly suspect they were from the older members because us younger folk frequent sites that publicize the things that Pollitt referenced. We're generally more attuned to the media and so we're more aware of incidents that don't make the New York Times or the FFRF newsletter.

In the end, I was heartened that there were many more attendees in their early to mid 20s and that I just saw more faces of color. Hopefully future conventions will feature more speakers of color. In decades past, the face of atheism & freethought looked a lot like Bertrand Russell's. And while Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, and Dennett are the most visible today figures, especially for the population at large, those of us on the inside see that the face of atheism & freethought today is changing with the likes of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, V.S. Ramachandran, and Neil deGrasse Tyson becoming more and more prominent.