By Sikivu Hutchinson

High stakes test question: A female science student conducts an experiment with chemicals that explodes in a classroom, causes no damage and no injuries.  Who gets to be the adventurous teenage genius mad scientist and who gets to be the criminal led away in handcuffs facing two felonies to juvenile hall? If you’re a white girl check Box A, if you’re an intellectually curious black girl with good grades check Box B.  When 16 year-old Kiera Wilmot was arrested and expelled from Bartow high school in Florida for a science experiment gone awry it exemplified a long American-as-apple pie tradition of criminalizing black girls.  In many American classrooms black children are treated like ticking time bomb savages, shoved into special education classes, disproportionately suspended and expelled then warehoused in opportunity schools, juvenile jails and adult prisons.  Yet, while national discourse on the connection between school discipline and mass incarceration typically focuses on black males, black girls are suspended more than boys of every other ethnicity (except black males).  At a Georgia elementary school in 2012 a six year-old African American girl was handcuffed by the police after throwing a tantrum in the principal’s office.[i]  Handcuffing disruptive black elementary school students is not uncommon.  It is perhaps the most extreme example of black children’s initiation into what has been characterized as the school-to-prison pipeline, or, more accurately, the cradle to grave pipeline.  Stereotypes about dysfunctional violent black children ensure that the myth of white children’s relative innocence is preserved.

Nationwide, black children spend more time in the dean’s office, more time being opportunity transferred to other campuses and more time cycling in and out of juvenile detention facilities than children of other ethnicities.  Conservatives love to attribute this to poverty, broken homes, and the kind of Bell Curve dysfunction that demonizes “welfare queens” who pop out too many babies.  Yet there is no compelling evidence that socioeconomic differences play a decisive role in these disparities.[ii]  The fact remains that black children are criminalized by racist discipline policies regardless of whether they’re privileged “Cosby kids” or are in foster care or homeless shelters.  According to Daniel Losen and Russell Skiba, authors of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Suspended Education” report, “ethnic and racial disproportionately in discipline persists even when poverty and other demographic factors are controlled.[iii]

National research such as the Southern Poverty Law Center’s study and the Indiana Education Policy Center’s 2000 “The Color of Discipline” report has consistently shown that black students do not, in fact, “offend” at higher rates than their white and Latino counterparts.[iv] Middle class African American students in higher income schools are also disproportionately suspended.  This implies that black students are perceived by adults as more viscerally threatening.  “The Color of Discipline” report found that black students were more likely to be referred out of class for lower level offenses such as excessive noise, disrespect, loitering and “threat.”[v]  According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, “race and gender disparities in suspension were due not to differences in administrative disposition but to differences in the rate of initial referral of black and white students.”

When it comes to black girls, the widespread perception that they are dangerous, hostile and ineducable is promoted and reinforced by mainstream media portrayals.  Historically, black women have never been regarded as anybody’s “fairer sex” because white women have always been the universal standard for femininity, humanity, and moral worth.  On contemporary TV and in film, heroic white women abound as “new” models of bold, adventurous, breakthrough femininity.  Writing on “women’s” TV portrayals recently in the L.A. Times, Mary McNamara gushed about how the current crop of small screen female protagonists were complexly layered, Read the rest of this entry »

WLP & Paula C.

By Sikivu Hutchinson

In all my years of “post-Jim Crow” public education no one ever handed me a book written by a black woman and said that what she wrote is universal truth.  I was never told that so-called civilizations rose and fell on the power of her words, or that entire belief systems sprung from her ideas.  I was never taught that the world’s greatest intellectuals worked plantations, were herded onto reservations, or traveled everyday from barrios and “ghettoes” to keep white people’s children.  Intellectuals and philosophers—serious thinkers—were white men, with no need for a living wage job.  They did not ride public buses or clean houses or go to schools where stop-and-frisk was a routine practice.  They did not have to worry, like my students do, about being assigned to special education classes because they were chronic discipline “problems” or didn’t speak “proper” English.  They were never told that they would be more likely to drop-out and get pregnant than go on to a four-year college.  These vaunted intellectuals and philosophers were certainly not seventeen year-old East L.A. girls like Paula Crisostomo, a Mexican-American Filipina activist who helped spearhead the Chicano student walkouts of 1968.  As a student at Lincoln High School in East L.A. Crisostomo was influenced by social studies teacher Sal Castro, who recently passed away at the age of 79.  Castro’s fierce commitment to culturally relevant education inspired generations of youth social justice activism in the LAUSD.  His guidance of Crisostomo and other youth leaders helped make the 1968 walkouts the largest high school student protests in this nation’s history.  Thousands of students boycotted their classes in protest over lack of college access, tracking policies, prohibition of Spanish in the classroom, and racist curricula.

I did not learn about the walkouts in high school.  In the march of great Western liberal democratic traditions there were no textbook portrayals of the homegrown activism in our own communities or link between the apartheid legacy of the past and its echoes in the present.  Instead, “social justice” history consisted of canned recitations of how Martin Luther King “led” the civil rights movement.  Then, as now, many of us disengaged from these token classroom discussions because activism was framed as though it was a distant, hallowed phenomenon propelled by charismatic god-status heroes.  Racism equaled the Klan, black people getting hosed down and spit at, black men being lynched, and the indignity of segregated water fountains.  Racism wasn’t the systematic sexual terrorism of black women in the Jim Crow South and the de facto segregationist North or the demonization of black women as welfare queen matriarchs.  Then, as now, there was no room for analyses of sexism, racial apartheid, heterosexism, and patriarchy and how our lived experiences diverged from the corrupt pedagogy of the American dream.

Last year, Crisostomo came and spoke to a group of my students at Washington Prep High School in South Los Angeles.  She drew parallels between the racism she’d encountered during the Vietnam War era and the de facto segregation of the Obama age. Read the rest of this entry »

Laurie James

By Naima Washington

To be sure, many assumptions are made about atheists. Some of the assumptions about atheists are made by atheists, and African American atheists are among the easiest people to stereotype: we are all in the closet; and/or have one foot in the secular world and the other in a pew; and/or due to so many years of religious brain-washing, unlike white people, black people aren’t authentic atheists. On March 28, 2013, I went to Austin, Texas for the 50th anniversary of the founding of the American Atheists. It is at secular meetings, large or small, where I try to meet every black person in attendance, and I was in for a secular surprise when I introduced myself to Laurie James, a beautiful, dreadlocked, fiery, unapologetic atheist. As a courageous truth-teller who defies all stereotypes, Laurie is both sensitive and uninhibited representing open-hearted, honest-to-goodness, Caribbean womanhood at its best!

Laurie studied and trained to be an evangelist, and no doubt evolved into a believer who apparently took no prisoners. Born in Jamaica, she arrived in NYC the divorced mother of four small children and recalls the loneliness of having no family members or friends in her newly-adopted country; she had no one but Jesus as most committed Christians would say. She recounted the endless time spent preparing her small children for the arduous journey to and from church, three times a week. Hurriedly making her way along the sidewalks, she’d push the double-stroller containing her two smallest children with one hand; and would pull along the other two children with her other hand. By the time she fought her way in and out of trains and subways stations, she’d finally arrive at church drop-dead exhausted only to have to reverse the process for the trip back home. This insane routine carried out three times a week clearly took a toll on all five of them, and although very much a believer, she continued making these treks until she just couldn’t do it any longer.

Laurie’s brand of theology also included faith healing. The majority of theists say that their gods can heal illness, yet at the first sign of a serious illness or injury, any praying that they do for healing takes place in their doctor’s office! In Laurie’s case, faith healing meant faith healing and there was to be no medical intervention. If someone was ill church members would ‘gather in a circle around the person; pray, lay hands on the person’ and plead to the gods for an intervention. If no church members were around, prayer for healing could take place over the phone. I’ve read stories about faith healing and all of them left me feeling depressed, but the unfortunate reality is that many people who practice faith healing coincidentally have little to no access to medical care. People with serious illnesses who don’t receive medical treatment will experience tragic consequences regardless of their beliefs. Laurie nearly lost one of her children who had become seriously ill, and tragically members of her family died after receiving no medical treatment. Their deaths, extremely painful and probably preventable, have no doubt left her with horrific memories and permanent emotional scars.

Laurie abandoned both faith and faith healing less than three years ago, and her recollections struck me as both devastating and ironic because her tee shirt had the quote of one of her heroes, Madlyn Murray O’Hair: An atheist believes that a hospital should be built instead of a church. But, some believers even at the moment they’re Read the rest of this entry »

“So much conversation regarding atheism and humanism gains no traction, and does little to push beyond areas of comfort and well worn arguments. Sikivu Hutchinson’s work offers an important corrective to this. With clear and sharp insights, Hutchinson pushes readers to recognize and tackle the patterns of thought and action that limit any real ability to respond to issues of race, gender, and sexuality from a transformative and humanist perspective. Read her work, but fasten your seat belt first!”

– Anthony Pinn, author, African American Humanist Principles and The End of God Talk: An African American Humanist Theology

From Godless Americana: Race and Religious Rebels (forthcoming May 2013):

Christianity was one of the primary means by which African Americans learned the lexicon of becoming subjects through otherness. This is a uniquely American dialectic, borne of the soul-killing terrorism of slave ships, and, later, the plantation, a gulag awash in the new republic’s corrupt gospel of individual liberty. When my students traveled to the California African American museum last year, they had a chance to see and imagine the terror of these spaces. They walked through galleries with floor-to-ceiling inscriptions chronicling the birth dates, family lineages, appearances, habits, and idiosyncracies of slaves. They marveled at the relevance and medievalism of the notorious Willie Lynch manifesto. Their blood ran cold at the military assemblage of black bodies in the slavers’ hull. They stood mesmerized, contemplating the sheer number, weight, and scope of intertwined bodies, twinned in the endless sea voyage, hour after murderous hour. Enraged, many of them wondered how these obliterated ancestors made it out alive. How they resisted the gnashing white turbine of the sea and the urge to rise up against their savage captors.

Often did I think many of the inhabitants of the deep much more happy than myself. I envied them the freedom they enjoyed, and as often wished I could change my condition for theirs.

Olaudah Equiano, 1789

Later, in the classroom, we read Alice Walker on the spirituality of art-making. She wonders about the enslaved “genius” great-grandmothers denied the right to their own bodies. The space of the transcendent artist is that of the white male, the universal subject, the hero, the kingmaker, the muse chasing romantic. Their art hangs timelessly on museum walls funded by billionaires and corporations. Their art demands time, self-presence, self-possession, insularity, a privileged distance from the relentlessness of everyday life and the oppressive inconvenience of the body. The caricature of the masturbatory white male artist is one of the crazy booze swilling, dick swinging, T&A besotted libertine whose creativity is powered by testosterone and angst. Within the Western artistic canon, the woman exists to provide sex, inspiration, and succor, to be a pious sacrifice at the altar of male genius.

…a cross between pedophile and Bible.   Yup, this is the man who will topple a well evidenced scientific theory that happens to cornerstone of modern biology.

Janeth Silva

Clay Wesley

WLP leaders on racism, feminism, school climate and media images of women of color in the Teen Skepchick Interviews series, “where TS writers talk with amazing women

Jamion Allen, 12th grade

scientists and skeptics about life, the universe, and everything. These three women are part of the Women’s Leadership Project, a feminist service learning program in South Los Angeles. The WLP has been in operation since 2006, and helps encourage and guide young women of color in their own advocacy projects, including activism around race, gender, and LGBT equality. The WLP is sponsored by the L.A. County Human Relations Commission and the Gardena Healthy Start collaborative…http://teenskepchick.org/2013/03/28/teen-skepchick-interviews-jamion-janeth-eclasia/

By Sikivu Hutchinson

As Prop 8’s lead attorney trotted out the standard Christian fascist “marriage is only for procreation” party line before the Supreme Court yesterday, I was reminded of a 2012 Los Angeles Times story about the changing demographics of California families.  The article leads with an idyllic portrait of a white lesbian-headed family whose daughter is asked “on a leafy drive…at a newly renovated home with cathedral ceilings and a backyard pool” why she has three mommies.  According to the U.S. Census, families are becoming less nuclear, headed up by more single parents, childless couples and LGBT couples with children.  Yet family diversity is only a revelation in the mainstream media, which continue to promote the model of nuclear family-hood, even if it is provisionally represented by elite white gay “The Kids Are Alright-style” yuppie throwbacks with photogenic children.  Historically, families of color have always been diverse by culture, economic necessity and social obligation.  Extended African American family networks of adult caregivers, gay and straight, related and un-related, have always contributed to childrearing.  When racist/sexist criminal sentencing policies, joblessness and inequitable access to housing loosened or precluded “traditional” family ties, multi-generational family networks were the glue.  As the recession intensifies these stressors, grandparents, aunts, adoptive parents, foster parents and “play cousins” from all walks of life increasingly become frontline providers for African American children.  Thus, the Times’ snapshot of affluent comfort contrasts with the realities of many LGBT families of color who struggle to stay above the poverty line.  Further, the depiction of white childrearing and parenting as the de facto norm contributes to the national narrative that non-traditional families of color can never represent an authentic model of family.

In reality, the numbers of same-sex families of color are increasing, especially in traditionally conservative Bible Belt regions in the South.  African American strongholds like Atlanta have seen a new black “re-migration” driven by the ripple effect of high unemployment, foreclosures, and gentrification in northern urban black communities.  According to Family Equality, LGBT families are “more racially and ethnically diverse than families headed by married heterosexual couples.  Of same-sex couples with children, 41% are people of color, compared to 34% of married different-sex couples with children.”  Impacted by racism, sexism, heterosexism, and segregation, same-sex families of color are also more likely to be near the poverty line and hence more reliant on public social welfare and health care assistance.  Nonetheless, when textbooks, TV shows, and Hollywood films envision culturally “diverse” LGBT families it is through the lens of privileged white middle class folk who have “benevolently” decided to adopt a child of color (ala the white gay couple on the sitcom “Modern Family”) or used expensive reproductive technology to have children.  In this context, marriage equality merely secures white wealth and white patriarchy, as white gay families also benefit from segregated neighborhoods and schools, tax credits for middle class homeowners, and higher-paying jobs.  Complex families of color that are either headed by single gay or straight parents are marginalized as inherently dysfunctional, welfare-dependent and socially borderline.  Loving gay partners of color with children are nonexistent.

This media white-out has insidious implications for both straight and gay children of color.  If gay children of color don’t see loving adult gay and lesbian caregivers then they will continue to internalize their own dehumanization.  If straight children of color don’t see loving representations of LGBT parents and families of color, gayness will still be viewed as a lifestyle choice, a sin in the eyes of God and “white” deviance.  In 2011, the California State Assembly passed a bill requiring that the contributions of LGBT communities and historical figures be taught in K-12 classrooms.  There is little evidence that this well-intentioned law has any teeth, as Ellen DeGeneres is the only prominent lesbian most high school students seem to know and most dialogue on homophobia never progresses beyond a token lesson on bullying.  In my gender justice work with high school students, I’ve used films and texts such as That’s a Family, Straightlaced, Rethinking Schools and Christine Sleeter’s “Turning on Learning” guidebook.  Yet there are virtually no secondary school resources that address the racialization of gender and sexuality.  Curricula and pedagogy that deal with the particular way hetero-normativity plays out for youth of color in a white supremacist culture where black and Latino sexuality is already demonized as savage and pathological, are few and far between.

Moreover, the absence of public conversation around the role religious bigotry plays in the epidemic of homelessness amongst African American youth is a critical blind spot.  Despite all the hype around gay-friendly congregations (as well as recent data suggesting black gays and lesbians are just as invested in religious communities as straights), cultural messages about the sin of homosexuality as an affront to masculinity and the “ideal” of strong black families headed by good black patriarchs are still widespread in black communities.  Nationwide, increasing numbers of LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered and questioning) youth of color are becoming homeless due to overt anti-gay harassment, emotional/physical abuse and lack of social acceptance by their families and communities.  LGBTQ black and Latino youth are also more likely to be suspended and expelled than are white LGBTQ youth.  With African American children comprising nearly 40% of the nation’s foster care and homeless youth populations, culturally responsive feminist approaches to caregiving and family sustainability are crucial. Living in a culture in which they are reminded daily of their non-existence by a white supremacist heterosexist nation that deifies straight white beauty ideals and views affordable housing as a privilege, some LGBT homeless youth of color resort to destructive behaviors like survival sex and drug abuse.   Demographic patterns have long shifted to make whites a minority in the U.S.  Yet mainstream media is still in the segregationist Ozzie and Harriet era when it comes to the realities of families of color, buttressing bankrupt social welfare policies that expose the Christian fascist sham of American “family” values.

Sikivu Hutchinson is the author of Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars and the forthcoming Godless Americana: Race and Religious Rebels.

March 14th is the International Day to Defend Apostates and Blasphemers. We stand in solidarity with the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain and courageous activists like Maryam Namazie to highlight and protest cases of draconian persecution worldwide:

“Countless individuals accused of apostasy and blasphemy face threats, imprisonment, and execution. Blasphemy laws in over 30 countries and apostasy laws in over 20 aim primarily to restrict thought, expression and the rights of Muslims, ex-Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

On 14 March 2013, we, the undersigned, call for an international day of action to defend apostates and blasphemers worldwide by highlighting ten cases though there are countless more…”

Alex Aan, Indonesia: 30 year old atheist, in prison for blasphemy for saying there is no god on Facebook. Sign Petition Here.

Abdul Aziz Mohammed Al-Baz (also known as Ben Baz), Kuwait: Blogger and atheist charged with blasphemy.  Support him here.

Turki Al Hamad, Saudi Arabia: Novelist in prison for Tweets critical of Islam and Islamism. Write Letter Here!

Raif Badawi, Saudi Arabia: Charged with apostasy for setting up a website that “harms the public order and violates Islamic values”. Sign Petition.

For a complete list of individuals see:

http://ex-muslim.org.uk/2013/03/14-march-2013-international-day-to-defend-apostates-and-blasphemers/