Godless Americana: Race and Religious Rebels NOW AVAILABLE

By Sikivu Hutchinson

Over the past several years, the Right has spun the fantasy of colorblind, post-racial, post-feminist American exceptionalism. This Orwellian narrative anchors the most blistering conservative assault on secularism, civil rights, and public education in the post-Vietnam War era. It is no accident that this assault has occurred in an era in which whites have over twenty times the wealth of African Americans. For many communities of color, victimized by a rabidly Religious Right, neo-liberal agenda, the American dream has never been more of a nightmare than it is now. Godless Americana is a radical humanist analysis of this climate. It provides a vision of secular social justice that challenges Eurocentric traditions of race, gender, and class-neutral secularism. For a small but growing number of non-believers of color, humanism and secularism are inextricably linked to the broader struggle against white supremacy, patriarchy, heterosexism, capitalism, economic injustice, and global imperialism. Godless Americana critiques these titanic rifts and the role white Christian nationalism plays in the demonization of urban communities of color.


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Faith and Fraud in "The Undershepherd"

By Sikivu Hutchinson, from Godless Americana: Race and Religious Rebels

The gospel of social capitalism is unpacked with salacious brio in writer-director Russ Parr’s 2012 film "The Undershepherd". Set in Los Angeles under luminous blue skies, the film provides a window onto the cesspit of thug religiosity. In the opening scene two “junior pastors,” Roland and L.C., from First Baptist church, chafe at the leadership of a cabal of older pastors led by veteran actors Louis Gossett Jr. and Bill Cobbs. When the head pastor is exposed in an embezzlement scandal, the young pastors embark upon separate ministerial paths. In typical Cain and Abel form, the story focuses on the opposite arcs of virtuous Roland, who branches out to start his own storefront church, and best friend turned rival, corrupt messiah complex preacher L.C. Roland skews toward Billy Graham; L.C. toward Jim Bakker. L.C. assumes leadership of First Baptist and spirals down into a cesspit of sex, lies, and depravity, Roland and his good woman/first lady minister to the poor and struggle over the light bill. Played by the expertly diabolical Isaiah Washington, L.C. is a caricature of swaggering preacherly sleaze and machismo. He dips generously into the church till, abuses his wife, impregnates a senior pastor’s daughter, and pins the rap on one of his minions, then orders him to take the woman to get an abortion (which, like most female characters on the big screen, she’s adamantly opposed to). Parr pulls his punches at the beginning of the film by having a commentator provide a “this doesn’t reflect all of the Black Church” disclaimer. Moreover, gender roles are rigidly prescribed; the black female characters fit neatly into the Jezebel/temptress or loyal, God-fearing/caregiver mode. For the females, being God-fearing is signified by prairie dresses with “tastefully” revealing necklines. The men are locked in a duel for power, but the women’s clichéd backbone-of-the-church status bear out Jill Nelson’s caveat about the nexus of religious power and gender: “If black women boycotted religious institutions for a week, they’d cease to function. Instead we continue to worship faithfully, tithe, answer the phone, and cook the minister’s lunch.” Nonetheless, the film ably spotlights predatory religious masculinity. L.C. liberally uses scripture to justify his debauchery. The church elders are portrayed as inept, overbearing and incapable of leading their way out of a paper bag. Meetings devolve into bickering and incoherence. The pecking order for who gives a sermon turns on ego and dominance. L.C. repeatedly attempts to upstage one of the elders with overwrought “can I get a witness” whooping and hollering. Church funds are secretly used to buy a condo hideaway in the Bahamas. The coup de grace comes when L.C. tells a church deaconess who accuses him of being a fraud that he is God, kisses the microphone he’s holding, then proceeds to poke her breast with it.

Throughout the film, Parr contrasts L.C.’s lust for stardom and celebrity with Roland’s humble struggle just to keep a roof over his storefront congregation’s head. L.C. brings in the cameras and turns his services into a reality show. He browbeats parishioners and even publicly chastises a shiftless father with a new girlfriend on his arm for deserting his kids. L.C.’s gross hubris becomes a metaphor and cautionary tale for the pitfalls of prosperity gospel demagoguery. It’s implied that Roland is closer to the Christ model and L.C. to the Pharissee. True Christians don’t act this way, or so the party line goes. The L.C. types pervert the true spirit and letter of the Bible and betray its overriding message of tolerance, charity, love, and humanity. Thus, L.C. and his real life counterpart Creflo Dollar give Christianity a bad name. In 2012, Dollar was arrested for hitting and choking his teenage daughter after she defied him about attending a party. He was soundly trounced in the media for hypocrisy, abusiveness, and sullying “true” Christian values, even as his flock predictably rallied around him with “he’s a true Man of God” declarations. So what would Jesus, protector of the meek and defenseless, do? He would cast out the false prophet Dollars of the world and protect the lambs from their predations. Why hasn’t this happened? Why do the prosperity gospel predators continue to rake in tax-exempt billions decade after decade with no divine oversight or intervention? The standard Christian rationalization is that they will pay in hell. But instead of punishment one can see collusion, deftly skewered by Harlem Renaissance author Nella Larsen in her book Quicksand: “How the white man’s god must laugh at the great joke he had played on them! Bound them to slavery, then to poverty and insult and made them bear it.” Indeed, there is no evidence that Jesus was simply a kinder gentler Michael Jackson milquetoast lover-not-a-fighter vision of tolerance and forgiveness. In the New Testament he slams Jews, smacks down non-believers and wants to kill the babies of adulterers (John, 3:18, 15:6). But the propagandists for a sanitized Christ always want to have it both ways. They want to cherry pick scripture to amplify Jesus’ essential benevolence while keeping critics from cherry picking the bad “out-of-context” stuff. As Dan Barker of the Freedom From Religion Foundation notes, “Believers often accuse skeptics of ignoring the good while picking out only the bad parts of the bible. Believers ask why we don’t join them in emphasizing that which is good and beautiful in the bible. This might appear to be a fair question until it is turned around and we ask them why they don’t join us in denouncing the ugly parts. Then, they don’t see the questions as being quite so fair.”

It’s precisely this kind of hyper-masculine license that allows the cult of the charismatic preacher to dominate the landscape of black America. Because the Bible is filled with so much rot, hatred, and anti-human rights vitriol, Christian propaganda about its moral righteousness is a schizoid enterprise. Although Larsen’s caveat about the gullibility of African Americans within the context of religious debasement rings true, the white man’s God has long since morphed into the God of black bootstraps opportunity. The legacies of slavery and racial apartheid have made the church one of the easiest venues for black entrepreneurialism. Drive down any urban street and the explosion of small ministries, makeshift spiritual centers, inner-city temples (one right around the corner from me is headed by a man who calls himself “Prophet”), and other low-rent vehicles of worship attest to the enduring power of this entrepreneurial hucksterism.

Mad Science or School-to-Prison? Criminalizing Black Girls

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. 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. 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.

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. 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.” 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, daring departures from the typical crone, slut and mother roles of the past. According to McNamara, “TV's female leads are breaking ground with their unexpected choices. Thanks to the feminist revolution and TV's increasing ascendancy, women are allowed to make mistakes without paying the ultimate price. It's all quite refreshing.”

Yet once again the “feminist revolution” is lily white and over-exposed. The article hails characters from “House of Cards,” HBO’s swaggering white-fest “Girls” and “Homeland,” then blithely acknowledges that the female protagonists of these shows are all white and mostly middle class. Previous pieces from both the L.A. Times and the New York Times have saluted the rise of ass-kicking female adventurers like those in the “Hunger Games”, “Zero Dark Thirty” and (even) Pixar’s animated movie “Brave” as evidence that Hollywood is becoming more receptive to strong independent female characters.

But back in the image ghetto, substantive, much less starring roles, for women of color are still less abundant than Aunt Jemima’s head scarf. The endless parade of reality show swill featuring hyper-sexual “out of control” brawling black women has long dwarfed dramatic mainstream portrayals of black women’s lived experiences, ambitions and narratives.

Thus, Kiera Wilmot’s arrest and expulsion is a national travesty. It is an indictment not just of the inveterate racism and sexism of American public education but of an image industry that still loves to see black women doing mammy, Jezebel and welfare queen to white women’s heroic explorers.

Prison House of Textbook History: Remembering the Chicano Blowouts

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 or "Blowouts" 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 social justice youth 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. Girls like Ms. Crisostomo were not supposed to go to college. Homemaking, caregiving, becoming a maid in a white household on the Westside—these were the common life expectations for young Latinas. For Crisotomo’s generation, the military was pervasive. Youth of color died in disproportionate numbers fighting and killing other dark-skinned peoples in Vietnam because college was not an option in the “ghetto.” Despite an increase in the number of students of color in college, aggressive military recruitment continues to be a reality for black, Latino, and Native American students. For many, college preparation and equitable college access are still a distant dream. For some, simply graduating from high school at campuses where less than 50% of the entering freshman class makes it to graduation is an accomplishment. This has become the standard in an era in which the Education Trust estimates that only “one of every 20 African American kindergartners will graduate from high school and go on to a four-year California university” in the next decade. While predominantly black and Latino schools in South and East L.A. are besieged by military recruiters, the more affluent white schools get the college recruiters, college prep classes, and highly qualified teachers. The Americana fever pitch of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines is unheard of on predominantly white campuses in Los Angeles. It is a given that these students will be going to college, not dying on the frontlines.

Forty-five years after the walkouts, high drop-out rates, black student suspension rates and low four year college-going rates undermine the illusion of post-Jim Crow progress. The conditions that walkout activists like Crisostomo and Castro protested are still in place, just with a “kinder gentler” post-racial varnish, buffed to blinding.

Defense of Marriage: Racism, Family Values and the 99%

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, 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.

Ida B. Wells, Feminist Public Menace

By Sikivu Hutchinson

At an early age, black girls are branded as public menaces. They are suspended and expelled for “defiance” at greater rates than white boys who commit actual felony offenses. They pack the juvenile halls and adult prisons of the most prolific “first world” jailer on the planet. In textbook history, their connection to radical social change begins and ends with a saintly defanged Rosa Parks, while white women assume center stage in the women’s movement. There is little mainstream feminist discourse linking black women’s historical erasure with their criminalization; no women’s rights outrage over how the disfigurement of black women’s image buttresses mass incarceration.

In their landmark 1982 anthology on black feminism, Gloria Hull, Barbara Smith and Patricia Bell Scott proclaimed that “all the women are white, all the blacks are men, but some of us are brave.” Perhaps no other early twentieth century feminist embodied the spirit of this sentiment more fiercely than anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells. A giant of the independent black press, and an early media literacy educator, Wells’ leadership and uncompromising vision continue to reverberate for black women. In an era in which International Women’s Day and Women’s History Month inspires only token attention — and then mostly to heroic white women – in American public education, her visionary organizing has been criminally marginalized. Long before daycare and leave time, Wells, like scores of other “faceless” activist black women, was a caregiver navigating the divide between her domestic responsibilities and her life’s work as the most militant media watchdog of her time.

Accused of not knowing her place because she challenged the vacuum in male leadership around lynching, Wells struggled for recognition and compensation for her work. The constant juggling of her roles as writer, activist, orator and mother loomed large in both her public and private stance on women’s rights. Wells once boasted that she was perhaps the only nursing mother to travel nationwide to give political addresses. After the birth of her second child she announced that she was retiring from public activism to devote all her energies to motherhood. Three months later she came blazing back onto the national stage in protest of the lynching of a black postmaster and his family.

In her fearless defense of lynching victims and African Americans’ right to due process, Wells often bucked the backward conventional wisdom of the era. When she began her campaign against lynching in the late 19th century there wasn’t consensus among African Americans that lynching was worthy of a national social justice movement, nor was there agreement about the terroristic sexual politics that motivated white lynch mobs. Wells was perhaps the first journalist to speak out on the racist and sexist implications of lynching. In her editorials she consistently blasted the hypocrisy of white savagery against black men accused of raping white women and exposed the long history of black female sexual exploitation by white men. Catapulted into twenty first century America, Wells might not be surprised at the power that this legacy has had on contemporary media images of black femininity. She might not be surprised that reconciling black liberation struggle with feminism is still dicey. As an outspoken suffragist and defender of the black female image she would have choice words for the young woman who told me recently that it’s ok when she’s addressed as a bitch or a ho because “I know I’m not one.” As a Chicago organizer ever skeptical of black politicians, she might have initially celebrated the election of Barack Obama then used her bully pulpit to separate the rhetoric of post-racial inclusion from the reality of racial apartheid. And as an early critic of western gunboat diplomacy she would have seen a clear connection between the U.S. government’s interventionist policies and its imperial relationship with over-incarcerated black communities.

Despite her challenges to the American criminal justice system, her long record of publication at home and abroad, and her influence on Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. DuBois (both of whom were ambivalent if not threatened by her single-mindedness), Wells’ legacy remains undervalued. Eclipsed by the cult of charismatic masculinity that privileged the contributions of male leaders like Douglas and DuBois, her relative obscurity parallels her conflicts with a black political establishment that deemed her too radical for her gender. Remarking that “the people must know before they can act, and there is no educator to compare with the press,” Wells remains a beacon of justice and a testament to the radical power of black feminist media literacy.

School-to-Prison & White Post-Racial Privilege

By Sikivu Hutchinson

“If you’ve seen a black or Latino person portrayed as a criminal on TV within the past twenty-four hours stand up. If you’ve seen a black or Latino person portrayed as a professional on TV recently stand up.” These were the two powerful icebreaker questions my students asked the audience in a room packed with 9-12th graders during a recent Youth of Color college panel at Washington Prep High School in South Los Angeles. Virtually everyone in the room stood up for the first question. Six people stood up for the second. One student wanted clarification on what a professional was.


According to the Education Trust-West, only “20 percent of African-American ninth-graders who graduate from high school four years later do so having completed the A-G coursework needed for admission to the University of California or California State University”. The report estimates that "if current trends continue” only one in twenty black students in Los Angeles county will go on to a four year college or university. Massive sequestration-generated cuts to early childhood education and K-16 will only deepen these disparities.

At the college panel, young African American and Latino first-generation graduates of Princeton, UCLA, UC San Diego and the California Institute of the Arts spoke candidly about the high stakes climate students of color face in higher education. A decade of racist anti-affirmative action propaganda has sanitized public discussions about racial politics in higher ed. Indeed, many education activists predict that the ultra-conservatives on the Supreme Court will strike down affirmative action policy in a landmark case involving the University of Texas. But, for many student activists, pretending like the racial playing field is level, and that white college students face the same conditions as students of color, is no longer an option. Skyrocketing unemployment amongst African American college graduates has permanently stymied upward mobility for many working class blacks struggling to "make it" into the middle class. According to a 2005 Princeton University study, even white former felons got offered jobs at slightly greater rates than did black job applicants with no criminal records.* The cultual presumption of white innocence (despite a criminal past), coupled with the stereotype of black incompetence/untrustworthiness, is still deep and intractable.

During the forum, Princeton University graduate and community organizer Brandon Bell talked about the assumption some white biochemistry instructors had that he wouldn’t be able to cut the rigorous coursework. Coming from the highly-regarded King Drew Medical Magnet in Compton, he was saddled with the perception of being an affirmative action admission (while his white legacy peers skated by with their meritocratic silver spoons in their mouths). Undocumented youth activist Edna Monroy spoke of being one of only three Latinas in her graduating class to go to UCLA. California’s draconian Proposition 209 prohibited affirmative action at public colleges and universities and dramatically reduced black and Latino admissions to elite UCs. Even though she’d been a straight-A student in high school, Edna struggled during her first year at UCLA because she hadn’t had college caliber coursework before. Graduate student Diane Arellano spoke of being viewed as less than competent because she was the only Latina in the photography department at prestigious Cal Arts; where high profile disciplines like directing and animation (fount of the Pixar empire) were almost exclusively white male. Brandon and Edna’s experiences highlight the institutional challenges that often prevent students of color from even getting to college—i.e., inadequate preparation at the middle and high school level, overcrowded classrooms, low caliber teachers, and racist/sexist stereotypes that translate into low academic expectations. The Ed Trust report criticizes racially disparate suspension policies that disproportionately “pipeline” black students to juvenile detention. Coupled with federal policy (such as the Obama administration’s Race to the Top “accountability” initiative) that mandates high stakes tests and relentlessly promotes charter schools, the over-suspension of black students is a national travesty.

Following a national trend, billionaire outsiders like Michael Bloomberg, the Walton Family Foundation, and the Broad Foundation have poured millions into Los Angeles charter schools. Charter privatization is a major driver of school re-segregation. Charter re-segregation buttresses disparities in home buying, homeownership, and employment amongst African Americans of all class backgrounds. A recent Brandeis University report concluded that the wealth gap between blacks and whites has increased dramatically from 1984 to 2009. White wealth derives from greater home equity, investments, and inheritances from family. By contrast, the bulk of black and Latino wealth comes from one place—homeownership. Because whites of all classes live in higher income neighborhoods than do African Americans (and have benefited from lower interest rates, longer term homeownership, greater access to social amenities, living wage job centers and better-resourced schools), white privilege continues to be the engine for white upward mobility.

But there is no federal policy that specifically addresses these disparities. The Obama administration’s “colorblind” remedies for the mortgage meltdown have been piecemeal, fragmented, and grossly inadequate for the economic crisis of communities of color. Even as President Obama forges ahead with a more “liberal” second term agenda, the administration’s robber baron race-to-the-bottom corporate education policy and its indifference to the scourge of mass incarceration underscore the lie of the American dream. It means that students like Brandon, Edna, and Diane know that they will have to work ten times as hard as their white counterparts who can still bank on earning a nice wage of whiteness in a “post-racial” age.

*The study was based on testers (some posing as ex-offenders) applying to nearly 1500 job openings in New York city and concludes that, “Black job seekers fare no better than whites just released from prison.”

Sikivu Hutchinson is the author of Godless Americana: Race and Religious Rebels, due March 30th.