Wednesday, December 17, 2014

White Wealth & the Cult of White Victimhood




By Sikivu Hutchinson
@sikivuhutch

When President Obama and other corporate Democrats approved the recent spending bill they thumbed their collective noses at working class communities of color.  Brought to us by Citigroup, JP Morgan and other robber baron banks who plunged thousands of homeowners of color into crippling debt, the new budget will phase out Dodd-Frank regulations that prevented banks from trading in “the risky derivatives that sparked the financial meltdown of 2008”.  It will also increase the amount wealthy donors can contribute to political parties and cut some multi-employer pensions. The financial meltdown disproportionately affected African American and Latino homeowners who were targeted by Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Countrywide and other big lenders for subprime and predatory home loans.  Although Obama is perfectly willing to engage in the optics of fake racial reconciliation on Ferguson and the Eric Garner case, his endorsement of the new bill further underscores his cynical disregard for the socioeconomic wellbeing of communities of color.

In black and Latino neighborhoods across the country the legacy of the mortgage debacle is vividly exemplified by months-old For Sale signs, “bank-owned property” notices on lawns and abandoned homes. CNN Money reports that “Between 2004 and 2010 blacks and Latinos lost nearly a quarter of their wealth, whereas whites lost nearly 1%”.  While the mortgage debacle gutted black and Latino wealth, the wages of whiteness have protected white working and middle class Americans from wholesale economic blight.  According to a recent Pew Report, “The Great Recession hit all Americans hard, but only whites have seen their wealth rise during the recent recovery…widening the already massive wealth gap between whites and other racial and ethnic groups to near record levels.”  Despite this fact, some whites still want to claim the ultimate victim status in the blue collar disenfranchisement sweepstakes. In their minds, poor whites are losing ground due to waves of job-stealing immigrants, reverse discrimination and affirmative action. According to this narrative, anti-white racism is the last acceptable preserve of bigotry and cops like Darren Wilson are themselves victims of a backlash against white males.

Clearly poor and white working class families were belted by the Recession.  However, the persistence of racialized wealth inequality eludes even the most progressive white “anti-Wall Street” policymakers. Although left-wing darlings Congressman Bernie Sanders and Senator Elizabeth Warren (who led the charge against the rollback of Dodd-Frank regulation) have been some of the most vocal opponents of the oligarchy class they’ve had relatively little to say about the role white supremacy and institutional racism play in wealth inequality. In a recent NPR interview about the midterms and his presidential aspirations Sanders was asked about racial disparities in job access and income.  He dismissed the question, implying that it was short-sighted if not petty.  Musing on why Democrats continue to lose white voters he maintained, “I am focusing on the fact that whether you're white or black or Hispanic or Asian, if you are in the working class, you are struggling to keep your heads above water.”  Sanders argued that Democrats fail to appeal to the economic interests of white working class voters but seemed willfully ignorant that the GOP’s appeal has always been based on white supremacy.  Simply put, some whites remain wedded to the GOP due to racism and race partisanship—as long as the Democrats represent big government spending and “handouts” to lazy blacks and undocumented Latinos “hostile” to American values, white working class people will continue to be beholden to the Republican Party for decades.
 
Sanders’ colorblind paternalism is all too common among white liberals and progressives.  When they trot out the mythic “working class” they frequently invoke images of heartland workers whose formerly unionized jobs have been decimated by globalization, destructive free trade and right-to-work policies.  Yet whites of all classes have been bolstered by the rebound in the stock market as well as rising rates of homeownership and increases in home equity.  While only 47.4% of people of color were homeowners in the last year, 73.9% of whites owned homes.  The bulk of black and Latino middle class wealth is concentrated in homes that are worth far less than those of working class whites.  Because homeowners of color are more likely to own houses in socioeconomically depressed segregated communities that have not rebounded from the recession their home equity is often minimal to nonexistent. 

For black women the nexus of income inequality and the wealth gap is even graver.  Although black women’s median wealth levels are among the lowest in the nation they have the highest workforce representation among all groups of American women.  Black women over sixty-five have the least wealth of any group in the U.S. and are less likely to have employer-funded pensions.  Because black women are more likely to work for poverty level wages right-to-work laws are especially devastating for black families.

Sanders and other liberal-progressive policymakers have long proposed creating a federal jobs program to redress income inequality. But a federal jobs program will not remedy decades-long segregation in the U.S. housing market nor bridge the gargantuan race/gender wealth gap.  It will not improve a K-12 school system which disproportionately criminalizes youth of color while shutting them out of college.  Neoliberalism and capitalism thrive on and exploit disparities in race, gender, sexual orientation and geography; a fact that has always worked to white America’s advantage.


Thursday, December 4, 2014

Teaching Against Terrorism


By Sikivu Hutchinson

Now that the grand jury in Staten Island has desecrated Eric Garner’s dying breath and re-confirmed fascism in the U.S. what Black person has confidence in the justice system?  What descendent of slaves has “faith” that speechifying, praying, and pleading for the system to recognize Black life will have any demonstrable impact on the United Terrorists of America?  Who believes that the rule of law means anything other than a jack boot and a lynch rope around the neck of African-descent people who built this country brick by brick? 

As progressive educators many of us enter the classroom every day with fierce expectations of change and redress.  Working against textbooks that obliterate poor and working class people of color, we teach our students about social history to enlighten, inspire, transform and enable them to think critically about the similarities and differences between past and present.  Even among those of us who push back against grand narratives that pimp the obscenity of Western exceptionalism there is an implicit assumption about progress; a secular faith in “advancement” despite the face of insidious institutional racism. 

Today, we go into the classroom with that secular faith blown to bits yet again. Today, some of us will tell our students that the Garner decision makes it important to amplify that people of color have always fought terrorism on this soil.  Some of us will say that the U.S. has a history of using the Orwellian language of freedom and justice to vilify the non-Western other while waging terrorist war against its own.  During World War II black activists fought the hypocrisy of the U.S.’ campaign against fascism in Europe.  These interventions were the legacy of 18th century revolutionary war era protests and legal resistance that free and enslaved Africans mounted against the tyranny of “democratic” empire.  Social justice pedagogy is designed to empower young people to critique, question and ultimately organize against these contradictions.  When we teach we try and lift up these brutal contradictions and show how they inform the present.  In an age of wall-to-wall corporate media it’s one of the last bastions of decolonization for youth of color who are told that race is no barrier but see white supremacy at work every day.  But in the cold light of unrelenting state criminality and savage indifference to black life it’s difficult to remain hopeful.
 
Discussing racism and discrimination with South Los Angeles students in a new multiracial leadership group before the Ferguson decision, some were initially hesitant to unpack their experiences.  Yet in the same school students reported that some teachers divide their classrooms by seating “smart” Latino students on one side and “underachieving” African American students on the other.  In the same school black boys are led away in handcuffs by school police every week.  In the same school “out of control” students of all genders are physically restrained.  In the same school, and in schools just like it across the district, black students are grossly under-represented in Advanced Placement and Honors classes but pack special education classes and detention halls.  Unlike the murder of Eric Garner, these are the routine, everyday acts of state violence that are never captured on videotape but also signal that breathing while black remains a punishable, lethal offense.  Our challenge as activist teachers and mentors is to keep pushing students to see that the system doesn’t want them to see these terrorist violations as the same.


Tuesday, November 25, 2014

"No Rights Which a White Man Was Bound to Respect" -- Slavocracy 2014

In 1857 Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney uttered these defining words in the Dred Scott decision which further embedded black dehumanization and non-citizenship into U.S. slavocracy.  In 2014 killer cop Darren Wilson walks free after being cleared of the lynching of unarmed teen Mike Brown by a white supremacist grand jury which endorsed Wilson's characterization of Brown as a subhuman "demon".  One hundred and fifty eight years later Blacks are not citizens, not human, not "legible" within the regime of white innocence.

Fill the streets. Teach-in, talk to every child about the importance of this criminal obscenity against human rights and Black humanity.  Join people of conscience around the world in mobilizing against state violence and law enforcement impunity in mass resistance to apartheid Amerikkkan style:



Tuesday, November 18, 2014

No More White Saviors: Jonestown and Peoples Temple in the Black Feminist Imagination



By Sikivu Hutchinson

I boarded the plane in a fog of dream and nightmare with all the others leaving America for the last time.  Nursing mothers with squealing babies in the row behind me, elders in front flipping through their bibles, Ebony magazines and Readers’ Digests, eyes aglow like Christmas.  On our stealth mission to the other side we wondered, watched, drank in the shifting remnants of the cities and towns below, demonic, beloved spaces that had held us close then betrayed us.[1]

A black female writer novelizing Peoples Temple and Jonestown must weave through a landmine of memory and myth.  The Jonestown canon, the reams and reams that have been written, is like a country unto itself, a kaleidoscope of porous boundaries incapable of containing the dead, the living, the in-between.  In the decades since the mass murder-suicide of over 900 members of the predominantly black Peoples Temple church at Jonestown, Guyana on November 18, 1978 it has been fictionalized to roaring excess, ghosting into American popular culture as the grotesque culmination of an oft-ridiculed decade.  Like many I was introduced to Jonestown through newsreel caricatures of bug-eyed cult zombies, endless rows of black corpses and the Reverend Jim Jones’ aging Elvis-meets-Elmer Gantry swagger.  Jonestown has become cultural shorthand for blind faith and cautionary tale about religious obsession.  But buried beneath the psycho cult clichés is the power of black women in the Peoples Temple movement.  As the largest demographic in Peoples Temple black women have seldom been portrayed as lead protagonists in popular representations of Jonestown.  Despite the horror of Jonestown’s demise its representation cannot be separated from dehumanizing cultural representations of black people in general and black women in particular.  While Jonestown as cultural “artifact” is perversely sexy—the object of near necrophilic projection and fantasy—Peoples Temple is a historical stepchild; its legacy an unwelcome reflection of the lingering race, gender and class divide in “New Jim Crow” America.



Faced with this mythologizing I began my novel, White Nights, Black Paradise, at the end.  It opens with a lone child, identity unknown, partly gesturing to the loss of black girls’ voices, partly to the psychobiography of Jim Jones as lovelorn singleton and partly to the naked terror that any child walking in the stifling heat among the community’s dead and dying must have felt in the Temple’s final moments.  The book’s title reflects the dual nature of PT’s trajectory.  White nights were rehearsals/demonstrations of loyalty and collective despair.  They evoked both the impossibility of a worldly paradise and the (hollow) approximation of one via the church’s multiracial social justice vision.

My initial research into Peoples Temple was driven by what seemed to be one of the most basic and egregiously unanswered questions—where are the black feminist readings on and scholarship about Peoples Temple and Jonestown??  As historian James Lance Taylor remarked to me recently, the erasure of black women is “a double victimization because the people who were victimized get hidden by Jim Jones’ ego (and) it made them into a bunch of freaks.  It’s important to bring out that this was a significant event and it needs to be registered along the lines of major tragic events in black history.”  Many of the literary portrayals of black women involved in Peoples Temple have been limply one-dimensional.  At stage right, the elderly self-sacrificing god-fearing caregivers who opened up their wallets and deeded their homes to the Temple with few reservations.  At stage left, the loyal “rudderless” young women who came up in the Black Church and followed disgruntled family members into the Temple collectives.  From Mammy to the trusty sage black sidekick, we’ve seen these stick figures trotted out ad nauseum on TV and in film.  They are serviceable (to use Toni Morrison’s term[2]) props to the main event—i.e., the mercurial path of the brash white savior/rock star/anti-hero.  The 1997 film The Apostle, starring Robert Duvall as a disreputable white Southern Pentecostal preacher redeemed by a predominantly black female congregation, wrapped up all of these Americana caricatures in a nice countrified bow.

Confronting this erasure of black women’s agency, the novel asks, what was the context of black women’s involvement?  What drove them to join, stay, leave, resist and/or collaborate?  What were the complex motivations that kept some tethered to Jones and the movement until the bitter end and how can these decisions be recuperated as rational?  How, ultimately, did black women shape Jim Jones and vice versa?  When she was introduced to Peoples Temple in the early seventies Los Angeles member Juanell Smart “had given up on religion, church and ministers because I had been married to a Pentecostal preacher for a number of years and knew the ins and outs of the church.” (Smart, 2004)  Smart’s comments imply that she might have been disillusioned with the sexism, corruption and moral hypocrisy that plagues organized religion.  Nonetheless, when she attended her first Peoples Temple service Jones’ criticism of abusive relationships resonated with her.  Smart lost her four children, her mother and an uncle in Jonestown.  Her article on the Alternative Considerations of Jonestown site captures her ambivalence toward Jones while she was a member of the Temple planning commission.  She notes that, “I have always been a skeptic so it was hard for me to be a true believer for any length of time.”  Smart’s skepticism and questioning of authority led her to break from Peoples Temple.  In a recent conversation with me she identified herself as an atheist.

Mainstream stereotypes of black hyper-religiosity have always precluded more complex representations of black faith and religious skepticism (Hutchinson, 2011).  Hy and Taryn, the two fictional African American sisters who anchor White Nights, Black Paradise, represent a mix of religious/skeptical belief that is rarely seen in literary portrayals of black women.  Hy is a spiritual agnostic; her sister Taryn an openly identified atheist.  Because neither of them subscribe to the dogmas and social prescriptions of the traditional Black Church they find the communal solidarity of Peoples Temple appealing.  Throughout its lifetime Peoples Temple was variously described and viewed as Pentecostal, Christian, millennialist, atheist and spiritual.  These shifting, and, frequently conflicting designations were evoked (and exploited) by Jones according to context and expedience.  All attracted different segments of the community who were willing to accept the Temple’s unwieldy diversity for what they deemed to be the greater collective good.  Yet there has been little examination of spiritual or religious diversity among the African American women members of the Temple.  My re-envisioning of black female agency seeks to rectify that.  For those who professed diehard Pentecostal beliefs Peoples Temple’s provisional secularism (with idolatry of Jones substituted for that of a supernatural deity) was a radical departure and compromise compelled by oppressive socioeconomic conditions.  Jones’ denigration of the Bible forced the most religious African American women into a new reading of Christian ethical obligations.  The absence of justice and equality in the world around them made this reading palatable.  Jones challenged the existence of a just God in the midst of rank poverty and obscene wealth.  Peoples Temple critiqued the persistence of anti-black racism against African Americans, the nation’s most devout Christian population.  Echoing Epicurus, Jones and Peoples Temple emphasized God’s irrelevance and rejected redemption in the afterlife.  Grappling with these contradictions, many traditionalists in the PT congregation agreed that God was indeed lacking if not fictitious.

The black women protagonists in White Nights, Black Paradise come to California at the tail end of the Great Migration in the 1970s.  They are driven by the same “Promised Land” fever that spurred African Americans’ decades-long exodus from the South to the North.  Originating as an unabashedly interracial church in the 1950s, Peoples Temple was a beneficiary of this movement.  The church’s 1973 transition to the Fillmore community in San Francisco was itself the third leg of an internal migration that would culminate in Guyana.  In a period in which most mainline churches were white supremacist, Peoples Temple’s leadership was able to capitalize on blacks’ yearning for inclusion and cultural validation.  In an era in which many Bay Area black churches were accused of bourgeois conservatism, People Temple touted the radical progressive rhetoric of black liberation struggle.  That said, as Taylor and other historians note, the movement was ultimately insular.  It provided social programs, health care, housing and jobs (in exchange for total allegiance) for its members, but did not forge lasting coalitions with like-minded movements.  In the novel, Taryn meets her lover Jess—a licensed clinical social worker whose family settled in the Fillmore community of San Francisco during the 1950s—in Peoples Temple.  Jess’ lineage represents the Fillmore’s postwar shift from a predominantly Japanese American community to an African American one.  Similar to their counterparts in Los Angeles, African Americans migrated to the Fillmore in search of jobs in the booming wartime industries. Both Los Angeles and San Francisco transplants found that the liberal façade of these cities hid an inveterately racist sexist power structure. 

This mix of paternalism and progressivism is a source of deep ambivalence for the characters in my novel.  In her book Slavery of Faith, Jonestown survivor Leslie Wagner alludes to this dialectical relationship vis-à-vis Jones’ public posturing.  Jones dubbed her his “little Angela Davis”, connecting her to Davis’ radical activism while playing on the still nascent identity of a young person whose life experience revolved around the church.  Wagner delighted in this comparison.  Davis, after all, was a revered figure in the Temple’s political pantheon, an ally and a powerful role model for many young black women during that era.  Ever the savvy showman, Jones successfully manipulated the revolutionary aspirations of young African Americans reeling from the fading promise of the Black Power movement.  Peoples Temple’s rainbow coalition optics (epitomized by Jones’ own mini-United Nations’ style family) deflected criticism of Jones’ motives.  The church’s association with Davis, the Black Panthers, American Indian Movement leader Dennis Banks and even the reactionary Nation of Islam lent it credibility among younger more politically progressive and radical blacks disillusioned with traditional black religious organizations.  Jones, the “anti-racist racist” (Taylor, 2013), played the part of the white savior, but it was not without the imprimatur of his predominantly black congregation, steeped as it was in a heritage of white supremacy inflected through pop culture.  In a nation shaped by minstrelsy and appropriations of blackness, Jones’ performance of black liberation struggle was a familiar one.  From late nineteenth century blackface to Elvis’ theft of black musical traditions to Norman Mailer’s exaltation of the “White Negro” and white America’s multi-million dollar consumption of hip hop—whiteness has always been defined by the specter of black otherness.  Jones was simply one in a long line of white minstrels who mined black idioms and Pentecostal religious practices.  Yet what was perhaps most seductive to his black audience was the way he deftly combined white power and privilege with the stagecraft of Black Power.

This interplay was also appealing to some black folk because of the devastation of the Fillmore’s African American community by urban redevelopment projects (Hollis, 2004; Taylor, 2013). As Hannibal Williams contends:
The times were right to produce a man like Jim Jones.  The circumstances of a community that is broken up, when the relationships that bind people together fall apart the time is always right for a religious scoundrel to take advantage of our credibility. Justin Hermann literally destroyed the neighborhood and in the process he made the neighborhood ripe for anybody with any kind of solution.  People were desperate for solutions, for something to follow. (Taylor 2013, p. 92).

In his article “Breaking the Silence: Reflections of a Black Pastor,” J. Alfred Smith argues that “The 1970s were a dark age for the Black church in San Francisco.” (Smith, p. 139).  Taylor maintains that progressive black pastors like Cecil Williams of Glide Memorial and physician/publisher/activist Carlton Goodlett embraced Jones precisely because they deemed most black churches in the city “irrelevant.” (Taylor, p. 101)  Jones and Peoples Temple’s ascent in the political hierarchy of San Francisco reinforced their legitimacy among Bay Area African Americans.

Yet although there have been numerous portrayals of PT’s shrewd politicking, the racial politics of gender in the movement have gotten relatively short shrift.  In my book, Peoples Temple is not only symbolic of progressive black social gospel traditions but of a racially divided secular women’s movement.  It is no secret that white women called the shots in Peoples Temple and that their leadership was resented by some of the black rank and file.  The movement’s veneer of interracial “sisterhood” was compromised by the reality of white female paternalism.  Wagner alludes to this in her book, and the infamous 1973 “Gang of Eight” manifesto suggests that the climate of white (female) power, control and favoritism hamstrung socialist progress.  In WNBP black women’s suspicion of white women’s dominance is symptomatic of the racial fault lines in second wave feminism.  As with the power struggles of the women’s suffrage era, the largely white middle class leadership of the women’s movement (represented by groups like the National Organization for Women) was willfully ignorant of if not downright hostile to the intersectional experiences of women of color.  At the core of second wave white feminist ideology was Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique, a text which universalized the experiences of white middle class women pushing back against the narrow confines of domesticity, marriage and motherhood.  While revelatory for many white women, the Feminine Mystique elided the realities of women of color who not only had to work but often served as maids and domestics in white women’s homes.  Unspoken in white women’s critiques of gender and power in the home and workplace was the fact that postwar wealth massively advantaged white families.  New Deal institutions like the Federal Housing Administration, the GI Bill and the Veterans Administration agency allowed working class and “ethnic” whites to move from inner cities or working class suburbs into more affluent suburban subdivisions protected from the dark other.  Further, while suburban white women took advantage of job opportunities opened up by the Civil Rights Bill of 1964, black women were shut out.  This fact was compounded by redlining policies which excluded blacks from buying homes in suburban communities with greater access to white collar jobs.  As a result, when it came to equitable access to homeownership and professional jobs, black women were only nominally more “liberated” in the Promised Land than they were under Jim Crow.

Thus, for many black migrants, rigid de facto segregation on the West Coast turned the postwar “dream” of escaping Southern apartheid into yet another bitter miscarriage of justice.  In both Los Angeles and San Francisco African Americans of all classes were tightly confined to working class black neighborhoods in South L.A., the Western Addition/Fillmore and Bay Point.  White privilege conferred the white women in Peoples Temple with mobility, prestige and decision-making power over their black female counterparts.

These tensions inform the power structure of both the novel and the real world of People Temple.  Black women in the book actively question and challenge white women’s authority.  They draw on the reality of their marginalization both within mainstream society and the church hierarchy.  The slights and indignities they suffer are not just due to racism but sexism, homophobia and transphobia.  Historically, black women of all sexual orientations, unlike white women, have never had the luxury of being considered pure, innocent and feminine.  This dichotomy was capitalized on by Jones and his white female regime; thus eliminating any real possibility of power sharing with the very black women who comprised the backbone of Peoples Temple.  Throughout the Peoples Temple/Jonestown canon the specter of the “uneducated” African American is contrasted with that of the “educated” generally middle class to affluent white woman appointed by Jones to a leadership position.  Certainly black women like Wagner, Smart and Christine Miller (a Los Angeles member who was the only recorded challenger to Jones on the so-called Death tape of November 18, 1978) did not fit the monolith of the “downtrodden” poor black woman.  But this contrast insidiously helps establish the agency, expertise, dynamism, and altruism of white women.

For example, Mary Maaga’s book Hearing the Voices of Jonestown examines the complexity of white women’s roles in People Temple but essentially flattens black women into supporting characters whose proper names merit no more than passing reference if at all (case in point, Maaga badly flubs the name of Shanda James, a young black woman who Jones sexually preyed on in Jonestown and drugged into submission).  White women like Carolyn Layton, Grace Stoen, Maria Katsaris and Annie Moore assume center stage as lead protagonists in a chapter ironically entitled “Restoration of Women’s Power.”  There is no substantive exploration of white female racism and complicity in the white supremacist cultural politics of Peoples Temple.  And Maaga goes to great lengths to evoke white women’s heroic management of Jonestown in the face of Jim Jones’ physical and mental decline.  Painting a picture of the selfless white savior, Maaga concludes that “Leading Jonestown was constant work, and neither Jones nor the members of the community seemed to appreciate the long hours and dedication of the (white female) inner circle.” (Maaga, p. 99)  Maaga’s portrayal valorizes the white female leadership in PT/Jonestown while leaving their all too intimate role in the exclusion of black women egregiously unexamined.

One of the ways that I attempt to address this lacuna is through the amplification of black journalism, symbolized by Hampton Goodwin (modeled after Jones’ ally Carlton Goodlett) and Ida Lassiter, a community organizer and muckraker.  A trailblazing publisher and physician who espoused radical left politics, Goodlett printed Peoples Temples’ publications, treated Jones as a patient and served as his adviser.  Lassiter is a fictitional character who mentors the young Jones then publishes exposés on the church’s inner workings in its later years.  She is the voice of independent journalism and a conflicted witness to the church’s downward spiral.  As the publisher of the influential black paper the Sun Reporter, Goodlett’s complex relationship with Jones is a historical curiosity.  Why would an eminent black leader become entangled with Jones and how did his involvement help boost and solidify the media profile of Peoples Temple?  For black people looking at PT through a twenty first century lens, the enigma of black complicity is a question that continues to confound.  It is inadequate to say that blacks were duped, hoodwinked or even “brainwashed” into staying in Peoples Temple’s “cult” of the white savior.  That narrative ultimately undermines cultural and sociological analyses contextualizing black women’s particular stake in the movement.  But it also undermines the interplay of passion, desire and revolutionary longing that informed their involvement and ultimate migration.  In the novel I suggest that black women were especially vulnerable because of their history of sexist/racist exploitation as well as their long tradition of spearheading social justice activism in the church.  Black women civil rights activists often faced sexist opposition from black men and racist opposition from white women “allies”.  Historically, the narrative of the charismatic black male civil rights leader has marginalized black women’s contributions to the civil rights and Black Power movements (Giddings 2007; McGuire 2011; Theoharis 2014).

For some black women migration was an act of positive self-determination.  In White Nights, Black Paradise, sisters Taryn and Hy leave segregated Indiana for segregated California. Taryn finds that she’s unable to advance at her Bay Area accounting job because she’s not a straight white woman.  Hy becomes disgruntled by the city’s limited job market and its climate of racist police violence.  Frustrated by these realities, their appetite for adventure is whetted by the prospect of Guyana.  Ernestine Markham, a middle class school teacher loosely modeled on Christine Miller, leaves because she believes it represents a better alternative for her troubled son.  Devera, a Black-Latina transwoman writer whose family is wrapped up in Peoples Temple, yearns to be a pioneer at the Guyana settlement. Markham speaks of her desire to teach in a school system where black children aren’t taught to hate themselves.  Each woman is politicized by the times, her experiences in Peoples Temple and the context of being black and female in “white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy” (hooks, 1996).

Faced with the ashes of stateside revolution, the betrayal of the liberal California dream and a “socialist” movement that preached first world apocalypse and third world redemption, migration to Guyana could be viewed as a life-affirming rational choice, a tributary of black diaspora (Harris and Waterman, 2004).  The final recording of the PT/Jonestown community reflected the trauma of this peculiarly black odyssey.  Christine Miller’s lone plea on the Death tape was part of a long tradition of black female self-determination.  Speaking for the voiceless, her final act of courage was a metaphor for black women’s complex role in Peoples Temple.  Submitting to the “will” of the majority, Miller and the unidentified black women who shout her down pass into myth—reluctant “exceptional” heroine versus brainwashed minions. It may be comforting for mainstream America to believe that the black voices extolling suicide were simply gullible bystanders but the truth is shaded in gray.  In the Jonestown of black feminist imagination, the agency of both the living and the dead demands that these ambiguities be part of history’s reckoning.


Works Cited
Giddings, Paula. Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching (New York: Harper Collins, 2008).
When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New
                York: Bantam Books, 1984).
Harris, Duchess and Adam John Waterman. “To Die for the Peoples Temple: Religion and Revolution
After Black Power,” ed. Moore, Rebecca and Pinn, Anthony, et al. People’s Temple and Black Religion in America (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004), pp. 103-122.

Hollis, Tanya. “Peoples Temple and Housing Politics in San Francisco,” ed. Moore, Rebecca and Pinn,
Anthony, et al. People’s Temple and Black Religion in America (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004), pp. 81-102.

hooks, bell. Killing Rage, Ending Racism (New York: Henry Holt, 1996).
Maaga, Mary. Hearing the Voices of Jonestown (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1998).

McGuire, Danielle. At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—a New History of
the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (New York: Vintage Books, 2010).

Smith, Archie. “An Interpretation of Peoples Temple and Jonestown: Implications for the Black Church,”
                ed. Moore, Rebecca and Pinn, Anthony, et al. People’s Temple and Black Religion in America
                (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004), pp. 47-56.

Taylor, James L. “Black Churches, Peoples Temple and Civil Rights in San Francisco,” from From Every
Mountainside: Black Churches and The Broad Terrain of Civil Rights ed. Drew Smith (Albany: SUNY Press, 2013), pp. 85-110.

Theoharis, Jeanne. The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (New York: Beacon Press, 2013).





[1]White Nights, Black Paradise (Infidel Books: Los Angeles, forthcoming 2015).
[2] Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (London: Vintage Books, 1993), p. 25.

Wednesday, November 5, 2014

How We’re Failing Black Girls



By Sikivu Hutchinson

WLP @ California Endowment
“I don’t want to be considered African American,” one of my tenth grade Women’s Leadership Project students said, shaking her intelligent head distastefully.  Another girl agreed, stating that her relatives were from Louisiana, so what did that have to do with Africa?  We’d been watching the 2008 film “The Souls of Black Girls.”  Our discussion of slavery and the ritual rape of black women elicited painful questions about their heritage.  Like Raven Symone, who notoriously proclaimed recently that she wasn’t African American, identifying with Africa or Africans was outlandish to some of them. Their disavowal is understandable in a geopolitical climate in which Africa is still associated with primitivism and blackness is demonized and discounted 24/7.  According to a recent report by the UCLA Bunche Center, people of color account for only 7.8% of writers in Hollywood film and only 10.5% of lead actors.  In the age of Obama, the image industry has become more unabashedly segregated and take-no-prisoners white supremacist.  Yet on a more basic level the disfiguring images and messages that young black girls consume are ones that we as black women—feminist, womanist or somewhere in between—have not been vigilant enough in challenging on the ground.

When white women and other non-black folks demean or marginalize relatively powerful black actresses (Kerry Washington, Viola Davis, Jill Scott) or, God forbid, the almighty “Bey”, we’re all over it, tweeting up a storm about the evils of respectability politics.  That’s cool and undoubtedly necessary for sticking it to racist white female power brokers.  However, I’d like to see the same energy directed at addressing the sexist anti-black miseducation that occurs everyday in our schools.  Truth is, when it comes down to actively mentoring, teaching and apprenticing black girls in public schools many of us are MIA.  When it comes to creating or lifting up existing feminist or womanist programming for black girls in our communities the lavish support and enthusiasm that fuel the latest feminist Twitter skirmish is simply not there.  The sexism, misogyny and heterosexism of traditional black civil rights, civic and religious organizations is exacerbated by the dearth of culturally responsive anti-sexist education for black girls.  It’s no revelation then that young black girls see feminism as not just white but as irrelevant.  And it’s no surprise—as the feminist activists who’ve pushed back against President Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper initiative have argued—that many black girls don’t “see” sexist oppression as central to their daily lives.

Earlier this year, I was asked by a black female administrator at a South Los Angeles high school to do a leadership pilot for 9th grade black girls.  A month after it began the initiative was derailed by the very same administrator because she was more concerned about civility and protecting the campus’ reputation than with addressing the authentic concerns of black female students.  On this particular campus sexual harassment was rampant and black girls were at high risk of falling victim to sex trafficking.  Colorism and fierce competition for boys were destroying relationships between black girls and damaging their self-esteem.  Most of them felt constant pressure to take care of siblings, parents and other relatives.  Few could identify black women role models other than Beyonce, Oprah or, sadly, Nicki Minaj (a favorite because she’s “making bank”).  All of them agreed that violence was taking a serious toll on black girls.  Many spoke of peers performing oral sex “on demand” or posting scantily clad pictures of themselves for a shot at Instagram or Facebook “fame”.  Most identified lack of access to reproductive health care, birth control and HIV and STI prevention resources as a major barrier to their upward mobility and independence.  During the process I was fortunate to have the support of another black woman administrator, Angela Rodriguez, who headed the school’s Wellness Center.

Many African American women agree on the urgent need to provide mentoring, leadership, and community development programs for black girls.  Unfortunately there are limited resources and limited will to do so.  In many schools, high stakes tests, criminalizing discipline policies and sheer faculty burnout preclude sustained attention to and support of culturally responsive programs for black girls and girls of color.  Fearing black children, some of us have even internalized the view that black girls are too loud, disrespectful and unruly to work with; doling out dean’s office referrals for back talk and “attitude”.  In schools with high numbers of black faculty and skyrocketing rates of suspension and expulsion the Cosby bootstraps-and-sagging pants mentality is all too real.

Case in point, a black female teacher recently gave me a self-help book for my students.  It was written by a black woman who instructed black girls on how to be “queens” and virtuous women.  One of the author’s prescriptions for developing dignity and self-respect was respecting “God the Father” and “one’s husband”.  Often such uncritically heterosexist patriarchal guidelines are viewed as the best “remedies” for young black girls who act out hypersexual imagery and dehumanizing social constructs.  According to this cliché, if black girls just trusted in “God”, developed a personal relationship with “Him” and learned how to become strong, capable caregivers, many of their personal problems would evaporate.  This brand of reactionary religiosity is all too common in youth leadership development curricula which render queer girls invisible and seek to domesticate straight girls.  Instead of teaching youth to question destructive gender stereotypes and homophobic myths, some of these programs merely affirm them. 

When women of color mentors do not provide clear countervailing messages about being strong, assertive and unyielding about safe sex, open communication and self-protection in teen heterosexual relationships, girls of color are even more at risk. And if our children are misguided about their identities, discount their African heritage and don’t have a language for naming sexist oppression in their lives we must take responsibility.  As writer-activist Thandisizwe Chimurenga said, “Many young black women/women of color come into contact with feminism through college, which is a marker of privilege and class mobility.  Many young, low-income black women (grassroots) and others who disdain feminism are not represented in these centers of higher learning, in addition to the fact that they have a reference for feminism that comes from popular culture which has no interest whatsoever in empowering young women of color.”  Black girls’ lives and, yes, black feminism on the ground, do matter.

Sikivu Hutchinson is founder of the Women’s Leadership Project and author of Godless Americana: Race and Religious Rebels and Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars. Her novel White Nights, Black Paradise on the Jonestown massacre and Peoples Temple is due in 2015.


Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Brave New Face of Humanism: Moving Social Justice Conference

Brave New Face of Humanism

“What is secularism without social justice in a nation where whites have over 20 times the wealth of people of color & our children are being pipelined into prisons?”

Beyond Dawkins/Hitchens/Harris &Toxic Myths of postracial colorblindness

Moving Social Justice Conference

Center for Inquiry, Los Angeles

October 11-12th

A gathering of freethinkers, atheists & humanists of color on the issues of our times

People of Color Beyond Faith/Black Skeptics Group


Monday, September 15, 2014

Where are the White Feminists? MIA on Racist Misogynist Police Violence



By Sikivu Hutchinson

The Oklahoma NAACP recently called on the Department of Justice to investigate accused rapist and Oklahoma City Police officer Daniel Holtzclaw for federal hate crime violations against his black women victims. On September 5th, Holtzclaw was released on bail after being charged with sixteen counts of rape, sexual assault, stalking and sodomy. Judge Tim Henderson (who is running for reelection unopposed) reduced Holtzclaw’s bail from $5 million to $500,000 and required him to wear an ankle bracelet while on paid leave. With this unconscionable decision Henderson simply made clear the historical legacy of the law when it comes to black women and their moral character—namely that black women are sexually promiscuous "hos" with no rights that a white supremacist criminal justice system is bound to respect. Actress Daniele Watts discovered this last week when she was pulled over, interrogated and handcuffed by LAPD officers after kissing her white partner while they were parked in the lot of a CBS station in Studio City, California. Watts had the temerity to display affection in an affluent area where a black woman with a white man could never be anything other than a prostitute.

The murder of Michael Brown and uprisings in Ferguson refocused national attention on institutionalized police violence in African American communities. Yet police violence and terrorism against women of color are rarely on the agendas of mainstream white feminist organizations. Because white women of all classes enjoy the privilege of protection from criminalization and systemic brutality by law enforcement, state-sanctioned violence doesn’t register as a “feminist” priority. Living in neighborhoods that are on average more wealthy than communities of color, white women can rely on the police as a thin blue line insulating them from the visceral threat of the dark other.
Historically, the police have been critical to preserving the purity of white womanhood by not only promoting the image of the insatiable black rapist but that of the out of control black bitch. The pervasiveness of sexual assault, often by law enforcement, was a major catalyst for black women’s civil rights activism. In 1955, teenage civil rights activist Claudette Colvin was sexually harassed by white police officers in jail after she was arrested for refusing to give her seat to a white person on a Jim Crow bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Black women of all ages, classes and sexual orientations routinely endured beatings, sexual harassment, sexual assault, intimidation, verbal abuse, stalking and other forms of terrorism by law enforcement. Police violence against black women was merely an extension of the brutal policing of black women’s bodies under slavery. Like the “disreputable” primarily working class black women Holtzclaw is accused of stalking and sexually assaulting, Colvin was not deemed to be suitably respectable by whites or even some in the black civil rights establishment. As a dark-skinned, pregnant teen from a poor family, her lower caste status made her a less desirable candidate to launch a citywide bus boycott around than well-respected longtime NAACP activist Rosa Parks. This was a bitter irony and disappointment for Colvin, who felt marginalized by the very movement she helped advance. The politics of class, respectability and colorism were also an affront to Parks’ early activism. In 1944, Parks spearheaded the investigation into the gang rape of Recy Taylor, a young African American woman whose white assailants were never convicted.

Sexual violence by law enforcement doesn’t compel mainstream women’s groups precisely because of law enforcement’s role in safeguarding white families and white communities. After raping one of his victims Holtzclaw allegedly said that it (the rape) was “better than the county”; sadistically implying that it was better for her to be raped than to go to jail. According to Jessica Testa of BuzzFeed, Holtzclaw’s victims were initially afraid to report their assaults to the police because they feared no one would believe a black woman. Some were fearful because they had criminal records for drug possession or prostitution. Criminal record or no, all black women are criminal in a society that sets up racial hierarchies of femininity. Given the history of racist sexual violence against black women they are never viewed as proper victims.

After the Holtzclaw assaults were disclosed NAACP head Anthony Douglas rightly wondered, “Where’s my media and where’s my women’s groups?” Yet Douglas also made the problematic statement that he didn’t “look at this gentleman as a sex offender or a rapist” but as a “racist, because he racially profiled and targeted African American women.” To be crystal clear, Holtzclaw—as beneficiary of a criminal justice system that sanctions police violence against black women—is both. The historic failure of both the civil rights movement and women’s movement to grasp these intersections keeps black women criminalized.

Holtzclaw goes back to court on September 18th. Help ensure that he is given the maximum sentence and terminated from the Oklahoma City PD.

Oklahoma Governor: Mary Fallin, (405) 521-2342
Oklahoma City D.A.: David Prater (405) 713-1600

Sunday, August 24, 2014

Burying Our Babies: Letter from L.A. to Ferguson


By Sikivu Hutchinson

In South Los Angeles’ Crenshaw District, there are three funeral homes within a one mile radius of each other. On bright sunny days young people pour out from their doors after viewing hours, lingering on the steps reminiscing, sporting t-shirts with pictures and art work commemorating the dead. In a thoroughfare that epitomizes L.A.’s deification of the car, cars are often rolling R.I.P. memorials of the dearly departed, the tragedy of stolen youth ornately inscribed on rear windows for the world to see.

Death is intimately woven into the experience of being a black child in America. The regime of “Black death”, as rapper Chuck D once described it, has its roots in slavery and the violent occupation of black bodies for profit and control. On Monday when Michael Brown’s family buries their precious baby it will be yet another reminder that the sacrosanct space of childhood is a white supremacist fantasy. As part of the legacy of the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, the Ferguson, Missouri uprising has seared this into black peoples’ consciousness anew.

Teaching in South L.A., the trauma of constant death, loss and mourning shapes all of my students’ lives. Their oral and written stories are replete with it. When they speak of terrorism, using other language, it has an American face. Last year, when my Black Skeptics Los Angeles organization awarded five South L.A. youth of color First in the Family scholarships the world was awaiting the verdict in the Trayvon Martin murder trial. Saluting our new scholars this year we mourned the executions of Brown, Ezell Ford and Renisha McBride, young people who will never have the opportunity to go to college, have a career or pursue their life’s dreams. At the end of the semester at one school I work at I was shown a list of college-bound students that had no black male names on it. It was a short list to begin with, a mere forty students out of three hundred, the majority first generation Latino graduates. That same day yet another black boy is led off campus in handcuffs by the school police. A few minutes later I meet with the Young Male Scholars group, brilliant ninth and tenth grade black boys who are becoming politicized about the fact that the curriculum does not represent them. The absent spaces on the college admissions list are a reflection and an indictment of their criminalization. Reading the dominant culture black children learn that their communities are deficit laden, that the threat of white supremacist violence disguised as law and order is normal, and that childhood may be fleeting. More powerful than any textbook, these “lessons” cause them to misrecognize themselves as the violent “nigga” predators white America loves to hate.

As a first grader I remember coming home from school in Inglewood and being excited that a police officer had come to visit our class. In that turbulent world of 1970s busing there were still a fair number of white kids in the class. Our teacher was a kind but rigorous elderly white woman who lived in the neighborhood; a remnant of the city’s bygone demographics. The ramrod straight white officer who spoke to the class said that if we were ever in trouble we could go right up to any policeman and address him as “Officer Bill”. Bill handed out kid friendly safety flyers with a twinkle in his eye, whisking off to adventures in high crime. I couldn’t wait to tell my parents about kind, benevolent Officer Bill, guardian of imperiled children. When I got home my father, an activist, bitterly dispensed with this fairy tale. The police couldn’t be trusted. They were an occupying army. Some preyed on the community. Some were cold-blooded above the law killers. Growing up in the era of LAPD Chief Daryl Gates, one of the first to institute SWAT teams, naked anti-blackness was a reality camouflaged by a middle class childhood.

Year after year the litany of the dead, black folk criminally robbed of victimhood, shattered any pretense of innocence, protection or security in “tidy” neighborhoods like ours, neighborhoods bright-eyed bushy tailed white reporters doing ghetto fieldwork were always surprised to know existed. In 1979, when an African American woman named Eulia Love was murdered at her house in South L.A. by two white police officers, it reaffirmed that black women’s bodies did not qualify as female, as fragile, as worthy of protection from state terror. My father took me to my first political rally in protest of her murder. For black women, home was no “safe” domestic space or private sanctuary as it implicitly was for white women. In the Ozzie and Harriet imagination of suburbanized L.A. black homes could never be more than a deviant subset of white Americana. Love’s murder further galvanized the community against LAPD police state suppression and occupation. It was a postscript to the 1965 Watts Rebellion and prelude to massive community resistance to Gates’ institutionalization of the chokehold (which Gates claimed blacks succumbed to more easily than “normal people”).

For African Americans migrating to California from places like Mississippi, Texas, Louisiana and Alabama during the Great Migration era, L.A. was full of redemptive promise. It was supposed to provide a context that was radically different from the grinding everyday indignities and outright terrorism of the Jim Crow South. Yet, as Isabel Wilkerson and other black historians of the Great Migration have noted, Northern segregation was no less insidious. Blacks who attempted to buy homes in white neighborhoods were shut-out by restrictive covenants rigidly enforced by realtors and development companies. They were firebombed by white homeowners associations and villified by angry white housewives. Black workers were discriminated against by trade unions and largely shut-out of all but the most menial jobs. While white immigrant populations advanced up the economic ladder via the GI Bill, FHA loans, VA loans, redlining, the development of new highway systems and countless other “whitening” aids, blacks bore the brunt of systematic ghettoization.

The post Great Migration generation came of age as the paramilitarization of LAPD’s police force deepened. One of Gates’ signal contributions to the War on Drugs was the battering ram, a tank ostensibly used to penetrate so-called “crack houses” which destroyed innocent citizens’ homes and inspired its own rap song.

Coming home one night in the eighties from the UCLA area my friends and I were stopped by several Inglewood PD squad cars. Without bothering to do a license and registration check the officers jumped out wielding rifles, pointing the weapons squarely at us as they ordered us out of the car. Later, after my friend’s brother was subjected to the humiliation of having to lie face down on the ground before ten cops brandishing weapons, we were told that they’d mistaken a car backfire for gunshots. Nobody would’ve given a shit if we’d been smoked. It was dark and we were black teenagers in “Ingle-Watts”.

Like Michael Brown we were college-bound, guilty until proven innocent, living in the shadow of death and the violent territorialization of the black body. Unlike him we were spared the brunt of black America’s nightmare. In the weeks since his murder there has been national movement connecting police terrorism with the general climate of criminalization that exists in American schools. Expressing solidarity with the uprising in Ferguson, the Dignity in Schools Campaign (DSC) recently highlighted the relationship between the pushout regime in schools and the onerous police presence in urban communities. If the uprising against the spate of police murders and beatings is to coalesce into a youth movement it must also expose the apartheid policies and mentalities that plague American schools. As DSC St Louis member Niaa Monee of the Missouri GSA Network commented, “I feel that we as young people really don’t have a say so in the world. It’s all about how the adults feel. Why can’t young people speak? Mike Brown didn’t deserve what happened to him, as well as all the other young people who this has happened to. Young people need to be heard, not shot. We are being criminalized and pushed out for being who we are.”

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

Saturday, August 9, 2014

White Nights, Black Paradise: A Novel on Peoples Temple & the Jonestown Massacre


By Sikivu Hutchinson

“Ain’t no white sky daddy gonna save you. Are we Black, proud and socialist? What are we?”

Why did a powerful white man utter these words and why did hundreds of black people, the majority of them black women, follow him to their deaths?

In 1978, People’s Temple, a multiracial church once at the forefront of progressive San Francisco politics, self-destructed in a Guyana jungle settlement named after its leader, the Reverend Jim Jones.

Fatally bonded by fear of racist annihilation, the community’s greatest symbol of crisis was the “White Night”; a rehearsal of revolutionary mass suicide that eventually led to the deaths of over 900 church members of all ages, genders and sexual orientations.

75% of those who died in Jonestown, and the majority of those in the Peoples Temple movement, were African American. But most of the literary portrayals of Jonestown have been by white people



Due in the summer of 2015, White Nights, Black Paradise focuses on three fictional black women characters who were part of the Peoples Temple movement but took radically different paths: Hy, a drifter and a spiritual seeker, her sister Taryn, an atheist with an inside line on the church’s money trail and Ida Lassiter, an activist whose watchdog journalism exposes the rot of corruption, sexual abuse, racism and violence in the church, fueling its exodus to Guyana.

White Nights, Black Paradise is a riveting story of complicity and resistance; loyalty and betrayal; black struggle and black sacrifice. It locates Peoples Temple and Jonestown in the shadow of the civil rights movement, Black Power, Second Wave feminism and the Great Migration. Recapturing black women’s voices, White Nights, Black Paradise explores their elusive quest for social justice, home and utopia. In so doing, the novel provides a complex window onto the epic flameout of a social movement that was not only an indictment of religious faith but of American democracy.

Monday, August 4, 2014

Getting on Up: Cult of the Charismatic Black Man


By Sikivu Hutchinson

Charismatic black men slapping black women around are funny. This was the takeaway conveyed by some audience members at a screening I attended of the new James Brown biopic Get On Up at a predominantly black theater in Los Angeles. Largely sidestepping the chronic abuse Brown inflicted on multiple spouses (Brown served jail time for domestic violence), the film all but deifies him as an uncompromising god-fearing, rugged individualist and red-blooded race man who inspired all black people to “get on up”. Yet during the film a group of male viewers howled to the rafters at a gut-wrenching scene in which actor Chadwick Boseman’s Brown sends wife Deirdre Jenkins—played by the luminous Jill Scott—crashing into a table. Later in the film we see Jenkins cowering after being verbally abused by Brown in an exchange which disturbingly segues into her initiating sexual foreplay.

The film’s uncritical juxtaposition of black male hero worship with intimate partner violence brought to mind the recent gyrations of ESPN commentator Stephen A. Smith and other prominent black male media figures who've mouthed off about black women’s alleged complicity in their own abuse. Last week, Smith elicited controversy when he criticized NFL player Ray Rice’s abuse of his spouse then proceeded to admonish women about “provoking” abuse. Smith received a one-week suspension for his comments but the message was unequivocal—women need to self-police to make sure they’re not inciting violence with their out of control mouths and “bitchy” emasculating attitudes.

Bashing black women for being complicit in their own abuse has always been an insidiously popular past-time but in the age of 24/7 media it’s high sport. Recently Grio writer Boyce Watkins and comedian DL Hughley were called out by black women activists after they made similar comments as Smith’s. Both half-stepped on their stated abhorrence of violence against women by trotting out racist, sexist, hetero-normative stereotypes about gold-digging hypersexual black women’s penchant for “provoking” or tempting brothers into committing rape and intimate partner violence. Hughley, like Smith, issued a now pro forma apology after writer Kirsten West Savali initiated a widely circulated petition condemning his remarks.

But a deeper and less explored question is how this plays out for black boys in an era in which they're regularly bombarded with violent demeaning images of black women and girls in social media, video games, film and TV. How do feminist/womanist educators, activists and organizers work with boys of color around anti-violence, gender roles and sexuality? One of the first steps is highlighting how violence against women of color pervades every social institution. In our work with high school students of all genders in the Women's Leadership Project, we talk about structural oppression in organized religion, specifically how the Bible establishes misogynist double standards for women. Living in highly religious communities, what do youth of color see in their everyday experience that tells them it’s ok to denigrate cis and trans women? Talking candidly about the way religion socializes, we unpack how the elevation of charismatic heterosexual men in traditional Black Church leadership prescribes and limits women’s roles. Bad fallen women are hypersexual, loud and indiscreet; mainstream America’s template for black femininity. Good straight Christian women submit to their men, mind their families and pledge undying, obsessive love for Jesus. Because both secular and religious culture deems female sexuality impure and in need of containment men always have a proprietary right to women’s bodies. As a result, black boys are socialized to believe that “checking” an “out of control” black woman or girl is practically their birthright. I was reminded of this yet again when I passed by a young black boy with the words “Bitch Please” emblazoned in bold letters on his shirt on my way to school. Laying down the silencing epithet “Bitch please” becomes part of their easy “canon” of male performance and male privilege in classrooms, streets and on social media.

Anti-sexist work with black boys in K-12 classrooms must begin with these kinds of conversations. It is telling that the Obama administration’s My Brother’s Keeper initiative does not emphasize the need for anti-sexist and anti-heterosexist best practices in K-12 education. Over the past several months, Kimberle Crenshaw’s African American Policy Institute and community activists across the nation have pushed back against this omission. Far too often, “rites of passage” violence prevention programs and initiatives for boys omit engagement with the role institutionalized sexism, misogyny, heterosexism, homophobia and transphobia play in the lives and attitudes of boys of color. Far too often they bury the code of silence and complicity that exists among men about violence against women in a barrage of platitudes about “respecting” women and treating them like “queens”. Fortunately, there are rising black male feminist and womanist voices in journalism, education, community organizing and social media who challenge these regimes of violence and invisibility in their work(Mark Anthony Neal, Kevin Powell, Darnell Moore and Byron Hurt come to mind).

As I wrote in this spring’s statement “Black Men Listening to Our Sisters”, through the holocaust of slavery and racial apartheid, black men have never been told by black women that their dehumanization was normal, natural and “just the way shit is”. Yet, even when it was at their expense, black women have always been expected to uncritically support black men’s self-determination. This double standard endangers black lives.