 |
| From White Nights, Black Paradise, 2018 By Sikivu Hutchinson |
Originally published
in Humanism and the Challenge of
Difference, 2018
After
a barnstorming night of raunchy revelry the four black women protagonists in
the 2017 Hollywood comedy Girls Trip cap
off their adventures with a group shout out to Jesus in their hotel room. Kneeling down in prayer, they thank Jesus and
trot out their blessings. The scene is
presumably intended as an antidote and winking mea culpa for the scandalous no
holds barred behavior the women indulged in moments before. Girls
Trip raked in over 50 million at the box office and was hailed as the first
black women’s film to shatter the glass ceiling of white male dominance in
comedy. Yet, in a movie that aspires to
“bust stereotypes” and upend black respectability politics, the prayer scene is
a clunky reminder of how faith is used as shorthand for the black female
experience. While Girls Trip superficially challenges certain conventions of
heterosexual gender politics, its faith-based respectability politics are a not
so subtle caveat to black women that failing to give props to God is unacceptable
when it comes to expressions of black female identity.
Scholar
Elizabeth Higginbotham first coined the term “the politics of respectability”
in reference to confining social mores and cultural conventions that were
imposed on the black masses, often by middle class African Americans.[i] Higginbotham argued that the politics of
respectability “disavowed, in often repressive ways, much of the expressive
culture of the folk”. Here, “respectability”
domesticates or sanitizes black expressivity in service to bourgeois class
norms that would ostensibly make blacks more palatable to mainstream white
America.[ii] Over the past decade, respectability politics
have frequently been cited by writers, activists and artists as an insidious
influence on black folk vis-à-vis higher education, politics, state violence
and popular culture. Nonetheless, there
has been very little commentary on the role respectability plays when it comes
to the intersection of race, gender, sexuality, and secularism among African
American women. For example, despite the
much vaunted rise of so-called religiously unaffiliated “nones” in the U.S., pop
culture portrayals of non-theist or secular views in African American communities
are few and far between.[iii]
Pop
culture is a reliable guide to the ubiquity of religious dogma in the African
American community in general and among African American women in particular.
From the prevalence of black luminaries thanking Jesus at awards shows to
caricatures of Bible-thumping, scripture-spewing black women characters in
Tyler Perry films to the OWN network’s popular black church family drama Greenleaf, representations of faith are
a booming business in black America.
For
African Americans, faith is a deeply public cultural affair, borne of centuries
of struggle, segregation, and strife. Because of racial segregation and white
supremacy, black churches became an epicenter of African American solidarity,
civil rights organizing, and civic engagement.
They remain vital to many African American communities because of black
economic disenfranchisement and the intractability of institutional racism in
housing, employment, and education. Of
course, black women have always been essential to leadership in black churches
but continue to be eclipsed by a male dominated leadership steeped in
patriarchal Christian notions about controlling black women’s
self-determination, sexuality, and roles in the family. Historically, the
plight of black women pastors “was intensified
by the fact that the church has traditionally been the primary vehicle for
black men to exercise both religious and political power.”[iv]
According
to the Pew Religion Research Forum and the Kaiser Foundation, 87% of African
Americans are religious, making African Americans among the most religious
communities in the U.S.[v] As the Kaiser Foundation survey notes, “in
times of turmoil, about 87 percent of black women — much more than any
other group — say they turn to their faith to get through.”[vi] A majority of black women go to
church on a regular basis, read the bible on a regular basis and tithe a
significant portion of their incomes to churches and faith-based institutions.[vii]
According to
Kaiser, faith is of a higher priority to black women than having children or
getting married. It is the glue that
holds the lives of many black women together, often substituting for more traditional
therapeutic approaches practiced by the Western medical establishment. By contrast, a 2014 Pew survey indicated that
while 18% of African Americans were religiously unaffiliated (or “nones”) a
miniscule 2% identified as atheists or agnostics.[viii] A majority of African Americans nones (a
category that includes those who consider themselves to be “spiritual but not
religious”) believe in God (57%), heaven (67%) and hell (51%).[ix] Not surprisingly, more African American men
(56%) than women (44%) identified as religiously unaffiliated.
Thus,
in addition to longstanding cultural religious traditions in the African
American community which stretch back to slavery, black women’s economic status
is a primary factor in their high level of religious observance. Moreover, black women have the lowest proportion
of household wealth in the U.S., possessing only pennies to the dollar of white
families.
In a Forbes magazine article entitled
“Black, Female and Broke”, Maya Rockeymoore noted, “Single black women, for
example, own only $200 in median wealth compared to $15,640 for single white
women. Those with children have a median wealth of $0 compared to $14,600
for single white women.”[x]
Even more damningly, although black women have some of the highest workforce
participation and college-going rates among women in the U.S., these factors
have not contributed to commensurate increases in wealth. For example, according to a 2017 study by the
Samuel DuBois Cook Center, “Single white women without a degree have $3000 more in wealth than single black women
with a degree”.[xi]
Single white women with bachelor’s degrees
have seven times the wealth of single black women with bachelor’s degrees.[xii] Not surprisingly, these disparities increase
with marriage. Married black women with
bachelor’s degrees have five times less wealth than married white women with
bachelor’s degrees.[xiii]
Thus, on every demographic indicator, black women fare
significantly worse than white women in wealth accumulation. Age, educational level and marital status did
not equalize their access to wealth relative to white women. Wealth accumulation is strongly influenced by
residential and housing patterns.
Because black women of all classes live in disproportionately segregated
communities with high levels of poverty and transience they have less access to
the home equity that constitutes the primary source of American wealth. As a result, white women’s across the board
advantages vis-à-vis black women is rooted in the intersectional privilege of
race and class. White women have
historically had the advantage of “intergenerational transfers like financing
a college education, providing help with the down payment on a house and other
gifts to seed asset accumulation (that) are central sources of wealth
building.”[xiv]
Consequently,
gaping wealth and income disparities between African American women and white
women play a key role in shaping high levels of religious observance among
black women. Black women’s relatively
high levels of education also belie the reductive claim that their lack of
education is a primary factor in their devoutness.
Over
the past decade, more data has emerged about gender and sexual diversity in
African American communities. These
demographic shifts further challenge single variable and hetero-normative analyses
of black female religiosity.[xv] According to the Pew Research Forum, African
Americans and other people of color are more likely to identify as lesbian, gay
or bisexual than are whites.[xvi] A study by researchers associated with UCLA’s
Williams Institute concluded that black LGBTQ folk have higher levels of
religious observance than LGBTQ whites.[xvii] This seemingly counterintuitive pattern may
be due to the foundational support provided by non-traditional or non-denominational
churches to queer black folk (although the study also noted that a large number
of LGBTQ folk of color reported attending churches that weren’t supportive). In addition, African American LGBTQ families
are more likely to have children than their white counterparts, perhaps making access
to the resources and social services that faith-based institutions provide even
more critical. Black and Latino LGBTQ
folk are also more likely to live at or near the poverty line. And black trans women have some of the lowest
incomes and highest risk of being victimized by sexual and intimate partner
violence—factors which contribute to long term economic instability and poor
health outcomes.
Attention
to the material and socioeconomic conditions of straight, queer and trans black
women’s lives rarely inform mainstream considerations about their receptiveness,
or lack thereof, to non-theism, secularism and humanism. In a highly religious cultural and national
context, the barriers to embracing an explicitly non-religious and
non-spiritual ethos are especially challenging for black women. As the not-so irreverent Girls Trip protagonists attest, being perceived as a good soldier
for Jesus is practically a prerequisite for establishing authentic straight
black hetero-normative femininity.
Again,
the absence of portrayals of black women or women of color secularists in
mainstream media, art and politics contributes to this vacuum in real life
representation. Black female faith in god becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as
“art imitates life imitates art”.
Questions about gender, sexuality, family, heterosexual relationships,
motherhood, home, and work are invariably filtered through a faith-based, spiritual
or religious lens. Even portrayals that highlight
the pitfalls of organized religion still promote certitude about and belief in
god(s) as an essential, redeeming life force.[xviii] In these narratives, the flaws of organized
religion and the Black Church are implicitly contrasted with having unmediated
access to God’s benevolent and affirming influence (as signified by the
increasingly popular declaration that one is “spiritual” not religious).
While
spiritualism may be a refuge for black women recovering from organized
religion, religious melodramas remain hugely popular with black audiences. Inspired by Tyler Perry and T.D. Jakes’
successful line of faith-based morality tale films, a cottage industry of
independently produced, straight to DVD “urban” (generally a euphemism for
black) Christian films has sprung up over the past decade. Often featuring black women protagonists
grappling with a moral crisis which puts them on the inevitable road to
redemption through God, this popular sub-genre has heavy rotation on streaming
services like Netflix and Amazon. The
bustling market of urban Christian films (in a genre that has proven to be
globally profitable), underscores how problematic the climate is for black films
that have an explicitly secular message or theme.
Mindful
of this, I shot a film version of my 2015 novel White Nights, Black Paradise, which features perhaps the first narrative
film portrayal of a black atheist lesbian protagonist. The film focuses on the interlocking lives of
a multigenerational group of black women members of San Francisco’s Peoples
Temple church, which was founded by the Reverend Jim Jones in the 1950s. It chronicles the events leading up to the Temple’s
demise in the 1978 Jonestown, Guyana massacre.
Pushing back against respectability is a recurring theme in the
development of the identities, politics and relationships of the film’s
characters. Each woman rejects
orthodoxies of religion and culture in pursuit of a more radical vision of self
and community. The question of what
constitutes authentic black community, given decades of de facto segregation in
the so-called Promised Land of California/the North, informs the lead character
Taryn Strayer’s ambivalent attraction to the secularized, activist Temple. Insofar as the Temple questioned the white
supremacist foundations of Judeo Christian religion it was a radical
alternative to mainstream black churches and a diverse community for folks from
all walks of life. In the novel and
film, Jonestown (intended as an independent agricultural settlement) also
functions as a platform for allowing black women to fulfill the revolutionary
possibility of building a multiracial society outside of the capitalist U.S. Its promise sprang from the diasporic hopes
and dreams of African descent black folk whose desire for a homeland free from
white terrorism fueled by the Great Migration.
In the end, the failure of Jonestown was also a cautionary tale about
idolatry, as Jones, the self-proclaimed Marxist atheist, required his parishioners
to bow down to him instead of the Judeo Christian god.
Ultimately,
respectability politics, in service to white supremacy, was one of the factors
that prevented Peoples Temple from being a site of genuine revolutionary
struggle and change. The white leadership
largely excluded the black rank and file who sustained the Temple and
Jonestown. In this regard, Peoples
Temple was a microcosm of the fractious racial politics of the second wave
women’s movement, as well as a brand of secular feminism that quietly looked
askance at traditional religious institutions.
Yet, while white women had greater luxury to be openly scornful of
organized religion and false prophets, black women risked social ostracism and
policing about their morals.
[i]
Elizabeth Higginbotham, “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage
of Race,” Signs, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Winter, 1992), pp. 251-274.
[ii]
Ibid.
[iii]
According to the Pew Research Center, “Religious ‘nones’
– a shorthand we use to refer to people who self-identify as atheists or
agnostics, as well as those who say their religion is ‘nothing in particular’ –
now make up roughly 23% of the U.S. adult population…a stark increase from 2007.”
Michael Lipka, “A Closer Look at America’s Rapidly Growing Nones,” Pew Research
Center, May 13, 2015 (http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/05/13/a-closer-look-at-americas-rapidly-growing-religious-nones/.
[iv]Ari
Goldman, “Black Women’s Bumpy Path to Church Leadership,” The New York Times, 1990 (http://www.nytimes.com/1990/07/29/nyregion/black-women-s-bumpy-path-to-church-leadership.html?pagewanted=all&mcubz=1);
It’s estimated that black women comprise between one and four percent of black
clergy. See Sandra Barnes, “The Alpha and Omega of Our People: A Sociological
Examination of the Promise and Problems in the Black Church,” in Juan Battle, Free at Last, Black America in the Twenty
First Century (Routledge: New York, 2006), pp. 149-172.
[v]
Pew Religion Research Forum, “A Religious Portrait of African Americans,”
January 23, 2009 (http://www.pewforum.org/2009/01/30/a-religious-portrait-of-african-americans/).
[vi]
Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation Poll of Black Women in America (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/nation/black-women-in-america/)
[vii]
Ibid.
[viii]
Pew Research Forum, “Religious Composition of Blacks,” (http://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/racial-and-ethnic-composition/black/),
2014.
[ix]
Pew Research Forum, “Blacks Who Are Unaffiliated (Religious Nones),” (http://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/religious-tradition/unaffiliated-religious-nones/racial-and-ethnic-composition/black/)
2014.
[x]
Maya Rockeymoore, “Black Female and Broke,” Forbes
Magazine, 2017 (https://www.forbes.com/sites/janetnovack/2015/09/30/black-female-and-broke/).
[xi]Khan
Jaw, et al. “Women, Race and Wealth,” Volume 1, January 2017, Samuel DuBois
Cook Center on Equity and Insight Center for Community Economic Development, 1(
https://www.insightcced.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/January2017_ResearchBriefSeries_WomenRaceWealth-Volume1-Pages-1.pdf).
[xii]
Ibid.
[xiii]
Ibid.
[xiv]
Ibid., p. 3.
[xv]
The term “single variable” refers to traditional analytical approaches that do
not consider the multiple factors informing identify formation, social
development and subjectivity. Single-variable
is the opposite of intersectional approaches which frame identity formation, et
al. through a dynamic lens which is more inclusive of non-dominant communities.
[xvi]
Pew Research Center, “A Survey of LGBT Americans,” June 2013 (http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/06/13/a-survey-of-lgbt-americans/).
[xvii]David
M. Barnes and Ilan H. Meyer, “Religious Affiliation, Internalized Homophobia,
and Mental Health in Lesbians, Gay Men and Bisexuals,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, Volume
82, Issue 4, October 2012, 505–515.
[xviii]
Recent depictions that are critical of certain elements of the Black Church
(e.g., homophobia, sexual predation, prosperity gospel exploitation) such as
the 2016 TV series Greenleaf and the
2012 film The Undershepherd come to
mind.
ENDNOTES
[1]
Elizabeth Higginbotham, “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage
of Race,” Signs, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Winter, 1992), pp. 251-274.
[1]
Ibid.
[1]
According to the Pew Research Center, “Religious ‘nones’
– a shorthand we use to refer to people who self-identify as atheists or
agnostics, as well as those who say their religion is ‘nothing in particular’ –
now make up roughly 23% of the U.S. adult population…a stark increase from 2007.”
Michael Lipka, “A Closer Look at America’s Rapidly Growing Nones,” Pew Research
Center, May 13, 2015 (http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/05/13/a-closer-look-at-americas-rapidly-growing-religious-nones/.
[1]Ari
Goldman, “Black Women’s Bumpy Path to Church Leadership,” The New York Times, 1990 (http://www.nytimes.com/1990/07/29/nyregion/black-women-s-bumpy-path-to-church-leadership.html?pagewanted=all&mcubz=1);
It’s estimated that black women comprise between one and four percent of black
clergy. See Sandra Barnes, “The Alpha and Omega of Our People: A Sociological
Examination of the Promise and Problems in the Black Church,” in Juan Battle, Free at Last, Black America in the Twenty
First Century (Routledge: New York, 2006), pp. 149-172.
[1]
Pew Religion Research Forum, “A Religious Portrait of African Americans,”
January 23, 2009 (http://www.pewforum.org/2009/01/30/a-religious-portrait-of-african-americans/).
[1]
Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation Poll of Black Women in America (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/nation/black-women-in-america/)
[1]
Ibid.
[1]
Pew Research Forum, “Religious Composition of Blacks,” (http://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/racial-and-ethnic-composition/black/),
2014.
[1]
Pew Research Forum, “Blacks Who Are Unaffiliated (Religious Nones),” (http://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/religious-tradition/unaffiliated-religious-nones/racial-and-ethnic-composition/black/)
2014.
[1]
Maya Rockeymoore, “Black Female and Broke,” Forbes
Magazine, 2017 (https://www.forbes.com/sites/janetnovack/2015/09/30/black-female-and-broke/).
[1]Khan
Jaw, et al. “Women, Race and Wealth,” Volume 1, January 2017, Samuel DuBois
Cook Center on Equity and Insight Center for Community Economic Development, 1(
https://www.insightcced.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/January2017_ResearchBriefSeries_WomenRaceWealth-Volume1-Pages-1.pdf).
[1]
Ibid.
[1]
Ibid.
[1]
Ibid., p. 3.
[1]
The term “single variable” refers to traditional analytical approaches that do
not consider the multiple factors informing identify formation, social
development and subjectivity. Single-variable
is the opposite of intersectional approaches which frame identity formation, et
al. through a dynamic lens which is more inclusive of non-dominant communities.
[1]
Pew Research Center, “A Survey of LGBT Americans,” June 2013 (http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/06/13/a-survey-of-lgbt-americans/).
[1]David
M. Barnes and Ilan H. Meyer, “Religious Affiliation, Internalized Homophobia,
and Mental Health in Lesbians, Gay Men and Bisexuals,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, Volume
82, Issue 4, October 2012, 505–515.
[1]
Recent depictions that are critical of certain elements of the Black Church
(e.g., homophobia, sexual predation, prosperity gospel exploitation) such as
the 2016 TV series Greenleaf and the
2012 film The Undershepherd come to
mind.
