Spring Book Tour and Appearances

March 16, Freedom From Religion radio interview, ffrf.org, 12:00 p.m. EST

March 20th, Center for Inquiry, Costa Mesa, CA, 4:30 p.m. (Hollywood appearance rescheduled to June 5)

March 23, USC Center for Occupation and Lifestyle Redesign, 3:00 p.m. (Imagining Transit)

March 29, Interfaith Voices, interfaith.org, EST tbd

April 1, Michael Slate Show, KPFK 90.7FM, 10:00 a.m.

April 3, Revolution Books, Los Angeles, CA, 2:00 p.m.

April 16th, Institute for Humanist Studies Conference, NYC

April 17th, Brooklyn Ethical Society, NY, 11:00 a.m.

April 20th, Zion Hill Baptist Church, Black Skeptics & Faith Community Roundtable, L.A., 6:30 p.m.

April 28th, University of South Alabama, Mobile, AL

April 30th, L.A. Times Festival of Books, Atheists United table, 12-2 p.m.; Revolution Books, 2:20-3:30pm

May 13, Eso Won Books, Los Angeles, CA, 7:00 p.m.

May 15, San Diego Humanist Society, 6:00 p.m.

May 27, Revolution Books, Berkeley, CA 7:00 p.m.

May 28, San Francisco Atheists, 5:00 p.m.

June 5, Center for Inquiry, Los Angeles, 11:00 a.m.

On the Writing Life: Questions for Author Niama Williams

Dr. Niama L. Williams is an author, speaker, intuitive counselor and homeless advocate who has written 11 books and will be launching a poetry series to honor the homeless in Philadelphia during the summer of 2011.

When did you begin writing and what was your first motivation?
Well, there was the 5th grade poem about loneliness and death at the top of which my teacher at the time wrote “Good!” and then there were the multiple notebooks of poems my middle school English teacher suffered through with virtually no complaints. To this day I write grammatically correct sentences because of this patient, devoted woman (thank God for Ms. Brown!). I’d have to say though that my commitment to writing as a profession and vocation began in the late eighties when I worked as a library assistant at the University of California at Irvine. I knew then, as I militantly read Toni Morrison, Toni Cade Bambara, and Alice Walker at the Information Desk between helping patrons, that I wanted to create work my aunt the day worker could read and decipher and that would help her face the realities of her work and her life.

I believe in the commitment of the Black Arts Movement artists; that we as Black writers must create work that challenges our audience and equips them with the tools to face meeting Mr. Charlie, whatever color he may be, every day. Meet him and all that he represents yet survive, thrive, achieve and change our conditions—for the better.

You often blend deeply personal themes with sociological and political references. How do your lived experiences and world views influence your writing style?
I wish I had a cogent, logical and rational explanation for the style of writing that pours out of my pen. I thank God every day for Toni Cade Bambara’s THE SALT EATERS, which convinced me it was alright to be a writer between forms who did something a bit unusual. I think Nikki Giovanni’s essays had something to do with it too.

I can only tell you that the personal is extremely relevant in my writing because how we meet the world, how we process what happens to us and the events and circumstances we create through our thoughts, plans, and feelings; how we deal with all of that I only understand and process through my writing. I write memoir and personal essay not because I think my life is so important; I write memoir because I have been through several rungs of hell, and I want to save others who are survivors some of the angst, mistakes, and calamities that I have endured. I want to show others one method of surviving and thriving; I want them to know they are not crazy to react, think or feel about something the way that they do, that someone else feels exactly the same way and she is rational.

I interact intimately with the world, including the world of film and television; I think Eliot would be proud of the way I weave in cultural references with his reverence for the inclusion of history. I do that one because it is unconscious and two because I want readers to have fun devouring my books and poems; I want them to catch references and laugh out loud or go, hmmmmmm. I want certain things in my work to be familiar because I cover some scary territory and those bedrocks of comfort along the way are important.

What form of writing do you believe that your voice is most powerful in, poetry or fiction?
Arrrgggghhhh! I wish, wish I could claim being a writer of fiction! The best I can do is claim memoir, poetry, and personal essay. I love good fiction, but writing is not my forte. I call my longer prose works novels because they tell a story, but in a very unconventional manner. You will pick up one of my novels and you may find a short, essay, poem, film critique or discussion of a television show all within 100 pages. I’d love to be artsy and call it avant garde, but the reality is in the midst of all that stuff lurks the thread of a story and I am counting on you to find and follow it.

Samuel Delany thinks I don’t write worth a damn, but I think there is a hint of laziness as well as a desire for my readers, like Eliot wanted of his readers, to dig a bit for the relevance and common thread. He wanted his readers to work a bit because he cared so much about history and culture; he was terrified of the old world dying through lack of knowledge. He also loved to pack his work with the occasional inside joke for his friends.

I want my readers to do a bit of work, but I also want them to have fun. To have their chests puff out when I make mention of the tv series Brimstone and they know what I’m talking about; to nod wisely when I refer to the conspiracy theorist cop on SVU who reminisces about the young girl in jeopardy on his block growing up whose dire situation led him to serve where and how he does.

Who are some of your major literary influences? Which writers challenge and confound you the most?
I love me some T. S. Eliot. When I discovered him, I read “Prufrock” and “The Waste Land” and all of the references and notes Southam provides in that wonderful book of his. I then read every biographical essay I could about him because there is that part of me that wishes to be “across the pond” and never return to American shores. I loved that he became the quintessential Englishman though his birth and upbringing made him as American as they come. I also love the deep, makes you struggle to understand it erudition of his work and the desire beneath it that culture and cultural references not die. I think that love for tradition and the preservation of tradition comes from the love I felt and experienced from my grandparents and my mother. You loved old people and you respected them because they knew more than you did and if you were lucky, they might tell you something that could save your ass one day.

To say I like the idea of blending the old and antiquated into the new as Eliot so brilliantly does, with a level of artistry and craft (his similies, metaphors, symbolism, etc.) beyond compare, well, I give myself away and indulge in understatement.

I simply adore with a healthy dose of “loving fan” because there is consistent artistry and craft in their work as well Toni Morrison (THE BLUEST EYE, the best novel ever written), Alice Walker, no equal to THE SALT EATERS anywhere, no equal in hilarity to the “Sort of Preface” to GORILLA MY LOVE (Toni Cade Bambara); when is John Edgar Wideman going to win the Nobel ….

As a professor of English, what are three of your desert island books? Which titles would you recommend for young aspiring writers of color?See, this is why interviewers always want to kick me in the head; I anticipate the next question. On a desert island I would need The Bible, THE SALT EATERS, GORILLA MY LOVE, THE COLOR PURPLE, THE BLUEST EYE, THE TEMPLE OF MY FAMILIAR, DAMBALLAH and every one of the original Sherlock Holmes stories written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. If I were comprising a list for young writers of color, I would add a couple by Sherman Alexie (THE LONE RANGER AND TONTO FISTFIGHT IN HEAVEN or the one about the serial killer) and THE HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG by Andre Dubus, III. A dash of Robert Hayden too, so we don’t forget our elders, and James Baldwin’s THE FIRE NEXT TIME so we see how a Black man can write like the most brilliant scholar breathing and still not get his props. Who studies Baldwin? No one. No book-length serious scholarship according to one of my sources. Shameful.

For more information on Niama Williams, keep an eye on her blogs and Facebook pages:
http://hubpages.com/hub/SURVIVING-SHEILA-DENNIS
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/drni
http://drnisnotesandnibbles.blogspot.com/2011/01/special-forces.html
http://www.squidoo.com/kickingbuttasadults

Echoes of Commonsense Interview with Sikivu Hutchinson

From EchoesofCommonsense.blog

"With the fresh release of her thought-inspiring title, erudite author of Moral Combat: Black Atheist, Gender Politics and the Value Wars, Dr Sikivu Hutchinson, among other things, discusses her inspirations for writing this relevant title, and how topical issues in the book can help our modern society. Sit back and enjoy the hot dialogue conducted by Echoes of Commonsense editor Nathalie Woods."

Q: What is the relevance of your book to the advancement of morality in the world, and where can readers find it?

A: The book assesses the social construction of public morality in America vis-à-vis race, gender, sexual orientation and class. For the past several decades, much of mainstream public morality has been framed by the Religious Right’s millennialist values wars against social justice and human rights. In this universe, being moral is all about taking rights away from others in service to a narrow nationalist racist sexist notion of what it means to be authentically American. Chris Hedges and others have identified this upheaval as Christian fascism...

http://echoesofcommonsense.wordpress.com/2011/03/06/moral-combat-interview-with-dr-sikivu-hutchinson/

Planned Parenthood and the Rape of American Women

By Sikivu Hutchinson

Lately, the sound of galloping hooves and rustling white sheets has risen in a deafening squall from the Capitol. Like their Klan ancestors, elite white males in Congress’ political lynch mob are once again savaging communities of color. The House’s vote to gut Planned Parenthood is a criminal act against poor and working class women and their families. In many rural and urban neighborhoods there are few affordable alternatives to the health care provided by Planned Parenthood and other reproductive rights service providers. These clinics are the frontline of preventive care in poor working class white communities and communities of color, providing pregnancy and STD testing, contraception, pap smears, abortions, and counseling for families with little to no health coverage.

Ever since its midterm elections’ sweep, the far right has ramped up its unrelenting drive to theocracy, using reproductive rights as its battleground. Drawing on the sabotage of ACORN, Speaker John Boehner and a host of other GOP and so-called Blue Dog Democrat fascists are bound and determined to take down Planned Parenthood. Extending Hyde Amendment restrictions on federal funding for abortions to private providers is central to their agenda. Too spineless to criminalize women who seek abortions outright, Religious Right politicians instead choose to pillage health care provisions that keep women from falling deeper into poverty, illness, and economic dependence. Hiding behind Orwellian claims of being pro-life, far right politicians exercise draconian control over the bodies of poor women and their families in the name of God, guns, and bloody fetuses. Why not just jail ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out?

It should be no revelation that when poor women are denied access to decent affordable reproductive care—including access to safe abortions—families and communities suffer. While federal and state governments dismantle education and health care funding, the American military regime goes untouched. Because black and Latino communities are on the frontlines of imperialist military recruitment and educational inequity, few people of color would argue that government handouts to the military industrial complex should trump education funding. However, reproductive justice just doesn’t have the same political cache or urgency amongst progressives of color. Consequently, conservative reactionary forces within the African American community have successfully allied with the Religious Right in a revived anti-abortion billboard campaign targeting black women. This propaganda has cropped up recently in black and Latino Southern California neighborhoods. By implying that aborting black babies makes them an “endangered species,” these billboards evoke plantation era regimes of social control.

In essence, bad “genocidal” black women don’t know their place, don’t know that they were put here to be God’s sacrificial vessels and don’t seem to grasp that only evil promiscuous misguided Jezebels get knocked up. They also haven’t gotten Sarah Palin’s “telegram” that women who are forced to have unwanted children will earn more, achieve higher education levels, and have a markedly better quality of life than women who aren’t. These ignorant bad black women destroy black communities with their arrogant self-absorption and unchecked sexual license. After all, black women who exercise control over their own bodies and destinies commit race betrayal and gender sacrilege.

How do we know these gospel truths? Powerful white male legislators, black preachers, and Christian soldiers like MLK’s anti-abortion activist niece Alveda King tell us so. They tell us that abortion is the greatest civil rights threat of our era. Like their Islamic fundamentalist comrades in the Middle East, these pro-death marauders know all too well that female sexuality is a dangerous commodity which only the jackboot of big government can control. Complicit with black hyper-religiosity and black nationalist delusions, silent progressives of color give them this license.

Sikivu Hutchinson is the author of Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars (Infidel Books).

Faith Predators: Looting the American Dream

By Sikivu Hutchinson

Excerpted From Free Inquiry Magazine, February 2011

The con man claimed to be a devout man of God: the title “visionary” figured prominently on his business card. Going door-to-door with promises of easy mortgage-refinancing deals and claiming to have a direct line to the Lord, Timothy Barnett wheedled his way into the houses of elderly homeowners in South Los Angeles. Scared, vulnerable, and without a safety net, his victims lapped up his God-schlock like mother's milk. Isolated in modest homes they'd owned for decades, they welcomed his call to prayer. Like a nattily dressed inner-city Elmer Gantry, Barnett's hook was pitch-perfect: “Our Christian beliefs unite us in a common value system based on ethics and integrity. The nonbelief of non-Christians consigns them to immorality, making them more prone to duplicitous behavior and less worthy of your trust than I.” Kneeling in humble service to God and claiming the status of copilot, he stole the titles to five of his elderly victim's homes-and their “stake” in the American dream.

The Los Angeles Times reported that Barnett, a repeat felon subject to California's three strikes law, could be the first person in California sentenced to life in prison for a white-collar crime. MORE @FREE INQUIRY

Throwaway Children

By Sikivu Hutchinson

An hour before last Tuesday’s accidental shooting at Gardena High School the campus radiated calm and placidity. I had just finished doing a workshop on homophobia and gender stereotypes with a peer health class headed by the fabulous teacher Debbie Wallace. The campus is a big geographic hybrid. It abuts a train corridor to the west and a phalanx of freeways to the east. The grounds are labyrinthine and rose bushes bloom fiercely in the courtyard. Four parking lots bookend each of the school’s exits. Low slung buildings and a network of open hallways wrap around the grounds, quietly testifying to its all-American journey from plum white campus to “ghetto” school in decline.

Media stereotypes about lawless, criminal urban schools are now a stock part of the American narrative. They add color, spice, and grit to a special genre of American meritocracy; the kind eternally populated by gleaming toothed Great White Hope teachers laboring against the corrupt system to bring Shakespeare, Langston Hughes and Enlightenment to culturally deprived ghetto children. It is axiomatic that these transformational teachers can never be black or Latino and from the ‘hood. It is a certainty that these sages on the stage will turn around the most hardened heretofore unreachable gang-affiliated youth with a steady diet of literary pixie dust and tough love.

After the Gardena shooting local and national news expertly trotted out these themes, minus the missionary teacher. My students complained about sensationalist portrayals. Some were outraged by a local TV news station’s dismissal of the gains the school had made in reducing suspensions. Others noticed the unfavorable comparison between Gardena and the more affluent El Camino Real High School in Woodland Hills, where a school police officer had been shot near the campus the day after the Gardena incident. El Camino Real is an academic decathlon winner located in a suburban area with "winding residential streets." So quite naturally one would never expect such a heinous act to occur there.

And yet, it did. In its rush to milk the narrative of urban youth criminality, the media conveniently omitted that the most heinous and prolific acts of violence resulting in mass student casualties have been in suburban white America. The shooters in the infamous school massacres at Littleton Colorado (Columbine High), Jonesboro, Arkansas and Santee, California were young disaffected white males with similar backgrounds to Tucson shooter Jared Loughner. Like the young man at Gardena, they were steeped in a gun culture that valorized violent masculinity. However, the Columbine, Jonesboro and Santee students were instantly transformed into symbols of troubled youth. These tragic figures were our boys; our problem, our wasted youth. As media critics Sut Jhally and Jackson Katz wrote in response to Columbine, “when the perpetrators are boys, we talk in a gender-neutral way about kids or children, and few (with the exception of some feminist scholars) delve into the forces - be they cultural, historical, or institutional - that produce hundreds of thousands of physically abusive and violent boys every year. Instead, we call upon the same tired specialists who harp about the easy accessibility of guns, etc. All of these factors are of course relevant, but if they were the primary answers, then why are girls, who live in the same environment, not responding in the same way.” With Columbine there was tacit mainstream understanding that these boys’ acts were symptomatic of an imperiled national heritage. Conversely, any time violence erupts in a black or Latino context it’s a racial indictment, an indictment of a community, not a nation. Thus, on the other side of the spectrum, the Gardena student was uniformly dismissed as a juvenile delinquent.

Suffice it to say, there will be no strenuous editorializing or earnest psychoanalysis of his motives for bringing the gun in mainstream media. He, after all, is a central casting black boy criminal from a “bad” school. Similarly, there will be no assessment of urgently needed mental health resources for young people of color who have lost friends and relatives to gun violence. By contrast, media coverage of Jared Loughner’s psychological profile has re-opened debate on the sorry state of American mental health care. After the Columbine shootings similar appeals for gun control, improved mental health services, and proactive parenting were made. Suspects from the “ghetto” only inspire a sense of deterministic inevitability.

On a KCRW Which Way L.A.? segment about the Gardena shooting, a 1991 alum of the school boldly proclaimed that “the smart kids don’t go to Gardena.” This belief drove the bootstraps mythology of generations of white flight South L.A. alums. And it has been inherited by the black and Latino middle class. Only expendable lives are wasted at public schools “ravaged” by white flight and urban “brain drain.” My talented, ferociously analytical students could break down the racist assumptions of meritocracy. But this smear resounds in a national climate dominated by the charter school tsunami and the demonization of so-called inner city schools. Here, it is tacit that time and progress left these schools behind. Brilliant youth of color are automatically condemned to second class citizenship and social pathology. The real epidemic of violence lies in this false indictment.

Sikivu Hutchinson is the author of Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars (Infidel Books, February 2011).

Straight to Hell

By Sikivu Hutchinson

What is it about “death with dignity” that Christian fascists don’t understand? Recently the ultra right wing crackpot at the blog American Power came out swinging against dearly departed Satanist Elizabeth Edwards. Apparently the ailing Edwards wasn’t clear about her submission to God in her deathbed message to family and friends. In a final Facebook posting before her death on December 7th Edwards said that she was sustained in life by “three saving graces—my family, my friends, and a faith in the power of resilience and hope." Blasting her “nihilism” Power wrote that “Edward’s non-theological theology gets props from the neo-communists.” Of course, “neo-communists” are the ones that molest children and cover it up, bash gays, commit acts of domestic terrorism, and loot millions from poor people on Sundays in the name of…atheism. Not content with the patriotic tradition of burning blasphemers at the stake, now Christian fascism demands that an individual’s own reckoning with death be policed in the cutthroat blogosphere. But the bashing of Edwards is just a footnote to the larger trend of right wing demonization of secular and left forces reignited by the Tea Party. This trend builds on Cold War “better-dead-than-Red” hysteria equating patriotism and “authentic” American citizenship with being god-fearing. In this universe, communism, totalitarianism, and atheism are the same anti-American McCarthyist mish mash all over again.

Good patriots can never be atheists. Not even football playing alpha males like Pat Tillman, the soldier and atheist whose “friendly fire” death was infamously covered up by the U.S. Army. Tillman made the grievous error of being a dirty infidel and a critic of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East. During a September interview on the Bill Maher show, Tillman’s brother Richard blasted folk who’d given his family religious blessings and bromides about Pat going to heaven.

Non-believers, skeptics, and humanists have always been conflicted about declarations of how the (“virtuous”) dead will be speedily dispatched to heaven. Ultimately, the so-and-so is going to heaven or being called “home” claptrap is a lazy way of legitimizing the brutality and finality of death. It is a craven deferral of the hard questions about how chance, circumstance, and randomness inform living in the rude, crude, unjust, savagely precarious wilderness of planet Earth.

Wandering through the savage god-fearing wilds of evangelical America in his book Republican Gomorrah, journalist Max Blumenthal recounts how James Dobson, psychiatrist and oracle of the Religious Right, courted serial rapist and killer Ted Bundy for a Death Row conversion. According to Blumenthal, Bundy’s leap onto the Jesus train was a crowning achievement for Dobson — a man whose greatest Christian therapy was beating the crap out of misbehaving children. Dobson’s obsession with corporal punishment and zero tolerance child-rearing methods is part of a continuum in the near epidemic of pedophilia, sexual abuse, marital infidelity, and domestic violence that “upstanding” male Christian and Catholic leaders have been embroiled in. While all of these behaviors are about violence, power, and heterosexist social control, if you have the power to define, police, and control the boundaries between self and other then your crimes aren’t really transgressions but distorted entitlements. The transgressions of male offenders can be magically purged by repentance to a forgiving Jesus. Jesus after all, is one of them; tough, hard, manly or, as Blumenthal notes, “a stern, overtly masculine patriarch charging into the fray with his sword raised against secular foes.” As long as the high profile male offender is literally and figuratively on top, and goes through the proper channels to repent, moral order is restored.

While heaven is overpopulated and over-mortgaged, hell’s cultural capital has declined somewhat. Public or graveside damnations of evildoers to a robust churning hell are less profitable these days. In an era of pseudo-scientific religious cosmology evocations of hell seem to have lost their purchase with all but the most florid fundamentalists. In an open homage to hell, Jerry Falwell famously declared the 9/11 terrorist attacks God’s revenge on a spiritually corrupt U.S. overrun by moral degenerates like gays, lesbians, and feminists/abortionists. Now, a smugger Christian fascism, far more insidious than the televangelist performance art of Falwell and Pat Robertson has prevailed. The fall of the former Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War, and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism has bolstered a kind of Christian fascist triumphalism that is not just hell bent on imperial domination but on Orwellian thought policing. The mainstream view that the U.S. is a Christian nation founded on Christian principles reflects Middle American ethnocentrism about the synonymity of democracy and Christianity. And since nationhood and religious belief are still so closely intertwined in the fevered American psyche, even spiritual “equivocators” like Elizabeth Edwards are fair game. As for us unrepentant atheists, we can make room in hell.