Black LGBTQI+ Youth and Mental Health Resilience in the Pandemic

 

By Sikivu Hutchinson

After the four-year barrage of homophobic and transphobic policy rollbacks by the Trump administration, the Biden-Harris administration’s pledge to push queer-affirming civil rights policies offers a ray of hope. Before the pandemic, queer BIPOC communities were already besieged by rampant unemployment, homelessness, and educational disparities. Since the pandemic was declared in March, 38% of LGBTQI+ workers have had their hours reduced (while 34% of the overall population have) and 22% have become unemployed. Biden has prioritized “corrective action” such as reversing Trump’s ban on transgender military personnel and aggressively advocating for the passage of the stalled Equality Act, which would amend the federal Civil Rights act to prohibit discrimination against LGBTQI+ individuals in employment, housing, public education, and public accommodations. Currently, 29 states do not have LGBTQI+ civil rights protections. Building on campaign promises to lift up transgender issues, the administration would also increase violence protection funding for the trans community and seek an end to the harmful practice of conversion therapy.

The pandemic has brutally exposed the nexus between health access and economic inequality for queer communities of color. LGBTQI+ youth of color have borne the brunt of this fallout. While health care access is abysmal for communities of color overall, LGBTQI+ communities of color are least likely to receive culturally competent, quality health care. Practitioner ignorance of and disrespect for transgender and nonbinary patients are contributing factors, as health care training and medical protocols are still designed to meet the needs of cis-straight patients. School closures and the downsizing of other support facilities have taken an especially large toll on Black and Latinx LGBTQI+ youth who are more likely to experience family rejection and separation. As one advocate noted, “Many LGBTQ students rely on student health insurance for mental health services and other healthcare needs, including hormone replacement therapy. All students are struggling with social connectedness and belonging, but isolation may be especially detrimental for LGBTQ students, particularly those who lack loving familial relationships.” This viewpoint is amplified by the pre-pandemic Gay Lesbian Student Education Network (GLSEN) and National Black Justice Institute (NBJI) report “Erasure and Resilience: Black LGBTQ Youth in Schools”. Published earlier this year, the report concluded that the intersectional trauma that Black LGBTQI+ students routinely experienced with racism, homophobia, and transphobia was amplified by disconnection from health and social safety net resources. While in school, Black queer and trans students disproportionately rely on supports provided by counselors, health practitioners, ally teachers, and queer-affirming organizations like the Gender and Sexuality Alliance Network (GSA). A majority of students who participated in the GLSEN/NBJI survey consistently heard anti-queer statements at their schools. As a result, “Black LGBTQ students who experienced higher levels of victimization based on race/ethnicity (as well as sexuality and gender) at school were more than twice as likely to skip school because they felt unsafe.” These students also experienced lower levels of “school belonging” and greater levels of depression.

For Black queer students, not having access to therapy can potentially lead to a vicious cycle of invisibility and erasure. In the GLSEN/NBJI report, over 90% of Black queer students heard the word “gay” used negatively. It was also the norm for students to hear negative comments about gender expression, as well as comments about not acting “masculine” or “feminine” enough. Women’s Leadership Project (WLP) South L.A. students who surveyed students at their school reported similar experiences, expressing dismay about transphobia among peers they believed would be accepting. As one Black GSA-WLP youth said, “Youth of color who were born in the colors of the rainbow flow to heaven’s gates four times faster than anybody else because we lack emotional and mental support.”

The cumulative effect of these experiences can lead to trauma and long term depression. Due to systemic mental health barriers and faith-based stigmas (e.g., messaging that emphasizes prayer and trusting god/Jesus as magic bullets for dealing with trauma), only 39% of Black queer youth have sought help from mental health professionals. By contrast, nearly 47% of non-black LGBTQI+ youth have. In addition, Black LGBTQI+ students who attended majority Black schools were less likely to have GSAs than those in majority white schools. Having a GSA at their school increased Black students’ feelings of school belonging and helped stave off leaving school.

These stressors reverberate throughout life. A recent study by UCLA’s Williams Institute concluded that anti-LGBTQI+ attitudes in families and the workplace were major contributors to high LGBTQI+ poverty rates. In addition, the absence of childhood support for LGBTQI+ folks who did not grow up poor is one of the biggest determinants of adult poverty later in life. And for both older and younger LGBTQI+ folks grappling with HIV, COVID “has disrupted the health system, making it much more challenging for people living with chronic conditions like HIV to see their healthcare providers in person or feel safe going to a pharmacy to obtain their medications.”

Going forward, public policy and legislation changes under the Biden-Harris administration, and a potentially Democratic-controlled Senate, will be critical. But in the midst of pandemic surges that weigh most heavily on BIPOC communities, schools and families must act immediately to ensure that Black LGBTQI+ youth are provided with the social and academic supports they need to thrive.

Youth serving BIPOC LGBTQI+ community resources in the L.A. area and beyond:

· GSA support for LGBTQI+ students is available virtually in partnership with school advisers and mentors

· The Standing4BlackGirls coalition and WLP will launch a 2021 wellness fund and task force focused on providing counseling and therapy for Black queer and cis/straight female-identified youth and biannual LGBTQI Youth of Color Institutes

· Brave Trails LGBTQ camp offers year-round virtual programming for middle school, high school and college age youth

· Colors LGBTQ counseling service provides free therapy for youth in the Los Angeles area.

· Mirror Memoirs is a “national storytelling and organizing project uplifting the narratives, healing and leadership of LGBTQI+ Black and indigenous people and other people of color who survived child sexual abuse, as a strategy to end rape culture and other forms of oppression and injustice”.

Twitter @Sikivuhutch 

Black LGBTQIA+ Parent and Caregiver Group

By Sikivu Hutchinson
 

A parent repeated the right wing slur that greater media representation of LGBTQ lifestyles is “turning youth out” and encouraging them to become gay. A South L.A. school employee said she had a problem with the use of the Black Power fist by a Black and Latinx GSA Network campus group during last November’s global Transgender Day of Remembrance. A Black father told his eleven year-old daughter not to display her Pride flag because it will cause conflict within the family. And, at a March LGBTQIA+ Youth of Color Institute with South L.A. students at King-Drew Magnet High School of Medicine and Science, virtually every young person in attendance expressed anxiety about their family’s religious-based homophobia and non-acceptance.

These exchanges occurred before the pandemic shutdown, the lynchings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and Tony McDade, the Black Lives Matter uprisings, SCOTUS’ recent decision on LGBTQ civil rights, and the massive educational upheavals that have forever changed the lives of Black and youth of color. When I completed the article "Black Queer Youth and the Family Divide" in March at the beginning of the pandemic, I had a hard time finding a publisher for it. Some of those rejections were no doubt due to the demand for COVID coverage. But most were undoubtedly due to the usual erasure of Black queer youth and family issues in the dominant culture when it isn’t Pride Month.

As the number of openly-identified Generation Z LGBTQIA+ youth increase, the exchanges that I reflected on above have become more commonplace in African American schools, homes, and families. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) 2017 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, African American youth in L.A. are more likely to identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual than non-black youth. As a result, they comprise a significant portion of all youth who identify as LGBT in L.A. Nationwide, LGBT African Americans are more likely to be raising children than are white LGBT individuals. And over fifty percent of queer families are headed by Black women, bucking mainstream depictions that privilege white gay and lesbian parenthood.

Although intersectional approaches to mental health and wellness are widely touted in social justice circles, educational and family support platforms that specifically meet the needs of Black queer K-12 youth are few and far between. Meeting Info: https://www.meetup.com/Black-LGBTQI-Family-Parents-and-Caregivers-Meetup-Group/

#Standing4BlackGirls: Rape Culture. the Election and the Pandemic

 

By Sikivu Hutchinson*

This week’s GOP Senate confirmation of dangerous theocrat Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court capped an epoch-defining year of unrelenting assaults on the bodily autonomy and reproductive rights of women of color. Barrett, whose fierce opposition to abortion rights and contraception is medieval, was Trump’s 220^th federal judicial appointee. With Trump’s fascist judicial legacy firmly in place, Black women’s self-determination is even more imperiled.  Nonetheless, in the runup to the November 3^rd election, there has been little public engagement with how this historical moment of political turbulence resounds for Black girls and the #MeToo movement against sexual violence. Although #MeToo was founded by Black feminist Tarana Burke, it has not emerged as a mass movement with substantive long term impact on poor and low-income communities of color (even though women of color employees in the service industries and other low wage sectors have long challenged systemic sexual abuse in the workplace).

On October 17th, teachers, students, artists, and organizers from the Women’s Leadership Project and Positive Results Center took to the streets to rally and raise awareness about the disproportionate impact of rape culture and domestic violence on Black girls and Black communities. Domestic violence rates have skyrocketed since the pandemic began, highlighting already existing socioeconomic disparities within vulnerable communities of color where access to preventive health care is limited. The rally was the first time I had ever seen Black and Latinx girls march through Leimert Park (or anywhere in L.A. for that matter) calling out the normalized sexual violence they experience every day. The Standing4BlackGirls coalition was spearheaded by L.A.-based Black women and girls-led gender justice organizations and supported by affinity groups such as the California Black Women's Health Project, Media Done Responsibly, and Rights4Girls. Although there were many who stepped up to support the action, there were also many in the community who did not, underscoring the difficulty of organizing around sexual violence, misogynoir, and patriarchy from within. Coalition demands include creation of a fund for Black girl domestic violence survivors, creation of a regional task force focused on Black girls, and development of safe spaces, housing, treatment and mental health and wellness resources for Black girls across sexualities.

During the event, youth and adults spoke of the toll misogynoirist victim blaming, victim shaming, and slut shaming have on Black girls who are more likely to experience sexual abuse before the age of eighteen than non-Black girls. These experiences are magnified by poverty, homophobia, transphobia, and foster care placement. WLP alumni activists Zorrie Petrus and Brianna Parnell discussed the double and triple burden that Black girls and women are saddled with. Black women comprise a disproportionate number of essential workers who do non-unionized minimum wage jobs in hazardous working conditions with minimal PPE. They are often the primary breadwinners in families where Black girls are also caregivers.  For sexual violence victims, silence and shaming from Black families, faith institutions, and the community at large contribute to this triple burden. Being at home with limited access to counselors, teacher advocates, afterschool programs, and affinity groups puts Black girls across sexual orientation at even greater risk of abuse.

                                                Ashantee Polk and Brianna Parnell speak

In addition, when Black girls are told to just pray or trust that “God has a plan” as antidotes to sexual abuse, true healing and treatment are hindered. Exclusive reliance on faith remedies for healing, rather than humanist alternatives, can be problematic for queer and trans youth dealing with faith-based discrimination. Moreover, psychotherapists who are not trained to understand the culturally specific impact of misogynoir, adultification, and hypersexuality on Black girls may not be effective in treating Black girl clients. WLP student Desja Sheridan expressed frustration about the dearth of Black women 

practitioners in psychotherapy. The practitioner pipeline issue has deep implications for the long term mental health and wellness of Black girls into adulthood.  As Skid Row activist and poet Suzette Shaw noted during a recent coalition meeting with South L.A. Assemblywoman Sidney Kamlager, unresolved trauma is a major source of stress for older Black women. Older Black women’s struggles with poverty, domestic and sexual violence, racism, criminalization, and ageism can lead to long term homelessness in a system that already blames and revictimizes Black women for being unhoused.

                                            Desja Sheridan, Jamie Kennerk and Kali Playter

In the runup to November 3^rd, these issues have not been on the national or local radar. As a result, the coalition is advocating for policies that redress the nexus of domestic violence, poverty and educational injustice.  Black girls have some of the highest rates of domestic sex trafficking in the nation, as well as high rates of death by gun violence. Not only are they impacted by the sexual abuse to prison pipeline, but easy access to firearms in the community puts them at greater risk for homicide. One of the new House provisions of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) would essentially bar stalkers and unmarried individuals who abuse their partners from owning guns. However, reauthorization of the act has languished due to the GOP’s corrupt alliance with the NRA, as well as the GOP's opposition to expanded provisions for the LGBTQ and Native communities. The coalition is also in support of Justice L.A.’s Measure J ballot initiative, which would allocate ten percent of the County’s budget to community and support services and shift revenue from police, jails, and legal services (which eat up 42% of the County’s budget).

As Kandee Lewis, executive director of the Positive Results Center, noted during the rally, the number of Black girls who are victimized by sexual violence before the age of 18 is probably higher than the 40%-60% cited in a 2012 survey conducted by the Black Women’s Blueprint. Shaming, blaming, fear of police violence, and community pressure on victims to stay silent to protect Black men play an insidious role in this regime. According to a recent survey conducted by  King-Drew WLP 10^th and 11^th graders Mariah Perkins and Kimberly Ortiz, nearly 70% of BIPOC teen sexual abuse survivors have never received therapeutic or community assistance to address their trauma (the majority of the youth in the survey were female-identified and African American). Bucking community silence and 

resistance, this cannot be the legacy that we leave Black girls and women with.  Expressing solidarity as a teen Latinx feminist Kimberly said, “We need change now! We are on the brink of having LGBTQ rights, same sex marriage and abortion legalization taken away. Our community has to unite. Black and brown girls need to support one another and use our voices. We can no longer stay silent because silence kills. Together we can be heard.”

Kimberly Ortiz

*Photos by Zorrie Petrus and BlueGreen

Big Black Sun: Sleep Dystopias Podcast

`Somewhere in Los Angeles, colonists from a parallel universe find a genotypically "perfect" host to invade

It was in the hum drum dreary of driving to work east on the 10 freeway, that Miz Cheryl Ann noticed two things. A black spot that she’d never seen before was stamped on her putty pale hand.

And didn’t the sun always rise in the east?

In point of fact, there are approximately three trillion galaxies in the observable universe. And at this precise moment, Miz Cheryl Ann was just a speck of a speck of a speck of a speck of dark matter, quivering because her whole department was about to be audited. Every unit turned upside down and shaken out, held up to the light...

Featuring Cydney Wayne Davis and Elvinet Piard. Music and narration by Sikivu Hutchinson. 

Available at

Apple Podcasts

Podbean

On Breonna Taylor, Criminal Injustice, and Trauma

 

Breonna Taylor L.A. memorial June 2020

By Sikivu Hutchinson, From The Humanist 

Last week was the first time in US history that thousands have taken to the streets to demand justice for the life of a Black woman. In cities across the nation, the Black Lives Matter and Say Her Name movements converged to stand for twenty-six-year-old Breonna Taylor, murdered in cold blood by Louisville, Kentucky, police in her own apartment.

The terrorist attack on Taylor has elicited global outrage for and reckoning with the erasure of Black women from mainstream narratives of police violence. After months of legal silence, the September 23 grand jury decision exonerating three officers of Taylor’s murder was a collective gut punch to her family, Black women, Black people, and Black communities.

Only one officer, Brett Hankison, will stand trial for the charge of “wanton endangerment” for firing ten rounds of his gun that, according to the conclusions of the grand jury, struck the exterior of a nearby apartment. The charge is considered the lowest of four classes of felonies and carries a maximum sentence of five years and a minimum of one. This means that Hankison will more than likely serve less time than a dog killer.

Incidentally, it was announced yesterday that one of the grand jurors filed a request to speak to the public and for the grand jury recordings to be made public, contending that Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron misrepresented their deliberations and that they weren’t given the option to indict the two officers who shot Taylor. Those recordings will be released on September 30th.

Cameron’s sickening declaration that no one was to blame for Taylor’s execution would have been inconceivable if one of Donald Trump’s vaunted white “housewives” had died similarly in the white suburban homes he has sworn to protect. Indeed, Taylor’s killing underscores the danger that “being home” poses to Black women across the nation.

According to the African American Policy Forum, which spearheaded the #SayHerName campaign in 2015, Black women and girls are often victimized by police terrorism in their homes. This threat is magnified by the disproportionate rates of domestic and intimate partner violence Black women experience overall. In October 2019, Atatiana Jefferson was murdered at her home in Fort Worth, Texas, by police officers conducting a “welfare check.” In 2010 seven-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones was murdered during a police raid of her Detroit home. In a brutal echo of the charge in Taylor’s case, the officer who murdered Aiyanna was charged with the sole count of “reckless endangerment” and ultimately acquitted.

Decades before, the 1979 murder of Eula Love by LAPD officers in the front yard of her South Los Angeles home was one of the most prominent early examples of domestic police terrorism against Black women. Her killing was a watershed for local activism around police violence and excessive force. I vividly recall attending a community protest and call to action for Love when I was in elementary school. What her murder highlighted to me as a Black girl growing up in Inglewood and South L.A. was how Black homes could never be safe spaces insulated from state violence. Unlike white women, Black women could never expect to receive “domestic” protection, nor be shielded by presumptions about their feminine innocence.

Many Black women and girls have been in deep trauma over the grand jury’s decision in the Breonna Taylor case. It has reopened profound wounds that reflect the everyday dehumanization Black girls face. And it has underscored the way Black women are socially constructed as racial others and “fallen women” (to paraphrase bell hooks). The racist-sexist vilification of Taylor as the girlfriend of a drug dealer who “got herself killed” only reinforces this vicious narrative. It has been widely noted among Black folks that white male murder suspects, from Dylan Roof to Kyle Rittenhouse, who go on savage killing sprees are always treated with Emily Post-like care and civility when apprehended. In a Covid summer that has seen the savage police murder of Dijon Kizzee in Los Angeles three weeks ago for bicycling while Black, and countless others for breathing while Black, the police state has become an even more oppressive everyday presence in Black folks’ lives.    

As a teen, I have vivid memories of guns being pulled on me and my friends by police officers in Inglewood, California, when we were on our way home one night. The police later claimed that our car backfired and they mistook it for gunshots. In a matter of minutes we were surrounded by squad cars as the police screamed at us to get out of the car. Panicked by being at gunpoint, I struggled to open the front passenger door. My friend’s brother, who was driving, was handcuffed and forced to lie on the ground. We managed to escape with our lives, but, like so many other Black teens in similar circumstances, a night of fun and frivolity had been transformed into one of terror and trauma. Unlike so many other Black teens, we lived to tell.

Prior to being hired by the Louisville Metro Police Department (LMPD) in 2003, Hankison received a scathing evaluation from his former supervisor at the Lexington Police Department (in Lexington, Kentucky), where he’d worked from 1999 until 2002. He had also been accused of sexual assault. Neither of these issues discouraged the LMPD from hiring him. In any other profession these deficits would be disqualifying, but for far too long the thin blue line has shielded incompetent to murderous officers from due process and accountability.

Reform measures that were promised as part of Louisville’s $12-million settlement to Taylor’s family have been touted as a first step in addressing the police department’s complicity in her death. Yet, these reforms have to be negotiated with the police union, whose notoriously corrupt practices enable officers to operate as though they’re above the law. One of these reforms includes expanding records maintained in officer personnel files. As critics have noted, piecemeal reforms fall well short of addressing the core issue of how entrenched police-state terrorism led to Taylor’s execution. Until the American police state is defunded and ultimately abolished, being at home will continue to be a public health threat for Black women and girls.

 

Sikivu Hutchinson is the author of Humanists in the Hood: Unapologetically Black, Feminist, and Heretical and the founder of the Women’s Leadership Project Black feminist humanist program for girls of color in South L.A. On October 17^th, The WLP will be holding a #Standing4BlackGirls community action in Los Angeles to end rape culture and sexual violence for Domestic Violence Awareness Month.

---

Speaking On Bre: #SayHerName and #Standing4BlackGirls

 

Standing4BlackGirls: Community Action to End Rape Culture and Sexual Violence

As the November 2020 election approaches and state violence against Black people and Black communities intensifies, Black girls and the epidemic rates of normalized sexual violence and domestic abuse that they experience are not on the national radar. It has been well-documented that sexual violence and domestic abuse have skyrocketed in vulnerable communities of color during the pandemic. These critical and life-altering aspects of Black girls’ experiences are seldom the subject of national campaigns or national focus. Yet, according to the Black Women’s Blueprint, between 40-60% of Black girls have experienced sexual abuse by age 18. Black girls and women are more likely to die at the hands of a relative or intimate partner than are non-Black women. Further, Black girls have some of the highest rates of sex trafficking victimization as well as arrest, conviction, and incarceration for sex trafficking in the nation. According to the Department of Justice, only one in fifteen Black women report sexual violence, while Black women and girls across sexuality and gender identity (cis, straight, queer, and trans) are more likely to be sexually abused and harassed by law enforcement. Historically, rape culture and misogynoir (anti-Black misogyny) have been inextricably linked to state violence, religious violence, and patriarchal heteronormative power and control over Black girls’ bodies. As survivors, the multigenerational trauma of sexual violence reverberates throughout our entire lives in communities where victim-blaming, victim-shaming, silencing, moral policing, and family complicity are normalized. For Black girls, experiences with sexual violence, domestic violence, and intimate partner violence are more likely to result in long term consequences such as homelessness, addiction, PTSD, depression, incarceration, and self-harm.

During Domestic Violence awareness month, the #Standing4BlackGirls coalition, led by Black women's youth and gender justice orgs the Women's Leadership Project, Media Done Responsibly, the Positive Results Corporation, the California Black Women's Health Project, and other community partners, will hold space for survivors in an outdoor community action to disrupt rape culture and sexual violence against Black girls and women on Saturday, October 17th at 12:30 in Leimert Park on Degnan. The action will focus on lifting up Black girl survivor voices while calling on policymakers and elected officials to earmark mental health and wellness resources for Black girls across sexualities.  

 

                                        Chardonnay Madkins on #Standing4BlackGirls

Coalition mission statement and demands. Community partners and supporters are welcome to add their names in solidarity. Endorsing organizations include:

Women’s Leadership Project

Media Done Responsibly

Positive Results Corporation

California Black Women’s Democratic Club

California Black Women’s Health Project

Afrolez Productions

AF3IRM Los Angeles

Black LGBTQIA+ Parent and Caregiver Group

Peace Over Violence

Rights4Girls

Women of Color Beyond Belief

YWCA Compton

National Radical Women

Freedom Socialist Party, Los Angeles

        South L.A. Black Girls: Changing the Narrative on #MeToo, 2019

Mental Health Matters for BIPOC Girls: Sustaining Youth-Centered Safe Spaces

According to a recent survey conducted by Women’s Leadership Project youth leaders Kimberly Ortiz and Mariah Perkins, a majority of female-identified sexual violence survivors have not received help, assistance or intervention for their trauma. Perkins and Ortiz conducted a community-based survey with over 180 respondents across age, gender and ethnicity. The majority of their respondents (44%) were African American, with youth between the ages of 14-18 comprising over 56% of respondents. Female-identified individuals comprised 82% of respondents. As part of their outreach, Ortiz and Perkins interviewed globally renowned activist, author, and filmmaker Aishah Shahidah Simmons about her sexual violence prevention activism. Simmons discussed the need to mobilize around sexual violence and misogynoir in African descent communities because "even if racism were eliminated today, we would still not be safe in our homes." Black, Latinx, and indigenous girls across sexuality have the highest sexual violence and harassment rates in the U.S. To address these conditions, WLP will be spearheading an October action to end rape culture and sexual violence against Black girls in observance of Domestic Violence Awareness month.

In addition, WLP’s weekly youth-facilitated meetings address the harmful impact of the COVID pandemic on mental health and wellness on BIPOC girls across sexuality. How, for example, do Black girls and girls of color survive and thrive with the pressures of work, school, relationships, abuse, stereotypes, racism, sexism, homophobia and victim-shaming? WLP youth leader Ashantee Polk will facilitate the group's September 11th session.

White Nights, Black Paradise: The Play @ The Museum of the African Diaspora, August 29th

 "A beautiful, gripping and urgent play," Mina Morita, Crowded House Theater, San Francisco

“What Blood feels safe in America, lady? Been staring down the barrel of a gun every day of my life.”

 

“There’s a war going on here against poor people. Against blacks.  A deadly civil war.  A cancer.  Now, our family’s fighting to stay together, by the skin of our teeth”

"Drop in on a classroom of Black children and get a good deep whiff of the poison they’re spoonfed by the white school marms who flee the ghetto in terror two seconds after the bell rings—then talk to me about a future."

Featuring: Cydney W. Davis, Breeanna Judy, Erin Aubry Kaplan, Philip McNair, Cheri Miller, Scott St. Patrick, Elvinet Piard, Darrell Philip, Elise Robertson, Charlotte Williams, JC Cadena, Ella Turenne, and Selene Whittington

Tickets @ MOADSF

Voting While Black, Feminist and Secular

By Sikivu Hutchinson

As a Black feminist, secular, humanist, voter, I cheered the selection of California Senator Kamala Harris as the Democratic vice presidential nominee with great ambivalence. Harris’ prosecutorial record as California’s Attorney General has been justifiably criticized as conservative and harmful to Black communities under siege from police violence. During her tenure, she consistently refused to prosecute killer cops, pursued thousands of marijuana convictions and penalized parents of truant students. Conversely, she established a task force to protect human trafficking victims, opposed their prosecution for prostitution, and created a court to provide alternatives to incarceration for youth charged with felonies which is still in existence.

Accepting her nomination at last week's Democratic National Convention, Harris acknowledged standing on the shoulders of African American women giants like Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman to run for president, and Black suffragist Mary Church Terrell, who fought first wave feminist white supremacy. Senator Harris’ historic nomination to the vice presidency has the potential to be a game changer for Black girls and girls of color long accustomed to seeing white men normalized as world leaders. Yet, as Congresswoman Ayana Pressley emphasized recently during an MSNBC interview, “Black women have been the table shakers and protectors of democracy. The election of Kamala Harris & Joe Biden is not a destination, it’s a door.” Pressley’s comments highlight how the symbolism of having the first biracial Black, South Asian woman on a presidential ticket is not enough. Once the dust settles on the “historic first” celebrations, the hard work of voting, organizing, and mobilizing “like our lives depend on it” (to paraphrase Michelle Obama) continues.

Indeed, after Senator Harris was named as the Democratic vice presidential nominee, a student of mine branded “all” of the candidates as “equally bad”. In their view, the Trump-Pence administration was equivalent to the Biden-Harris ticket. This perspective has become commonplace in the aftermath of the demise of Senator Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign. However, according to Newsweek, Harris’ Senate voting record has been one of the most liberal in Congress, paralleling that of Sanders. Further, the chorus of racist, sexist, and xenophobic attacks on Harris since her nomination underscore the distinction between the Biden-Harris ticket and Trumpism. One of the most virulent examples of Harris’ demonization is the creation of a t-shirt entitled “Joe and the Ho”, foregrounding the way Black women are automatically hypersexualized no matter how high they rise.

To be clear, Biden-Harris both bring deeply flawed records on criminal and racial justice. They do not support defunding the police, much less abolition. And Biden’s "Great White Father" paternalism, his history of inappropriate touching, and his failure to shield Anita Hill from GOP attacks during the 1991 Clarence Thomas hearings are problematic. At the same time, Biden-Harris are not Trump-Pence. They are not Trump-Pence on LGBTQI rights and gun control. They are not Trump-Pence on labor, workers’ rights, and immigration. They are not Trump-Pence on climate change and the environment. They are not Trump-Pence on domestic and sexual violence (Biden co-authored the Violence Against Women Act which has yet to be renewed in the Senate). And they are certainly not Trump-Pence when it comes to this administration’s relentless fundamentalist Christian agenda of gutting public education, health care coverage, the Johnson amendment, birth control, and abortion rights. To all appearances, a Biden-Harris administration will be vigorous in beating back the tide of fundamentalist Christian white segregationist supremacy, putting an end to the Trump administration’s catastrophic record of packing the federal courts with young, far right white judges (Trump has made the most federal judicial appointments of any president at this point in their career, a distinction which The New York Times has dubbed one his most “enduring accomplishments”).

This will be even more critical for Black secular voters who subscribe to a humanist progressive politics of Black liberation. Though small in number relative to Black religiously-identified voters, Black “religious nones” are increasing as a more vocal, yet still stigmatized block within the electorate. According to the recently published Secular Survey, “Black participants were 1/2 as likely to have supportive parents and three times as likely to be physically assaulted” than non-Black participants. Anti-Black secular discrimination is set against the backdrop of institutional racism, criminalization, sexism, heterosexism, and economic apartheid which make Black secular folks even more personally/professionally vulnerable and socially isolated.

For Black secular voters, the potential flaws and strengths of a Biden-Harris administration provide a springboard for challenging the corporate Democratic agenda. A corporate Democratic agenda that favors big business over labor and living wages; police state suppression over self-determined communities; and sexist workplaces over the universal right to child care, health care, and protections for working families and children is counter to radical humanism. In the midst of the Black Lives Matter movement and a global pandemic that has disproportionately impacted Black, Latinx, and indigenous communities, the centrist-to-conservative policies that defined the Obama-Biden administration won’t fly. Covid-driven layoffs, mass evictions, homelessness, and educational disruption are devastating African American workers and families in ways that have ripped the covers off American apartheid. As Black secularists living in Black communities, a radical humanist economic agenda involves systemic redress and reparations for the historic decimation of Black wealth. Allowing corporations to exploit tax loopholes and loot billions in PPP loans are two recent examples. In the same vein, Trump’s attempt to destroy the postal service via USPS Postmaster General Louis DeJoy and his lapdog Board of Governors is both a threat to American voters and Black America. As one of the largest public employers of African Americans, the USPS has been a bedrock for Black middle class stability and multigenerational wealth.

The Biden-Harris ticket has already pledged to fight back against the GOP plot to privatize the postal service. Both candidates have also spoken out about the need to protect essential workers of color from exploitive workplace policies that put them at greater risk of contracting Covid. An incoming Biden-Harris administration will have to squelch right wing backlash against science and evidence-based public health policies. And the path to a socially progressive legislative agenda becomes even more difficult if the Senate doesn’t flip to Democratic control in November.

The next three months will be a litmus test for progressive organizing and coalition building. This is especially true in a world where the phrase “anti-racism” has been appropriated by the white mainstream, while the economic regime of white supremacy remains firmly intact. As author Ibram Kendi has noted, “By 2053, Black wealth will flatline to $0. In this regard, “Black people are facing economic death”. It is an economic death that has been hastened by Trumpism and corporate Democratic policies that preceded the pandemic. During her Convention address, Harris pledged that “We will be bold”. To make good on that promise, Biden-Harris will not be allowed to skate on the symbolism and empty rhetoric of expediency.

Sikivu Hutchinson is the author of Humanists in the Hood: Unapologetically Black, Feminist, and Heretical (2020). She is directing her play White Nights, Black Paradise on Black women, Peoples Temple, and the 1978 Jonestown massacre on Zoom with San Francisco's Museum of the African Diaspora on August 29th.