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.

Sikivu Hutchinson is the author of Godless Americana: Race and Religious Rebels, Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars and the forthcoming White Nights: Black Paradise.

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).

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[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.

Bronze Magazine: "Moral Combat Explored: A Chat with Dr. Sikivu Hutchinson"

FROM BRONZE MAGAZINE
She’s black; she’s a feminist; and she’s an atheist. Author and lecturer Dr. Sikivu Hutchinson makes no pretense about her progressive “non- beliefs.” In her book, Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars, Dr. Hutchinson reveals how atheists of color are challenging the whiteness of “New Atheism” and its singular emphasis on science at the expense of social and economic justice. The book also highlights the cultural influence of African American humanist and atheist social thought in America. Dr. Hutchinson spoke with us more about the foundation of her “non-beliefs” and how they influenced the writing of her book.

BM: Hello Sikivu, it is an honor to be able to speak with you today. Atheism is a term that is not usually acknowledged within the Black community. Can you tell us what it means (to you) to be an African American female atheist?

SH: It means being able to question the orthodoxies and conventions of mainstream African American experience, particularly when it comes to how black women are supposed to behave and what they are supposed to believe.

BM: When/how did atheism enter your life?

SH: I grew up in a secular household. My parents were progressive and politically conscious. They were both steeped in the radical activism and intellectual foment of the Sixties. My upbringing was very black-identified; black literature, black social history, black activism. There were no Bibles on our bookshelves Prayer and God talk was never a part of the home culture of my immediate family. Because there was no indoctrination into God belief I had no authentic emotional connection to this idea of a supernatural omnipotent being manning the universe’s puppet strings. Naturally though most of my extended family and friends were religious so my limited church connections came through them. In retrospect however, my parents were no doubt mindful of the stigma black communities attach to non-believers and non-belief. So although there was never any explicit talk about atheism in our household I began to self-identify as one after enduring the hostile cultural backwater of my Catholic high school, where writing Beatle lyrics on your paper (as I did in 9th grade) got you branded a reprobate. MORE@

http://bronzemagonline.com/moral-combat-explored-a-chat-with-dr-sikivu-hutchinson/

Beyond The Sacrificial Good Woman: Freethinking and Black Feminism

By Sikivu Hutchinson

In the 1997 film The Apostle Robert Duvall plays a white Southern Christian fundamentalist preacher and murderer on the lam seeking redemption. The film is literally cluttered with images of devout blacks, from black women swaying in the breeze at a big tent church revival to a particularly indelible church scene of dozens of black men chanting “Jesus” in rapturous response to Duvall’s pulpit-pounding call. I found The Apostle perversely fascinating because it trotted out this totally revisionist romanticized narrative of black obeisance to yet another charismatic but flawed white renegade savior figure in Louisiana (where, contrary to Hollywood flim-flammery, most of the congregations are racially segregated). These popular fantasies of black religiosity always seem to revolve around images of good, matronly black women eternally quivering with a strategic “Amen” or “can I get a witness;” subject to break out into a Blues Brothers back flip down the church aisle at any moment.

It’s a caricature of black feminine servility—in homage to the Lord, the good book and the white renegade—that exemplifies what Toni Morrison has characterized as the “serviceability” of blackness and the black body. In her 1992 book, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Morrison argues that blackness and the black body—or what she dubs the Africanist presence—have historically functioned as vehicles or props for white subjectivity. In 18th century America, the Africanist presence allowed the new white man of the emergent slave republic to pose and explore fundamental questions about what it meant to be free, what it meant to human and what it meant to be a citizen within a founding “democratic” society. In 19th century Europe, the Africanist presence was literally articulated through the exhibition of black bodies, most notably that of Saartijie Baartman, aka the so-called Venus Hottentot, a young South African Khoi woman. Baartman was paraded all over Europe and displayed in salons in museums by the European scientific establishment. For the hoards of gawking white spectators who paid to see her “perform,” her “grotesquely exaggerated” anatomy demonstrated that there were clear boundaries between the civilized self and the savage sexually deviant Other.

Caught in the crossfire of science and superstition, black femininity has been critical to defining Western notions of “the human.” Negotiating the journey to the human on their own terms has been a centuries’ long quest for black women freethinkers, veering between religion and skepticism, faith and humanism. Bringing a black feminist secular humanist freethinking tradition “out of the closet” requires an assessment of the way black women have intervened in their historical construction as racial and sexual Others.

For example, when preacher and abolitionist Sojourner Truth purportedly rolled up her shirt sleeve during her historic 1851 “Ain’t I a Woman” speech before the Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio to show how many rows of cotton she’d plowed, she simultaneously rebuked notions of genteel white womanhood and degraded black femininity. By celebrating her flesh as a field slave and mother of several children “who didn’t need to be helped over ditches,” she was challenging the gendered division between body and intellect, men’s space and women’s space.

Black feminist secular humanism emerges from the legacy of Truth’s humanist intervention into the dualities of Western empiricism and Judeo Christian dogma. Enlightenment and Judeo Christian ideologies of black racial otherness and black sexuality reinforced each other. Blackness was outside of the human, the rational, the sovereign, and, of course, the moral. While white women have traditionally been placed on pedestals, and idealized as the ultimate symbols of feminine virtue, worth and desirability, black women have been demonized as hypersexual Jezebels or asexual Aunt Jemimas. The historical association of black femininity with amorality, promiscuity and fallen womanhood makes the stakes for and investment in black female religiosity higher. Christianity was a means of redeeming “fallen” black femininity.

Truth, of course, was also challenging the authority of white male preachers who muscled in on the Akron Convention to remind the sinful women activists that females who spoke in public were guilty of heresy. In her rebuttal she proclaimed: “Then that little man in black there, he says women can't have as much rights as men, 'cause Christ wasn't a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.” Tweaking biblical literalism with her own feminist spin, Truth bequeathed us the paradoxical figure of the defiant black woman of faith, ever-ready with a bit of scripture (ala the take no prisoners Lena Wilder from Lorraine Hansbury’s A Raisin in the Sun ) to verbally smack down Christian fundamentalists and heathens-in-the-making alike.
Truth’s example influenced a long line of activist women of faith, from the radical journalist/newspaper owners Ida B. Wells and Charlotta Bass, to civil rights firebrand Fannie Lou Hamer. Wells and Bass drew on humanist freethinking principles in their exhaustive exposes of lynching, racial terrorism and residential segregation. Hamer, an astute critic of the contradictions of Jim Crow “democracy,” was beaten and jailed like a dog for fighting for the right to vote. Yet, in the post-civil rights era, these hybrid models of faith-based and humanist social justice activism have been largely eclipsed by that of the good woman of faith as backbone of an increasingly socially conservative, insular Black Church. Steadfastly devout, black women power all the numerous Pew Research studies which indicate that African Americans are one of the most religious groups in the country.

Black adoption of Christian dogma brought African Americans into conformity with European American sexist/heterosexist models of gender hierarchy. As historian Paula Giddings notes, the Black Church played a key role in enforcing black patriarchy because it “attempted to do this in much the same way that Whites had used religion, by putting a new emphasis on the biblical ‘sanction for male ascendancy.’ This “new emphasis” meant that black men could be rightful patriarchs despite the yoke of slavery and Jim Crow apartheid. Contrary to the popular belief that black men were “emasculated” under slavery because they did not have unfettered access to and “control” over the bodies and destinies of black women and children, women were still socialized to fulfill gender hierarchical responsibilities like cooking, cleaning and taking care of children.* Black women were still regarded as the primary caregivers of the family, the protectors of home, hearth and the wellbeing of their male partners and their children. Black women were the repositories of moral and social values, entrusted with transmitting them to children.

So because women are responsible for transmitting moral values to children and families, breaking from deeply ingrained Christian ideology, culture and community ties is problematic. In African American communities where devoutness is the “default position,” the presumption of female religiosity, reinforced by cultural representation, is a binding influence that makes public skepticism for women taboo.

For observant women, questioning much less rejecting, religion would be just as counterintuitive as rejecting their connection to their lived experiences. In this regard religious observance is as much a performance and reproduction of gender identity as it is an exercise of personal “morality.” Many of the rituals of black churchgoing forge this sense of gendered identity as community. From the often elaborate pageantry of dressing for church, to participation in church leadership bodies, to the process of instilling children with “proper” “Christian” values in church-affiliated day care centers and schools—the gendered social contract of organized religion is compulsorily drilled into many black women.

Perhaps no modern black woman writer and skeptic captured this more vividly than Nella Larsen. In her 1928 novel Quicksand , Larsen chronicles the claustrophobia of domesticity, religiosity and female self-sacrifice in African American community. After a long personal journey from skepticism to religious acquiescence, Larsen’s mixed race protagonist Helga, a pastor’s wife, eventually rejects the existence of God. Helga’s internal conflict over the dominance of religious belief in the black community reaches a fever pitch after a long painful convalescence from childbirth. Throughout the novel, Helga frequently disdains blacks’ passive acceptance of “the White man’s God.” For Helga “Religion after all, had its uses. It blunted the perceptions. Robbed life of its crudest truths. Especially it had uses for the poor—for the blacks.” Helga’s observations have particular relevance for the lives of black women, whose servility and self-sacrifice she both admires and abhors. In one exchange with Sary, a mother of six, she wonders how women are able to bear the burdens of all their family and domestic responsibilities. Sary believes that one must simply trust in the “savior” to be delivered in the afterlife. This recurring theme of suffering, female self-sacrifice and deferment repels Helga, ultimately leading her to conclude that there is no God.

Larsen, as well as writers like Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker, provided a black feminist humanist context for rejection of organized religion and Christianity that don’t rely on revisionist acceptance or soft pedaling of the Bible’s brutal misogyny. Larsen’s critique is achingly relevant in the midst of an anti-feminist backlash that has been partly fueled by the Religious Right and the global regime of corporate media. The emergence of anti-abortion fetal “civil rights” laws, the proliferation of hypersexual media imagery promoting violence against women (from rape video games to the sexualization of female preteens in marketing and advertizing), and rising HIV/AIDS and STD contraction rates among young women of color underscore that women’s right to self-determination is increasingly under siege. In mainstream media, popular culture and black communities, black women have been targeted by both Puritanical policing and pornographic fetishization of their sexuality. Over the past year, black nationalist and black religious organizations have renewed their attacks on abortion and reproductive justice as a form of “black genocide.” In some instances they have aligned with the Religious Right on anti-abortion billboard campaigns and draconian anti-abortion legislation that targets women of color in states like Georgia. These forays once again establish black women’s bodies as contested moral battlegrounds. Reproducing more black babies becomes a means of moral and racial redemption. Patriarchal and religious control over black women’s bodies is reasserted as the linchpin for black uplift. And in this universe, only race traitor women, in collusion with white supremacist abortion providers, would dare to selfishly “kill” their babies and sacrifice the perpetuation of the race. Good women, on the other hand, learn to sacrifice and be sacrificed. And it is this theme of the good woman that keeps black women dominating the pews and auxiliaries of black churches, while the official face of black church leadership remains male.

The struggle to connect black women’s self-determination with the larger issue of human rights enfranchisement is still radical in the 21st century U.S. And 155 years after the white atheist suffragist abolitionist Ernestine L. Rose was smeared as being “a thousand times below a prostitute” because of her atheism, feminist humanist non-believers are still in a state of radical moral combat. And in an era in which, to paraphrase black feminist writer Gloria Hull, all of the women “freethinkers” are white, the challenge, for some of us, is to be brave, and to bring the sacrificial good woman out of the closet once and for all.

Sikivu Hutchinson is the editor of blackfemlens.org and a senior fellow with the Institute for Humanist Studies. This is an excerpt from her forthcoming book Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics and the Values Wars (Infidel Books, January 2011).

Not Knocking on Heaven’s Door:* Black Atheists, Urban America

By Sikivu Hutchinson

Late Saturday afternoon, like clockwork, the street corner preachers on Crenshaw and King Boulevard in South Los Angeles take to the “stage.” Decked out in flowing robes and dreadlocks, they fulminate into their mikes about the universe, God’s will and “unnatural” homosexuals to a motley audience waiting for the next express bus. Members of the Black Israelites, they are part of a long tradition of performative religiosity in urban African American communities. This particular corner of black America is a hotbed of social commerce. Kids who’ve just gotten out of school mingle jubilantly as pedestrians flow past fast food places, mom and pop retailers, street vendors and Jehovah’s Witness’ hawking Watchtower magazines. The Israelites have become a fixture of this street corner’s otherwise shifting tableaux. Exclusively male and virulently sexist and homophobic, they are tolerated in some African American communities in part because of the lingering visceral and misguided appeal of Black nationalism.

While the Israelites’ millennialist “racial uplift” ethos ostensibly fits right in to the bustle of this prominent South L.A. street, other belief systems are not as easily assimilated. Since 2006, the L.A.-based street philosopher Jeffrey “P Funk” Mitchell has been documenting his conversations with everyday folk on questions of atheism and faith. Using the handle “Atheist Walking,” Mitchell also conducts free-ranging inquiries into Christianity’s contradictions with a rolling video camera and a satirically raised eyebrow. Adopting the role of the bemused urban flaneur, ala the commentator- pedestrian immortalized by French poet Charles Baudelaire, he delves into “atheist spirituality,” biblical literalism and the paradoxes of faith. Mitchell is a member of the L.A.-based Black Skeptics, a group that was formed earlier this year to provide an outlet and platform for secular humanist African Americans. The Skeptics are part of a small but growing segment of African Americans who are searching for humanist alternatives to organized religion. In May, the Washington DC Center for Inquiry’s first annual African Americans for Humanism conference drew over fifty participants. Chat groups and websites like the Black Atheists of America have sprung up to accommodate the longing for community amongst non-theist African Americans who feel marginalized in a sea of black hyper-religiosity. Organizations such as the Institute for Humanist Studies cultivate African American secularist scholarship and advocacy.

With over 85% of African Americans professing religious belief, black religiosity is a formidable influence. Racial segregation, the historical role of the Black Church, and African American social conformity reinforce Christianity’s powerful hold on black communities. Indeed, I was recently told that I’d been deemed an unsuitable culmination speaker for a bourgie philanthropic organization’s young women mentees because of my decidedly unladylike public atheism (Perhaps the Israelite’s Old Testament shout-out to silent prostrate women would be more acceptable). Proper role models for impressionable black youth are, at the very least, skillful church lady pretenders with ornate hats in tow. Secular organizations that seek to build humanist community with a predominantly African American base and social justice world view are challenged by the association of charitable giving, philanthropy, poverty work and education with faith-based communities. For many, successfully emulating the strong social and cultural networks that have sustained church congregations is an elusive goal.

And then, there is the deep and abiding desire for belief in the supernatural, the ineffable faith-passion that propels some through the trauma of racial indignities and personal crisis. Yet, humanism asks why we should cede enlightenment and the potential for restoration to the supernatural. Humanism challenges the implication that the sublimity of the natural world, and our connection to those that we love, admire and respect, is somehow impoverished without a divine creator. In one of his bus stop monologues, Mitchell comments, “I want people to look at each other with the same reverence that they look at God and realize that ‘we’ did this, we made this happen.” The “we” represents will, agency, and motive force; qualities that many believers would attribute to God as omniscient architect and overseer. Non-believers are compelled to ask whether individual actions (for good or ill) are determined by God, or whether human beings simply act on their own volition in a universe overseen by God. Since time immemorial, non-believers have questioned whether God exercises control over those who commit evil acts or whether hell is the only “medium” for justice. By refusing to invest supernatural forces with divine authority over human affairs, humanism emphasizes human responsibility for the outcome of our pursuits. Morality is defined by just deeds, fairness, equality and respect for difference; not by how blusteringly one claims to adhere to “Godly” principles.

However, in communities that are plagued with double digit unemployment and a sense of cultural devaluation, notions of self-sufficiency and ultimate human agency may be perceived as demoralizing if not dangerously radical. As a child preacher steeped in the fiery oratory of the Black Church, writer James Baldwin recounted his growing cynicism about spreading “the gospel.” Lamenting the grip of religion on poor blacks, Baldwin said, “When I faced a congregation, it began to take all the strength I had not to…tell them to throw away their Bibles and get off their knees and go home and organize.” In Baldwin’s view organized religion’s requirement that believers suspend disbelief and submit to “God’s will” is a liability for working class African Americans. Religious dogma anesthetizes as it bonds, a dangerous combination in an era in which the proliferation of storefront churches in urban black communities is a symptom of economic underdevelopment.

Echoing Baldwin, Chicago-based Education professor and atheist Kamau Rashid argues that “Freethought is an extension and expression of the struggle that African Americans have waged for self-determination. In fact it represents a heightened phase of such a struggle wherein one of the final stages of ‘conceptual incarceration,’ the belief in a God or gods, is discarded for a belief in the human potential, for a belief in ourselves.”

And why, in a heritage steeped in the revolutionary thought of such dirty outlaw skeptics as Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, A. Philip Randolph, James Forman and Alice Walker, would this be so viscerally frightening?

Sikivu Hutchinson is the editor of blackfemlens.org, a member of the Black Skeptics Group and the author of the forthcoming book Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics and Secular America.

*With apologies to Bob Dylan

Black Infidels: Humanism and African American Social Thought

By Sikivu Hutchinson

excerpt from The New Humanist Magazine, A Publication of Harvard's Humanist Chaplaincy

During a talk show discussion on relationships last year, radio personality and self-proclaimed dating guru Steve Harvey charged that atheists had no moral values. Anyone who didn't believe in God was an "idiot," he said, and women should steer clear of these rogue blasphemers at all costs. While atheist websites were abuzz with condemnations of Harvey, his tirade went unchallenged by mainstream African American media. Yet his view reflects conventional wisdom about African American communities and faith. Namely, that African Americans are so unquestioningly religious that having any other viewpoint is grounds for "revocation" of one's race credentials. With churches on every corner, religious idioms seamlessly woven into everyday black speech, faith-based license plates ubiquitous in black neighborhoods and black celebs thanking Jesus at every awards event, how could it be otherwise? According to a 2008 Pew Research Forum study, African Americans are indeed the most "consistently" religious ethnic group in the U.S. However, black Humanist scholars like Norm Allen, Executive Director of African Americans for Humanism, and Anthony Pinn, Professor of Humanities and Religious Studies at Rice University, point to another tradition. Both have critiqued the exclusion of Humanist influence from appraisals of African American social thought and civil rights resistance. Whilst acknowledging the key role African American Christian ideology played in black liberation, these scholars believe it is also crucial to highlight the influence of Humanist principles of rationalism, social justice, skepticism and freethought...

Read more at www.thenewhumanism.org

The White Stuff

By Sikivu Hutchinson

Her name was Sarah Baartman, aka the Venus Hottentot, and she had ass to spare.

Like many Africans staged for public exhibition in 19th Century Europe before her, Baartman became an object of scientific investigation. She was poked, prodded, measured, assessed and ultimately dissected in death by British and French empiricist wizards like the esteemed scientist Georges Cuvier. She was marshaled as resident Other to determine the exact nature of her “difference” from “normal” (i.e., white) men and women. This standard only had weight and relevance in the context of Baartman’s grotesqueness. Her deformations provided white femininity with its mooring as the standard of feminine beauty. Her sub-humanity gave her white male examiners a biological compass (and canvas) that was then translated into immutable racial difference. The sexual deviance signified by her enormous backside literally functioned as an epistemological frame and cover for her interpreters’ own cultural biases and assumptions. Identified as the “missing link,” Baartman’s anatomy was critical to affirming white racial superiority and capturing inexplicable gaps in the ascent from "savage" to "civilized." Through the lens of the scientist, looking, seeing and interpreting were deemed to be “transparent” enterprises--not naturalized through the cultural position of the observer.

Tim Wise, the foremost white critic/interpreter of the phenomenon of white supremacy, once noted that whites “swim in white privilege.” Like fish in water, whites don’t grasp or see the complexity of white privilege because they breathe it and live it 24/7. It immunizes them in the predominantly white schools, neighborhoods, social networks, media, places of worship and scholarly traditions that they inhabit. It makes the systemic institutionalized nature of racial hierarchy invisible. And it marginalizes race and racism as part of the narrow, sectarian and, ostensibly, divisive concerns of a “minority” lens.

Navigating a fantasy “post-racial” universe, these “invisible” cornerstones of white supremacy are not supposed to matter. It is not supposed to matter that a five year-old African American male has less chance statistically of going to college or even of living to the age of 25 than his white male sandbox comrade. It is not supposed to matter that home equity for blacks and Latinos of all classes has historically been far lower than that of whites due to institutional segregation in so-called inner cities and working class suburbs. These “blemishes” in the fabric of American liberal democracy are not supposed to matter because individualism is the currency of Americana, and there is no evil intelligent designer separating one’s exercise of free will from free enterprise.

Yet for W.E.B. DuBois, these disparities constitute the “wages of whiteness,” a public and psychological wage of white social capital, translated into everyday white privilege. For those who bemoan the “provincial” and “race-obsessed” orientation of American writers of color, DuBois implicitly forces us to consider how the very arc of European American intellectual, social and economic “progress” has been shaped by the racialization of the Other. As an artifact of a supremely barbaric and unenlightened aspect of the Enlightenment, Baartman’s dissected backside was a key player in the birth of the objectivist researcher. Representing reason and rationality, Baartman’s interpreters were conferred with a personhood and subjectivity that afforded them “unraced” status.

Toni Morrison has defined unraced status as the ability to appear to be beyond racial classification or identification. Whiteness becomes the norm not only through racial segregation but through the discursive tools of defining value and worth. This status rests on having the right to write, analyze, classify, quantify and have one’s conclusions recognized as universal truths, rather than as the culturally contextual products of a racist colonialist legacy.

When it comes to the “new atheism,” the romance and Bambified innocence of not seeing is just a living. Recent debates in the blogosphere about the whiteness of atheist discourse get sidelined by accusations about the perceived “hysteria” of those making the claim. Surveys that suggest that atheist affiliation actually reflects race/gender demographics similar to say a John Birch Society confab are dismissed as being just the way it is because white boys naturally dominate science and are better writers anyway.

So it stands to reason that white folk don’t like it when it is inconveniently pointed out by ghetto interlopers that knowledge production and universal truth claims in the West have historically been marked as white. It’s cartoonishly pro forma when white folk, ignorant of these historical traditions, swaggeringly insist that atheist discourse is implicitly anti-racist, anti-sexist and anti-heterosexist because one, we say so, and, two, hierarchy is something only those knuckle-dragging supernaturalists do. It’s paint-by-the-numbers entitlement time when the so-called new atheist “movement” is resistant to the charge that racial and gender politics just might inform who achieves visibility and which issues are privileged in the broader context of skeptical discourse. It’s not PC to suggest in the science-besotted circle jerk of atheist-supernaturalist smackdowns that Hottentot-obsessed traditions of scientific racism and fire and brimstone Judeo Christian religiosity went gleefully hand in hand for much of the West’s enlightened history. It belies humanist delusions of pure objectivism to say that “science as magic bullet” boilerplate will not enlarge the conversation to include those for whom organized religion has had some cultural and historical resonance (as an albeit complicated bulwark against white supremacy and racial terrorism). It is treasonous to argue that having the luxury and privilege to proclaim one’s atheism, publish, become recognized as an unraced authority, disseminate tomes to and command a global audience and garner recognition for capsizing the sordid ship of theological tyranny is a peculiarly white enterprise precisely because of the history of Western knowledge production. And it flies in the face of the myth of meritocracy to suggest that eminent white philosophers and scientists don’t “focus” on race and gender because their identities are based on not seeing it.

As Greta Christina has noted in her insightful critique of racism, sexism and visibility within the new atheist movement; hand-wringing about the absence of diversity without confronting the historical power dynamics of access and visibility becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. When not seeing becomes a virtue its equivalent to telling all those uppity “missing links” to sit down and shut up. Let us write the record for you, because we know how it ends.

Sikivu Hutchinson is the editor of blackfemlens.org and a commentator for KPFK 90.7 FM in Los Angeles

This Far By Faith? Race Traitors, Gender Apostates & the Atheism Question

By Sikivu Hutchinson

Martin Luther King, Jr. once dubbed Sunday at 11:00 a.m. the most segregated hour in America, a microcosm of the titanic divide that specifically separates black and white America. Yet racial divisions are not the only prominent schism in the Sunday churchgoing ritual that encompasses much of the social and cultural life experience of one of the most God-obsessed nations on the planet. Despite all the “liberal” revisions to biblical language and claims to progressivism among some Christian denominations, mainstream Protestantism is still, of course, a Jim Crow throwback and a man’s man’s world. As Mark Galli, editor of the Evangelical magazine Christianity Today once remarked, “It’s a cliché now to call institutional religion 'oppressive, patriarchal, out of date and out of touch.' So what else is new? I feel sorry for those people who don't think there's anything greater than themselves…It leaves out the communal dimension of faith.”

From the Deep South to South Los Angeles, this “communal dimension of faith” is one of the most compelling and problematic aspects of women’s investment in organized religion. When it comes to accounting for the disproportionate male to female ratio for self-identified atheists, there has been much wrongheaded conjecture about the supposed emotionalism of women versus the rationality of men. Bloggers muse about women’s intuitive sensitivity to the warm and fuzzy “verities” of religious dogma. Women are portrayed as naturally timorous and thus less inclined to question or suspend belief about the inconsistencies of organized religion. For the most part, there has been no serious evaluation of the perceived gendered social benefits of religious observance versus the social costs of espousing such a gender non-conforming “individualist” ideology as atheism, particularly with respect to American born women of color. Indeed, in many communities of color the very structure of organized religion offers a foundation for the articulation of female gendered identity that has been a source of agency and an antidote to marginalization. On the other hand, patriarchy entitles men to reject organized religion with few implications for their gender-defined roles as family breadwinners or purveyors of cultural values to children. Men simply have greater cultural license to come out as atheists or agnostics because of the gender hierarchies that ascribe rationalism, individualism, intellectualism and secular or scientific inquiry to masculinity. So women in traditionally religious communities who come out in real time (as opposed to online) risk greater ostracism because women don’t have the cultural and authorial privilege to publicly express their opposition to organized religion as men.

African American women provide an illustrative case in point. Imagery such as filmmaker Tyler Perry’s bible thumping malapropism spewing Madea, stereotypically heavyset black women in brightly colored choir robes belting out gospel music and sweat-drenched revelers cataleptic from getting the holy ghost are some of the most common mainstream representations of black femininity. These caricatures are buttressed by the unwavering financial and social support of the black church, which is predominantly Christian-based, by African American communities of all income brackets. According to blackdemographics.com African Americans remain the most solidly religious racial group in the United States, outstripping whites in their churchgoing fervor by a nearly 20% margin. Sunday in and Sunday out, between the hours of 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., a familiar scene emerges in both working and middle class black communities across the nation. Black women shuttle dutifully to church in their sartorial best, backbone of a dubious institution that still accords them only second class citizen standing. The gender dynamics in the breakdown of regular churchgoers reflect an utterly predictable disparity in power and access. While more black women have been allowed to assume leadership roles in black churches in recent years, they remain a minority among deacons, pastors and senior pastors of most black congregations. So although black women are far more likely than men to attend church more than once a week, the officialdom of black religious establishments, and certainly the political face of the black church, is steadfastly male.

What is the relationship between these gendered religious hierarchies and cultural politics in African American communities? Christian religiosity pervades the slang of misogynist black hip hop artists and sports figures and worms its way into their Jesus touting boilerplate award acceptance speeches. Christian religiosity engorges multi-million dollar faith-based empires in poor urban black communities where “prime” real estate is often a triad of storefront churches, liquor stores and checking cashing places. Sex scandals and financial improprieties fester amongst the leadership of black churches yet sexist and homophobic rhetoric remain a mainstay. Blind faith speaks through bulging collection plates and special tithes to the latest charity, pastor’s pet cause or capital campaign, “blessing” donors with another chit to heaven and certitude that black apostates are also race traitors. If mainstream African American notions of black identity are defined by a certain degree of essentialism, then religious identity is certainly a key element. Alternative belief systems are viewed with suspicion because they are deemed to be inconsistent with authentic black identity.

Given this context it is unsurprising that comedian and self-appointed dating guru Steve Harvey’s diatribe against atheism this past spring went largely unchallenged by African American cultural critics. Doling out sage dating advice, Harvey warned black women to avoid atheist gentlemen callers at all costs because they simply have no morals. Harvey’s swaggeringly ignorant declaration was not only a repudiation of atheism but a thinly veiled warning to black women that they should tow the religious line with their personal choices. Failure to do so would have serious consequences for racial solidarity and their ability to be good (black) women, compromising their heterosexual marketability and legitimacy as marriage partners and mothers. It is this brand of essentialism that makes stereotypes associating black identity politics with an anti-secularist stance and religious superstition so irritatingly persistent.

While the greater religiosity of women of color in comparison to men is no mystery, why is it that this peculiarly gendered regime gone relatively unquestioned? The gravity of the social and economic issues confronting black communities—and the tremendous cultural capital and social authority that organized religion exercises within them— compels further analysis. Just as women are socialized to identify with and internalize misogynistic and sexist paradigms, religious paradigms that emphasize domestication and obeisance to men are integral to mainstream American notions of femininity. For many observant women questioning or rejecting religion outright would be just as counterintuitive as rejecting their connection to their lived experiences. In this regard religious observance is as much a performance and reproduction of gender identity as it is an exercise of personal “morality.” Many of the rituals of black churchgoing forge this sense of gendered identity as community. Whether it be maintaining ties with peers within the context of a church meeting, ensuring impressionable children have some “moral” mooring by sending them to Sunday School or even invoking sage bits of scripture to chasten malcontents, enlighten casual acquaintances or infuse one’s quotidian doings with purpose—all carefully delineate enactments of kin and community that have been compulsorily drilled into women as the proper fulfillment of a gendered social contract. And if this gendered social contract were violated en masse patriarchy and heterosexism would have less of a firmament.

What, then, are the lessons for promoting secular humanist, agnostic or atheist belief systems? First, that there must be more clearly defined alternatives to supernaturalism which speak to the cultural context of diverse populations of women and people of color. Second, that moral secular values should provide the basis for robust critique of the serious cultural and socioeconomic problems that have been allowed to thrive in communities of color under the regime of organized religion. Finally, in an intellectual universe where rock star white men with publishing contracts are the most prominent atheists and atheism is perceived in some quarters as a “white” thing, it is also critical that acceptance and embrace of non-supernatural belief systems be modeled in communities of color “on the ground.” Only then can secularism defang the seductions of the communal dimension of faith that defines our most segregated hour.

Sikivu Hutchinson is the editor of blackfemlens.org and a presenter at the Atheist Alliance International Conference in October. This article is an excerpt from her book Scarlet Letters an essay collection on race/gender politics, atheism and secular belief.

"Out of the Closet:" Black Atheists

By Sikivu Hutchinson

In some black communities it’s akin to donning a white sheet and a Confederate Flag. In others it’s ostensibly tolerated yet whispered about, branded culturally incorrect and bad form if not outright sacrilege. For black atheists like myself, proclaiming one’s non-belief amidst genial wishes to “have a blessed day” is never easy in the seemingly innocuous context of casual chit chat between black folk. Yet, according to the New York Times, a small but growing segment of the American population, galvanized by the hyper-evangelical climate of the Republican Pleistocene, have begun organizing nationwide and becoming more vocal about their atheism. Although African Americans are not visible in the “movement” some are easing away from religion. For black atheists, actively breaking with religious tradition is an even graver rejection than that of white intellectuals electrified by the “pew-storming” rhetoric of atheist gurus like Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins. This is partly due to the fact that the history of African American civil and human rights resistance is heavily steeped in Judeo-Christian religious dogma. Despite the White Anglo Saxon Protestant religious justification for slavery and domestic terrorism, African Americans converted to Christianity and utilized it as a source of succor, community and spiritual redemption. No matter one’s actual deeds, life path or personal mores, to be unquestioningly religious in some quarters is to be inoculated from criticism. Noting this historical irony in his blog “The Black Atheist,” Wrath James White states, “In these (black) communities you find more tolerance towards gangbangers, drug addicts, and prostitutes, who pray to God for forgiveness than for honest productive citizens who deny the existence of God.” For Wright, this “is one of the most embarrassing elements of Black culture, our zealous embrace of the God of our kidnappers, murderers, slave masters and oppressors.”

While there have been critical appraisals of African American adoption of Christianity within the context of European conquest and racial slavery, few propose atheism as a corrective. Indeed, atheism would seem to fly in the face of a cultural ethos that frames earthly pain and suffering as a crucible for achieving rewards in the afterlife. In the midst of extreme brutality religious faith can either be seen as a means to mental health, or, as Karl Marx put it more bluntly, an opiate.

In this sense contemporary black religiosity is the legacy of a culturally specific survival strategy. Many black secular community-based organizations still look to the black church as a coalition partner and resource. Disturbingly, the church is often uncritically perceived as the “backbone” of the black community. However, as the debate over California’s Proposition 8 demonstrated, the notion that there is a monolithic “marching in lockstep” black community is terminally outdated. On issues of gender and sexual orientation, the overwhelming opposition of many prominent black churches to granting civil rights to partnered African American gays and lesbians is morally indefensible. When it comes to attitudes about traditional gender roles, gender-based assumptions about black female religiosity are double-edged. While black male non-believers are given more leeway to be heretics, black women who openly profess atheist views are deemed especially traitorous, having abandoned their family role as purveyors of cultural and religious tradition. Images of black women faithfully shuttling their children to church and socializing them into Christianity are a prominent part of mainstream black culture. If being black and being Christian are synonymous, then being black, female and religious (whatever the denomination) is practically compulsory. Black women with children who don’t fall in line, who raise their children as atheists, may find their race credentials revoked.

On the national level the contradictions between American secularism and religion have produced a schizoid tension in the U.S., whereby religious fundamentalism and intolerance for secular thought have become the norm. When it’s practiced in the non-Western world Americans routinely brand this kind of propaganda as backward and extremist. Yet, in this, the most swaggeringly “liberal humanist” of all nations, “coming out” as an atheist in a culture that parades religious dogma as a substitute for true morality may be one of the final ideological frontiers for African Americans.

Sikivu Hutchinson is the editor of blackfemlens.org and a commentator for KPFK 90.7 FM.

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