Uganda, White Supremacy and Evangelical Blood Money

By Sikivu Hutchinson

White evangelicals have taken their corrupt “traditional family values” racket to Africa and hit paydirt. Over the past several months, Uganda’s terrorist anti-Homosexual Bill has been exposed as not just a symbol of African homophobia but a symptom of American evangelical empire building. While the legal battle over same sex marriage has reached epic proportions in the United States, American evangelicals have been quietly wielding “moral” influence over African public policy, spearheading a rabid call for retribution against gays and lesbians in their missionary pilgrimages. During a March 2009 trip to Uganda, evangelical activists Scott Lively and Don Schmierer warned Ugandan leaders of a gay agenda to “take over the world.” Lively and Schmierer have been roundly condemned by human rights and social justice organizations for galvanizing Ugandan politicians to develop the legislation.

As has been well-documented, the Ugandan legislation would “seek to protect the traditional family by prohibiting any form of sexual relations between persons of the same sex.” It would also bar “the promotion or recognition of such sexual relations in public institutions and other places through or with the support of any Government entity in Uganda or any non-governmental organization inside or outside the country.” The Bill envisions a vast homosexual conspiracy of “sexual activists” seeking to convert youth and adopt children. It would require those knowing of homosexual acts to report them or risk prosecution, and, as a result, seriously jeopardize the country's inroads into HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment.

The United States and other donor countries have denounced the Bill. Facing the possible loss of international aid, the Ugandan government is considering revising an earlier provision which would have required the execution of known homosexuals.

After a firestorm of criticism, the evangelicals have also tried to distance themselves from the flap. However, the Ugandan Bill is part of a larger movement of evangelical puppeteering. The Bill exploits deep anti-gay sentiment and anxieties within African culture about a family structure under siege by “outside” forces, evoking some of the same tensions that African American communities experienced around California's Proposition 8. Fittingly, the Bill has been bankrolled by conservative foundations and promoted by the far right Christian activist group the Family. Stoking anti-gay sentiment through biblical edict and propaganda about potential homosexual corruption of the African family, evangelicals have used Africa as a springboard for a virulently homophobic agenda that has been intensified by the struggle over gay equal rights in the United States. At the forefront of this movement is President Obama's buddy Rick Warren. Warren's purpose-driven crew is hugely influential in Africa, funding schools, missions and HIV/AIDS treatment while brokering homophobia.

Warren and his American counterparts have identified Africa as the new frontier and future of evangelicalism. And as such, Africa is fertile ground for the export of hate and right wing evangelical terrorism. Indeed, evangelicals’ hold on Africa is merely an extension of white supremacist control over African self-determination. The colonial legacy of African exploitation by the West, exemplified by the undue cultural and economic influence of Western missionaries, has played a pernicious role in the African psyche. To the extent that African nations have been so besieged by Western influence, their embrace of American-bred homophobia, in exchange for American largesse, is simply part of the package of white capitalist patronage.

For this reason, it is inconceivable that African evangelicals would have the same impact on public policy in the West. In a sweeping expose, the progressive think tank Political Research Associates reports that American evangelicals have long been active in promoting anti-gay public policy through their missionary work in Africa. Because “the demographic center of Christianity is shifting from the global North to the global South,” Africa’s influence on the global direction of Christianity has increased. According to the report, one of the architects of this movement is the Institute for Religion and Democracy (IRD). IRD is a neo-conservative think tank which has exploited the widespread belief that homosexuality is a western phenomenon that undermines essential African culture values. Scratch the surface and IRD is a radical political organization that has actively opposed the social justice campaigns of mainline Protestant churches and pro-democracy movements in Central America and Africa.

Supported by ultraconservative foundations such as the Scaife and Bradley Foundations, the organization is part of a well-financed network of think tanks and nonprofits, many with tax exempt status granted to religious entities. The staggering amounts funneled into these organizations dwarfs foundation grants and funding to progressive advocacy organizations. As a result, conservative organizations are better equipped to position themselves as lobbyists and power brokers in both the global and domestic legislative arena.

The intersection of dire poverty, underdevelopment and social desperation has historically made African countries vulnerable to the moral profiteering of a bankrupt evangelical movement. Make no mistake, American evangelicals, in their advancement of a terrorist agenda that ultimately seeks extermination based on sexuality, will most certainly have blood on their hands. Far from being an isolated act of extremism, Uganda's shadow evangelical legislature is yet another potent reminder of the global destruction that the Christian right wreaks in the name of Western enlightenment. As the anonymous author of the blog Gay Uganda says, “I am immersed in the middle of a battle for my life. My very life, me and my partner’s. And of all Ugandans that are like me.”


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

Mainstream Media's Tea Party Tryst

By Sikivu Hutchinson

Its déjà vu all over again as the mainstream media trumpet the ascent of the so-called tea party movement. In its rush to frame the recent victory of Republican State Senator Scott Brown in the Massachusetts Senate race as a tea party triumph mainstream media have given more ammo to the politics of racial hysteria. Last fall’s health care reform inspired outburst of anti-Obama anti-government hysteria officially inaugurated a return to the in-your-face “populism” of angry white men. Thinly disguised as saber rattling against big government, race-baiting propaganda has been revitalized as the Republican strategy for taking back the country. A bolded asterisk should be stamped on these tired broadsides, as big government never includes defense, domestic law enforcement, prisons, functioning stoplights or pothole free roads for ozone shredding SUVs.

Instead of critiquing the real roots of these spasms of white supremacist “reclamation,” mainstream and even some liberal-progressive media have largely parroted the view that there was some new and unprecedented backlash in Massachusetts. Head scratching pundits counsel Democrats to “listen” to the sentiments of the tea baggers and stop parodying them as ignorant philistines. Yet Massachusetts state Attorney General Martha Coakley was simply a weak candidate. Like most Democrats she took the support of black and Latino constituencies for granted and failed to do the campaign trench work required to win election. Kowtowing or trying to “understand” the motives of a narrow segment of the Massachusetts electorate simply legitimizes a long strain of American politics that dates all the way back to Strom Thurmond's twenty-four hour filibuster against the 1957 Civil Rights Bill.

If a really dumb space alien landed in the middle of a tea party protest they wouldn't need a decoder ring to tell them what the demographic “411” is when it comes to power and privilege in the United States. Before Massachusetts, so-called disaffected white independents were only one slimy teabag away from their “birther” brethren. In the 2008 campaign Obama won a mere 43% of the white vote, greater than either Gore in 2000 or Kerry in 2004, but miniscule when considering the carnage left by the Bush administration. As historians have noted, the Democrat Party has never recovered from the mass exodus of whites after the passage of the 1964 Civil and 1965 Voting Rights Acts. Hence, the post-racialism which conservatives tout as an outcome of Obama’s election has simply never been borne out in the numbers.

On the black side of Flat Earth, black conservatives valiantly uphold this dramatic tradition of casting the universe as one giant self-reflection. Recently, in commemoration of King's birthday, African American commentators were trotted out on MSNBC and NPR to assess the nation's racial climate. Questioned by MSNBC’s Chris Matthews during a race roundtable John McWhorter, a pundit at the conservative Manhattan Institute, proclaimed his love of segregation, noting that it's a good thing—Cleveland, Philadelphia, D.C., Detroit, Milwaukee, Baltimore and South Los Angeles aside—when black people live together. On NPR conservative watchdog Joe Hicks swaggeringly boasted that he could go anywhere in the country without fear of legal barrier, reminding the listening audience that King probably would have opposed affirmative action had he been alive today.

Like their white counterparts, black conservatives hew faithfully to Ronald Reagan’s old caveat that facts are “stupid things.” On the phenomenon of lending discrimination against homebuyers and homeowners of color they can't be bothered to read decades of research documenting the institutional basis for segregation. On the issue of African American over-incarceration they point to black matriarchs like the fictitious Mary Jones of the film Precious and baggy pants wearing young black males. Over-incarceration is merely a symptom of poor blacks' refusal to assimilate. Similarly, the fact that blacks and Latinos are more likely to live in areas that are environmentally toxic, with little access to healthy shopping alternatives is really just evidence of their failure to learn how to say “ask” instead of “axe” in order to take advantage of all the higher paying private sector jobs that would spring them from the ghetto.

The conservative tradition of cultural and historical illiteracy is now a permanent and defining part of the political landscape. Due to its influence the general tenor of the country is proudly unabashedly hostile to evidence and documentation. Global warming is a liberal conspiracy. Evolution is cultural propaganda and any research-based evidence is deeply suspect. The Supreme Court's recent ruling giving corporations free reign to influence peddle and steal elections have liberated them from “second class citizenship.” The Fox regime’s scant coverage on Haiti, coupled with “Boss” Limbaugh’s reduction of the nation’s mammoth death toll, destruction and human suffering to a money pit exacerbated by too much global welfare, is bolstered by the witch-hunting moral authority of Pat Robertson. The media’s new love affair with the tea party phenomenon is entirely in service to a racist narrative in which capitalism and imperialism are endangered and the white electorate is the underdog minority. In the hype of the old its 1995 all over again, and the militia are massing at the gate.

Sikivu Hutchinson is the editor of blackfemlens.org and the author of the forthcoming book Moral Combat: Black Atheism, Gender Politics and Secular America.

Black America and the Morality of Choice

By Sikivu Hutchinson

In the film Precious, a teenage African American girl has two children by her HIV infected father. The possibility of abortion is never spoken of and the girl’s delivery of her second child is treated as a bootstraps triumph over the matriarchal hell of her upbringing by a degenerate “welfare queen” caricature. Yet Precious is simply one more example in a long line of contemporary American films that “omit” reference to abortion as a viable life option. Popular glorifications of young motherhood in such white female-centered vehicles as Juno, Sixteen and Pregnant and Knocked Up ,promote a conservative pre-feminist vision of compulsory motherhood. In this moral universe abortion is a third rail alternative that only bad women make in shame and secrecy.

When I chose to have an abortion in my 20s as an underemployed college student on the road to a PhD., it was in a climate in which the horrors of the pre-Roe vs. Wade era seemed distant and unimaginable. Now the pendulum has swung back, underscored by the recent debate over abortion coverage in the health care reform bills. Ostensibly drawing on the ban on federal abortion funding mandated by the 1977 Hyde Amendment, both the House and Senate bills drastically restrict abortion coverage in ways that will reduce the access of working and middle class women to safe legal abortions. Hyde restrictions on funding for abortion through Medicaid, the federal health insurance program for low-income women, effectively denied access to poor women seeking abortions. The House bill goes beyond Hyde, prohibiting insurers who participate in health reform insurance exchanges from including abortion coverage in their plans.

There has been very little national discussion of how women of color will specifically be affected by draconian restrictions on abortion in the health care bills’ mandated insurance exchanges. At approximately 6% of the U.S. population, African American women have a disproportionate number of abortions. African Americans’ long-standing allegiance to the Democratic Party has led to the assumption that blacks are unwaveringly pro-choice. However, there is tension between public support for choice among black voters and deeply held antiabortion sentiments in African American communities. A 2006 Zogby International poll showed an increase in anti-choice views among African Americans. Black anti-choice factions have gained greater visibility in the national arena in such influential far right media as Fox News. Internet searches for information on abortion and African Americans yield more references to “black genocide” than to pro-choice African American views. Mainstream black civil rights’ leadership remains steadfastly silent on the urgency of protecting legal abortion access and reproductive justice for black communities.

The overwhelming religiosity of African Americans, coupled with the political ascendance of the Religious Right, has made religious nationalist abortion foes the “authentic” voice of black America by default. It has also made frank talk about abortion's role in addressing the crisis of unwanted births in black communities virtually impossible. This climate fuels black nationalist and religious propaganda equating abortion with genocide. Hearkening back to eugenicist history, black abortion foes point to a white conspiracy to reduce the black population. However, skyrocketing numbers of black children who are homeless, in foster care and/or Child Protective Services illustrate the gravity of caregiving issues facing many African American families. And black abortion foes offer no viable program for addressing this moral and social crisis. They offer no viable program for the dilemma of an 18 year-old who had her first child at age 12. They’re MIA when it comes to concrete assessment of how this 18 year-old (multiplied by 10,000) raising her second child by an incarcerated older man, develops parenting skills, deals with anger management, gets an education, gets a job, finds health care resources, puts food on the table and grapples with the probability of being a single mother for the rest of her life.

The pervasiveness of popular images in which getting a man and becoming a mother are the end all be all of femininity make it easy to see why some young women decide to forgo abortion. Steeped in a culture where having a child at an early age is not stigmatized, being a young mother becomes an “antidote” to low self esteem and limited life opportunities. It is no mystery then why girls who see their friends get pregnant and have no other meaningful affirmation in their lives decide to sacrifice their youth for the fantasy of a baby’s unconditional love. It is no mystery why girls who are ambivalent go forward with a pregnancy anyway due to ignorance and/or fear about seeking out reproductive resources or lack of access. Because of the deep social stigma associated with abortion and the frayed social welfare net, the burden of educating young women about the existence of alternatives to early motherhood increasingly falls on peers and mentors in their communities.

Historically black women have not had power and control over their bodies. Under slavery compulsory pregnancy through rape and forced breeding was the norm for black women in this country. In the 19th and 20th centuries eugenicist sterilization policies were imposed on black women to assert racist control over black reproduction. However, noting the connection between reproductive freedom and social justice, Loretta Ross, co-founder of the reproductive justice organization SisterSong remarked, “We understand why African-American women risked their lives then and why they seek safe, legal abortion now. It's been a matter of survival. Hunger and homelessness. Inadequate housing and income to properly provide for themselves and their children.” Choice is a key aspect of achieving self-determination and sovereignty for black communities in a racist patriarchal culture.

Nonetheless, recent polls such as Zogby and Gallup have shown that there is increasing support for anti-choice, antiabortion views among younger people. In a national culture in which the bankrupt “morality” of the Religious Right is the default position on ethics and personal choice, many young people have a limited a-historical view of the real life implications of restricted abortion access. In the debate leading up to the House and Senate bills, the morality police, led by the Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Family Research Council, were out in full force, lobbying for more comprehensive restrictions on abortion coverage.

These views are reinforced by the Democratic shift in framing abortion initiated by President Obama. In January Obama lifted a Bush-era “global gag rule” ban on funding for foreign family planning agencies that provide abortion services. Yet early in his presidential campaign he showed his willingness to kowtow to antiabortion forces out of political expediency. He cozied up to antiabortion evangelicals with rhetoric about “reducing” the number of abortions by reducing unplanned pregnancies. He rubbed shoulders with homophobe Pastor Rick Warren at his mega-church in Orange County and gave him a plum position at his inauguration. He re-legitimated Bush’s faith-based initiative program by approving its funding base and tacitly endorsing discriminatory church hiring policies. Obama’s politically expedient approach to choice has bolstered the anti-choice antiabortion agendas of Blue Dog Democrats like Congressman Bart Stupak and Senator Ben Nelson. The aggressive recruitment of the Blue Dogs by White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel has led to the gutting of any semblance of progressive legislation in the Democratically-held Congress.

In the health care reform charade this will have disastrous consequences for black women and communities of color, who rely heavily on services like Planned Parenthood for preventive care (due in part to the Hyde Amendment). Every state that enacts parental notification laws and late term abortion restrictions further imperils the lives of women of color who generally have fewer health care resources than do white women of any economic level. The crisis of unemployment, unequal pay for equal work, unequal access to health care and a cradle-to-prison pipeline mean that African American women can least afford to be mis-educated about the right to choose because of religious dogma or destructive nationalist blather. In the midst of a dangerously reactionary climate we can least afford to cede visibility to the self-appointed “authentic” morality police of black America. Simply put, abortion saves lives, black lives, and standing on the sidelines while the Religious Right and its black allies hijack our rights is not an option.

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

Call Me Barry: Obama’s Tough Love

By Sikivu Hutchinson

In the dark of any given movie theatre, from Main Street USA to MLK Boulevard, they surround us: white America’s Hollywood objects of desire, playing romance and adventure in full amnesiac bloom. They taunt and entice, radiating spunk and derring-do in the face of strenuous man-hunting, universe-saving, dragon slaying and average hardworking Americana family-hood. Missing from the studio green light rosters are the tales of the ambitious, play by the rules black girls and boys newly-minted in the job market and beat down by underemployment. The ones who are initiated into adulthood on reverse discrimination screeds heralding the white working class as the last acceptably dumped on “minority.” The ones who are promised that the legions of Talented Tenth blacks armed with college degrees will level institutional racism. The ones who must quietly “absent” themselves from their resumes as white convicted felons, cashing in on their birthright, waltz through corporate doors.

A recent New York Times article on black college grads’ struggle to find jobs should be sobering for anyone with the deluded belief that Obama’s Talented Tenth magic will rub off on them. According to the Times, some black college grads, fearing that they will forever be consigned to fast food fryers or professional irrelevance, are changing their names from Rashida to Heidi, Omari to Chip (or Barack to Barry). Staggering black unemployment rates five percent above the national average have made black job applicants desperate to preempt racist discrimination by potential employers. In some instances, graduates of historically black colleges and universities have deleted all reference to their tenure and omitted mentions of involvement in ethnically suspect groups.

These trends point to the larger paradox of black invisibility. The Congressional Black Caucuses’ (CBC) futile White House lobby for targeted initiatives to address black unemployment underscores the divide between the image of black assimilation suggested by the hyper-telegenic Obama family and the reality of post-Jim Crow segregation. Jockeying for a white norm, blacks must effectively water themselves down, evacuate their social histories and memorialized sense of self and accomplishment. Racist death threats against Obama, coon/welfare mother cheat references on AOL news posts and Fox News fueled tea party insurgencies offer a steady avalanche of evidence that representations of blackness remain fixed in the white mainstream mind.

Indeed, the current crop of mainstream film narratives about blackness, from the blockbuster white woman’s burden romp The Blind Side to the lurid ghetto pathology of Precious—offer powerful affirmation of the seductive lure and redemptive powers of whiteness. Released in an era where the rhetoric of post-racialism has reached surreal fever pitch, both films are essentially bookended portraits of the perils of being an orphaned black child in a dysfunctional racial “subculture.” The character Precious initially achieves agency by fantasizing herself thin, “pretty” and white, while Blind Side protagonist Michael Oher escapes the “Moynihanian” churn of black poverty into the healing arms and tough love of a benevolent white mistress, or, rather, adoptive mama. While Precious gets props for spotlighting the subjectivity of a non-traditional black female protagonist, it does nothing to disrupt patriarchal assumptions about black femininity or challenge the masculinist culture of violence that underlies Precious’ sexual abuse by her father. The unrelenting bleakness and solipsistic vacuum of Precious’ swaggering welfare mother’s den in the projects effectively lets the dominant culture off the hook. Lacking historical context or socioeconomic critique of the complicity of racist sexist social institutions, these films offer comforting retrograde portrayals of good and evil, where transformation of individual circumstance is the bellwether for social change.

Ultimately, these triumphal human spirit over adversity morality plays go down well with prevailing conservative bromides of bootstraps enterprise and white (or, in the case of Precious, light-skinned black) patronage. Popular culture messages such as these also bolster Obama’s trickle down doctrine of “benign” ghetto neglect. Bailing Wall Street and his corporate cronies out to mega-billions while kicking the CBC to the curb, Obama has symbolically wagged his finger and reminded us hardheaded Negroes once again that he never promised black America any kind of Rose Garden.

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

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

Houses of Horror

By Sikivu Hutchinson


House of horrors. Nightmare on X Street. Shiftless apathetic residents with criminal pasts. Throwaway victims with dead-end lives.

Over the past several weeks the news cycle has churned with high profile examples of systematized violence against women and embattled communities of color. The Richmond High gang-rape incident, the Department of Justice’s egregious findings on untested DNA rape kits and the Cleveland serial killer case have all demonstrated that sexualized violence continues to be a national unaddressed epidemic. When news of convicted rapist turned serial killer Anthony Sowell’s Cleveland killing spree broke recently the media dove in feet first with its boilerplate on black urban dysfunction. In incredulous narrative after incredulous narrative, black criminal pathology, neglect, neighborhoods saturated with and inured to violence were all on lurid display.

The Cleveland story received more coverage than is normally devoted to poor black communities. Yet the coverage was noteworthy for its relentless focus on the macabre circumstances of the discoveries in Sowell’s house. Lost in the mainstream outrage over the house of horrors was the specter of decades-long neglect by the local police. Cleveland residents have long complained about the lack of police follow-through on missing person cases in the community. In language that echoed the sentiments expressed by black communities from South L.A. to North Carolina, Cleveland community members weighed in on the lack of coverage, exposure and law enforcement presence around local efforts to track their missing. Some of the Internet stories of the missing evoked the stereotype of drug-addicted black women, alluding to their being prostitutes and transients. With their spotty pasts and run-ins with the law the two Sowell victims who were positively identified were portrayed as textbook examples of black female criminality. And what bigger contrast could there be to nationally mourned white female abduction victims who are invariably depicted as apple-cheeked pictures of unblemished innocence. In the mainstream narrative, unruly criminal illicit black women, the kind who “invite” rape anyway, are hardly worthy of mention must less sympathy. Thus, Sowell was able to hide in plain sight because of the presumption of guilt that the criminal justice system associates with black communities. As a parolee in a criminalized community it was easy for him to rack up multiple victims. It was easy for him to let these murdered women literally decompose in plain view on his living room floor because of the belief that black communities are cesspits and black lives are not worth protecting.

In a more "rarefied" sector of the East Coast another “house” of horrors is being buttressed in the name of healthcare reform. Nancy Pelosi and her lawless Blue dog Democrat posse in the House of Representatives have voted to include an amendment to the healthcare bill that would deny women the right to abortion coverage. Under the terms of a private healthcare exchange in the misnamed public option women could not purchase plans from private insurers who provide abortion coverage. This provision would essentially create a two or three tier system in which wealthier women would once again be able to fund abortions and poorer women would be left to their own devices. Black and Latino women, who are disproportionately un and under-insured, and have the most to lose from unwanted pregnancies, would be the most deeply impacted. And with the more conservative Senate trotting out its own bill in a month, hardcore white collar state sanctioned violence against women will be on full display.

Prayer Cult Nation: Faith Healing Scams & Healthcare Reform

By Sikivu Hutchinson

Recently on a popular Black Entertainment Network talk show R&B singer Monica pitched her new reality show and extolled the virtues of prayer. Suited up in hip high boots like an emissary from God’s army, she credited God with guiding her through life and imbuing her with purpose. His word was her marching order, she proclaimed, as the rapt studio audience nodded in approval, giving credence to surveys that indicate African Americans are more religious, more likely to subscribe to Creationism and more apt to break out the Bible for guidance and counsel than any other group in the U.S.

Yet not since the Great Awakening of the 18th Century has “God” spoken through so many American public figures so unequivocally. The medievalist Sarah Palin has risen to cult status touting her personal speed dial to the Lord. The Old Testament God has become the kamikaze co-pilot of the Republican Party. And President Barack Obama frequently invokes both God as an adjudicating figure and prayer as an antidote to tragedy.

Prayer has become the national bromide for generalized suffering. If it can’t be sanitized, domesticated and defanged by prayer then it isn’t worth experiencing. Now, in the midst of the healthcare reform morass, prayer healing “therapy” may become a legitimate form of government subsidized medical treatment. According to the Los Angeles Times, a “little known” provision in the healthcare overhaul bill would authorize coverage for Christian Science prayer as a medical expense. The provision is sponsored by the ultra-conservative Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah and the liberal Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts. This strange bedfellow pairing is part ideology and part political expedience. Hatch is a notorious Mormon ideologue and Kerry’s state is the Christian Science Church’s base. Despite several high profile cases in which religious fanatic parents have been convicted for using prayer healing to “treat” their terminally ill children rather than seek medical treatment, the Senate healthcare provision would sanction this practice.

In a nation in which millions go bankrupt and/or die from not having health care insurance the decision to include prayer healing into the insidiously partisan healthcare deliberations is an outrage. Increasingly, prayer has wormed its way into the most mundane of American moments. Moments of prayer or “silence” have become more commonplace during local government meetings, schools, social functions and games. A recent AOL poll surveying site users about a Southern school’s decision to post a message to God received overwhelming support. A majority of users agreed that reverence for God is part of “our” nation’s heritage. As more and more Americans shrug in apathy at the leaky wall separating church and state, those who abstain from or question these mass spiritual entreaties are viewed as curmudgeon naysayers at best and un-American public enemies at worst. The explosion of public prayer—exemplified by the near manic drive to enshrine the most simple of pursuits with Godly sanction—seems to bespeak some deep-seated crisis of American selfhood which afflicts all classes and ethnicities.

According to the Christian Science Church, a faith healing internship takes the form of an “'intensive' two-week class instruction in Christian Science healing” after which practitioners “may take patients.” Treatment “may rely on passages of the Bible…or may simply be a period of silent communion. There is no formula and ‘treatment’ can be given in absentia by telephone or email.” Since Christian Science practitioners can hang up their virtual shingles after a two-week crash course why can’t apostles of Frodo or oracles of Pan be similarly credentialed? Ethnocentric bias has apparently banished Pentecostal snakes, Santeria chants, Wiccan spells and animist rituals from consideration as insurable faith treatments. However, the Senate provision would ultimately provide protection for so-called religious and spiritual healthcare, opening the gate to all manner of medically dangerous, clinically unproven treatments.

Few on the Left have raised concerns about the contradiction between conservatives’ draconian attempts to eliminate coverage for abortion (a medically established and lifesaving practice) in the healthcare overhaul and this obscure provision for government subsidized Christian Science hocus pocus. The House of Representatives’ deliberations on its version of the healthcare bill are being stalled by endless wrangling over toughening restrictions on abortion coverage from private healthcare companies that participate in a government public option insurance “exchange.” Under the current language these private plans could be purchased by poor subscribers with the aid of government subsidies. Yet anti-abortion legislators are jockeying to prevent private insurers that offer abortion coverage from even being included in the public option.

Perhaps poor women seeking reproductive healthcare would be advised to submit an email request for God’s intervention to their nearest Christian Science provider, courtesy of the federal government. In the only democratic nation in the postindustrial world that doesn’t have equitable government healthcare the watchwords will be “let them have prayer.”


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