Godless Americana: Race and Religious Rebels, Forthcoming Fall 2012

In Godless Americana, Sikivu Hutchinson challenges the myths behind Americana images of Mom, Apple pie, white picket fences, and racially segregated god-fearing Main Street USA.  In this timely essay collection, Hutchinson argues that the Christian evangelical backlash against Women’s rights, social justice, LGBT equality, and science threatens to turn back the clock on civil and human rights.  As a result of this climate, more people of color are exploring atheism, agnosticism, and freethought.  Godless Americana examines these trends, providing a groundbreaking analysis of faith and radical humanist politics in an era of racial, sexual, and religious warfare.    

“So much conversation regarding atheism and humanism gains no 

traction, and does little to push beyond areas of comfort and well 

worn arguments.  Sikivu Hutchinson's work offers an important 

corrective to this.  With clear and sharp insights, Hutchinson pushes 

readers to recognize and tackle the patterns of thought and action 

that limit any real ability to respond to issues of race, gender, and 

sexuality from a transformative and humanist perspective.  Read her 

work, but fasten your seat belt first!" 

 -- Anthony Pinn, author African American Humanist Principles and The End of God Talk: An African American Humanist Theology

Silence, Sexual Violence and Young Women of Color

By Sikivu Hutchinson

In April thousands of schools did outreach for Denim Day, a global observance that honors sexual assault survivors.  This Denim Day my Women’s Leadership Project (WLP) students from Gardena and Washington Prep High schools in South Los Angeles conducted classroom trainings on gender equity and sexual violence; challenging their peers to critically examine the media, school, and community images that promote sexualized violence against women of color.  WLP is a feminist humanist mentoring and advocacy program based at Gardena and Washington Prep.  Like most South Los Angeles schools these two campuses are predominantly black and Latino.  They have high foster care, homeless, and juvenile offender populations and will be among the most deeply impacted campuses if the Los Angeles Unified School District proceeds with a plan to phase out health education requirements.

Health education is a frontline social justice issue in our schools.  Much of WLP’s curriculum focuses on HIV and STI contraction, intimate partner violence, and sexual assault.  Women of color have some of the highest sexual assault rates in the nation. Yet, when the girls in our workshops were asked to speculate about why our communities have disproportionate rates of sexual assault they trotted out stereotypes like “mixed race women are more likely to be raped because they are the ‘prettiest’ and “black women get assaulted more because they have ‘big butts.’ The association between black women’s anatomies and sexual violence was pervasive.  It brought home how deeply our young women are impacted by internalized racism and sexism.  And it underscored how hyper-sexual media depictions of young women of color normalize sexual violence.

Youth of color do not have the language to talk about the pain of sexual violence.  As a survivor growing up in the 70’s and 80’s I certainly didn’t.  Coming of age in an era in which they are stereotyped and criminalized as hard, swaggering, and nihilistic youth of color don’t “play” as victims. So when the WLP students began their presentations they encountered ridicule and bitter denial in some classes.  There is still widespread belief among girls that women bring sexual violence on themselves because of the way they dress, act, talk or walk.  Consequently, much of our training focuses on the culture of everyday misogynist violence that makes it acceptable for young women to call each other “bitches” and “hos.”  In fact, at the beginning of one presentation with a particularly resistant class, a girl sitting in the front jokingly referred to WLP 12^th grade leader Liz Soria as a “bad bitch.” When Liz checked her she apologized, but the cold reality is that our girls are drowning in a 24/7 corporate media culture that serves up gang rape in videogames like Grand Theft Auto and state-sanctioned “rape” via the right wing family planning and abortion rights backlash.

Some girls claim they use the terms “my bitch or my ho” playfully.  In their view this neutralizes the negative connotations of these words, ala the way some young people use the word “nigga.” Of course, most girls of color use these terms to put “bad girls” who are deemed promiscuous and unruly in their place.  There is no consciousness that black women have always been deemed “bad” in the eyes of the dominant culture; as less than feminine, as bodies for violent pornographic exploitation, as essentially “un-rapeable.” For example, under slavery the rape of a black woman (regardless of whether the perpetrator was black or white) was not a punishable offense. And it was not until the mid-20^th century that the rapes of black women were even seriously prosecuted.  Thus, while white femininity is the beauty ideal and hence the human ideal—exemplified by the tabloid media’s obsession with missing white women and white girls who become nationally eulogized as “our daughters” the face of victimhood—the “bitches” and “hos” of the inner city symbolize the disorder and ungovernableness of urban America.

Unable to see themselves and their lives as valuable girls of color slam each other girls for being “ratchet” (the new term for an unruly promiscuous girl) and sloganeer violent misogynist lyrics without a second thought.  But as the WLP students work through definitions, case studies, and scenarios of sexual assault and sexual harassment in the classroom they often see attitudes begin to shift.  Debunking the myth that rapists are strangers lurking in dark alleys, rather than fathers, step-fathers, uncles, and cousins, the trainings often elicit identification from students who have never had this experience validated.  WLP frontally addresses homophobia and the stigma surrounding male sexual assault victims, particularly in hyper-religious black and Latino communities. Getting young men and women to examine the destructiveness of traditional norms of hard, aggressive, invulnerable masculinity is also a key part of our outreach. 

I consider myself fortunate to be working with young women who are building a movement to change our local and national culture of misogyny.  Ultimately silence—as the old HIV/AIDS activist saying goes—still does equal death.

Sikivu Hutchinson is program director of the Women’s Leadership Project and the author of Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars.

College for the One Percent

Women's Leadership Project students and alumni

By Sikivu Hutchinson

Recently former GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum called President Obama a snob for having the audacity to suggest that going to college should be a priority. As a privileged white male college graduate on big government’s payroll Santorum’s message to youth of color is: why go to college when there are unskilled sub living wage jobs selling oranges, cleaning houses, washing cars and shoveling French fry grease awaiting you in the ghetto? Santorum’s anti-college diatribe comes in an era when the need for a college degree has increasingly been questioned by both right wing policy makers and mainstream media. Yet, college-going continues to be one of the bedrock civil rights issues for youth of color in the U.S. Over the past several years the wealth gap between black and Latino households and white households has widened. Over the course of their lifetimes college graduates earn nearly one to several million more than do high school graduates. However, in California, Latino youth have the lowest college going rates among youth of all ethnicities despite the fact that they comprise over 50% of students in California schools. While college-going for African American students has increased college completion for youth of color overall remains abysmally low at major colleges and universities. Historically, colleges and universities that have few African American students and few culturally responsive on-campus resources have lower black graduation rates. According to the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, “Curriculum differences also play an important role in graduation rates. Carnegie Mellon University and Cal Tech are heavily oriented toward the sciences, fields in which blacks have always had a small presence. It continues to be true that at many high-powered schools black students in the sciences often have been made to feel uncomfortable by white faculty and administrators who persist in beliefs that blacks do not have the intellectual capacity to succeed in these disciplines.”

For youth of color who are the first in their families to go to college these challenges are compounded by the disproportionate number of black and Latino students who are in foster care, undocumented, homeless, and/or formerly incarcerated. Only 44% of LAUSD graduates go on to four year colleges. And the percentage of South Los Angeles high school graduates who do so is significantly lower. Due to budget cuts, inept professional development and institutional racism, culturally responsive college counselors, A-G college preparation courses, and highly qualified teachers are in short supply in high poverty schools. During a recent college forum at Gardena High School four activists from the Women’s Leadership Project and FUEL, CSU Long Beach’s undocumented youth advocacy group, discussed the importance of knowing how to prepare for and navigate college. All of the young women on the panel were the first in their families to go to college. The panelists discussed study groups, mentors, taking the time to meet with professors during office hours and tuning out the distraction of social media and peer pressure. Although the college-going rates of women of color outpace their male counterparts, college-educated black and Latina women continue to face steep obstacles in the job market vis-à-vis sexual harassment, employment discrimination (particularly within the private sphere), and pernicious wage gaps. Indeed, although black men have higher overall unemployment rates than black women, rates for black men improved at the end of 2011 and worsened for black women due to deep cuts in public sector jobs. The panelists addressed confronting sexist low expectations in school-community climates that normalize misogyny, teen pregnancy, and the model of black and Latina women as self-sacrificing caregivers. 

http://www.womenleadershipproject.blogspot.com/2012/04/wlp-presents-women-of-color-college.html 

Onward White Christian Terrorists

By Sikivu Hutchinson 

In yet another act of domestic terror against a family planning facility, a Planned Parenthood clinic in Wisconsin was fire-bombed recently.  The attack comes on the heels of the bombing of a Pensacola, Florida clinic in January.  Although no one was injured in the attack, the fascist demonization of Planned Parenthood by inciters like Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney continues to put women’s lives in the line of fire; in an era of vanishing clinics and mounting violence.  

In honor of Abortion Providers’ Day last month I visited a family planning clinic after participating in an abortion rights protest.  The head doctor on staff lamented how few of his colleagues had been trained to perform abortions. Volunteer patient escorts helped protect the tucked away strip mall facility from violent interlopers.  The scene was a vivid reminder of the atrocity of the assassination of Kansas abortion provider Dr. George Tiller in 2009.   

Tiller was murdered in cold blood in his church by former Montana freemen and Army of God member Scott Roeder, who said he was just following God’s law. At Tiller’s funeral anti-abortion protesters wielded signs proclaiming “God sent the shooter.” His murder was the culmination of years of attempted murders, death threats, bombings and arson attacks waged against abortion providers by white Christian terrorists. While law-abiding Muslim Americans continue to be profiled and surveilled, white Christian terrorists are handled cautiously.  Historically the feds have always reserved their most savage, concerted “counter-terrorist” campaigns for radical activists of color.  From 1956 to 1971 J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI launched its notorious Cointelpro “counter-intelligence” operation targeting radical groups in the U.S.  The operation systematically co-opted, jailed, and murdered activists of color in organizations like the Black Panther Party, the US Organization, the American Indian Movement, and the liberal Southern Christian Leadership Conference.  Hoover relentlessly smeared these groups as domestic terrorists. The fire-bombing of a Wisconsin Planned Parenthood clinic is a potent reminder of how white Christian terrorism gets a pass in the mainstream media.   

Yet white militants who invoke Christian fundamentalism to justify their barbaric acts against women and their allies are still dismissed in the mainstream as aberrations.  These spasms of Christian fundamentalist violence are largely peculiar to the United States. Anti-abortion activism in Western European countries such as Britian, France and Italy doesn’t inspire anywhere near the level of militant resistance seen here. This virulent strain of fundamentalism was nourished by three theocratic Republican administrations that dismembered the Constitution and effectively sanctioned criminal campaigns against abortion providers. So while the U.S. condemns Muslim religious fundamentalism and trumpets itself as a beacon for individual and civil liberties unbridled by theocratic intolerance it has become a breeding ground for the most dangerous Christian fundamentalist terrorist movement in the world.

Writing for the Southern Poverty Law Center back in 1998, Frederick Clarkson pinpointed the alignment of anti-abortion terrorism, white supremacist activism, and the far right militia movement.  Like the perennial black male inner city perp, the profiles of anti-abortion terrorists are always the same—“disaffected” white middle aged males, drunk with anti-government militia and/or a fundamentalist ethos steeped in the bloody retribution of the Old Testament. Clearly black men running around bombing abortion clinics or plotting to kill abortion doctors would get no farther than the nearest county jail cell.  And as the lynch mob justice meted out to Trayvon Martin, Kendrick McDade, and scores of other people of color demonstrates the threat of “savage” black criminality—particularly vis-à-vis white lives in the heartland or in gated communities—is the only national scourge that must be contained by any means necessary.  

Sikivu Hutchinson's forthcoming book is Godless Americana: Race and Religious Rebels

White Picket Fences, White Innocence

By Sikivu Hutchinson

Black children in America are never innocent.  Innocence looks like Dick and Jane, our bright-eyed tour guides through the idyll of green lawns, lazy bike rides down hopscotched sidewalks, and the mystery meat treasure of sandboxes under blue skies that sparkle into eternity.  From the 1930s into the 1960s Dick and Jane taught America how to read the American dream.  Picture book primers with these two characters snaked through every schoolhouse from the Deep South to the rugged West of African American “Promised Land” reveries. Before the mainstreaming of phonics, the Dick and Jane primers were the first to provide sight reading instruction supposedly grounded in average everyday life.  In their sun-kissed freckle-faced average-ness, Dick and Jane schooled America in the cultural literacy of suburbia and the holy trinity of nuclear family, heterosexual marriage, and whiteness.  Neat, well-dressed, ever-courteous, they established the template for a “normal” childhood of perfect single family homes in segregated subdivisions that would be tethered to the world’s largest interstate highway system in 1955.  Father was breadwinning and boozing. Mother was homemaking and Easy-Off sniffing.  Spot the family dog brooded faithfully at brother Dick’s side, primed to rip off the balls of any intruder.  Government subsidized Federal Housing Administration (FHA) loans and GI Bill funded college educations smoothed the pathway for Dick and Jane’s nuclear bootstrapping.  Black vets and black families needn’t apply.

In her World War II era novel The Bluest Eye Toni Morrison begins almost every chapter with a bitter homage to the manufacturing of Dick and Jane. The book opens with “Here is the house.  It is green and white.  It has a red door.  It is very pretty. Here is the family.  Mother, Father, Dick, and Jane.”  On the next page the words blur together, spidery and damp, underscoring the brutal contrast between idyllic Americana and the novel’s blistering story of incest, racial apartheid, misogyny, and psychic degradation in the life of a black Midwestern family.

As metaphors for American innocence Dick and Jane continue to taunt and terrorize.  These are the bodies that matter, that are worthy of protection, that demand the kind of national security epitomized by America’s panting 24/7 tabloid obsession with all the missing Caylees, Jaycees, Chandras, Elizabeths, and Natalees.  This is the legacy of human value and worth that so-called “white Hispanic” neighborhood watch “captain” George Zimmerman, like scores of American children of all ethnicities, was steeped in when he murdered Trayvon Martin in cold blood. It is the code that gives law enforcement license to criminalize the lives of blacks while harboring white killers.  Some residents of the Sanford gated community where Martin was killed allege that Zimmerman targeted black men.  Early on, his white father sought to deflect charges of racism by trotting out his Latino heritage.  Yet reference to his “biracial” status hardly neutralizes claims that he subscribed to racist beliefs about black people.  In the U.S., Latino racial identification has always been fluid, whereas the categorization of blacks has historically been bound by the “one drop rule”, or the rule of hypodescent.  Reviewing the results of the 2010 Census the online publication Latino Decisions noted that, “the Latino population is responsible for much (74%) of (a) 6.5% increase in white population. This poses an interesting dilemma: Latino population growth is driving the national movement toward majority-minority status, but the rise in white identifying Latinos is also responsible for a renewed growth of the U.S. white population.” Indeed, the Pew Hispanic Center’s 2004 report also noted that nearly half of Latinos identified as white on the 2000 census.  So when the news of the shooting first broke, Zimmerman was variously identified as white, white Hispanic (by law enforcement) and Spanish-speaking.  In the eyes of the police, Zimmerman was able to occupy whiteness in a way that would never be afforded a biracial person with identifiable African heritage.  This kind of ambiguity—or what feminist activist Diane Arellano has called “lesser white status”—is part of what legitimized Zimmerman’s self-defense claim. 

In his role as neighborhood watch captain, Zimmerman was upholding the time-honored tradition of white homeowners’ associations that protected white communities from dark interlopers.  During the era of restrictive covenants, pioneering 1940s subdivisions like Long Island’s Levittown New York ensured that black homebuyers were excluded through discriminatory clauses buttressed by the FHA, real estate brokers, private lenders, and banks.  In Los Angeles, black homebuyers who overstepped these boundaries were targeted, profiled, and often run out of their new homes by the local blockbusting “welcome wagon.”  These exclusionary white affirmative action policies solidified white middle class upward mobility. And their legacy can be felt in 21^st century America as residential segregation continues to trump income.  According to Brown University’s 2011 “Separate and Unequal” report, “affluent blacks have only marginally higher contact with whites than poor blacks” and the overwhelming majority of all whites still live in white communities (regardless of class background).  Then as now, national security meant protecting white homes and white property values.  Open carry and stand your ground laws merely reinforce this regime by giving white citizens carte blanche to police the “dangerous” racial other.  Fifty-seven years after Emmett Till was lynched in the name of white womanhood, the murder of Trayvon Martin—a beautiful son, friend, and prospective college student—is yet another testament to the terror of white picket fence innocence.

Decriminalizing Truancy in the LAUSD

By Sikivu Hutchinson

Recently, in a class discussion about youth not having a voice at school, my students gave me an earful about racially disparate discipline policies.  They pointed to a culture of disrespect that they believe marginalizes and disfavors outspoken African American students.  For many, this culture is rooted in a policing regime that kicks in before they even get to school, buttressed by criminalizing truancy policies that disproportionately target black and Latino youth.  Over the past several years Los Angeles Unified School Police and the LAPD have handed out 88% of $250 truancy tickets to black and Latino students.  Blacks and Latinos constitute 74% of the student population.  Moreover, a significant number of youth of color in South L.A. schools such as Gardena and Washington Prep High Schools are homeless, in foster care and/or indigent.  So in what parallel universe does a low income student, a homeless student or a student in foster care afford a $250 ticket?  Clearly doling out tickets to students who are already faced with deep educational challenges is a recipe for disaster.  But the city’s current daytime curfew policy bolsters a culture of suppression and enforcement that further exacerbates the yawning achievement gap and feeds the school-to-prison pipeline.  It sends students the insidious message that being late for school is a criminal act, rather than a social issue which caring adult providers, families, and communities must actively redress in order to serve the needs of struggling young people.  

Towards this end, Los Angeles City Councilmember Tony Cardenas introduced a Council motion that would revise daytime curfew laws to make them more culturally responsive to the needs of working class transit dependent students of color.  The motion was passed by the City Council’s Safety Committee on February 13^th and will go to the full Council for a vote on February 21^st.  It calls on the LAPD and School Police to end the practice of issuing citations with fines for truancy when minors are within range of their school sites.  It also requires that the LAPD and School Police collect demographic data on the population of minors cited for truancy infractions.  The Community Rights Campaign and allies such as Public Counsel and the ACLU are spearheading the effort to decriminalize truancy.  In addition to the City Council motion, the coalition is urging law enforcement and school officials to consider programs that emphasize restorative justice and non-punitive conflict mediation approaches to addressing truancy.  It is also recommending that school officials work with the MTA to develop policies that ease the burden on transit dependent youth who are often at the mercy of erratic bus schedules.  By framing truancy as a systemic issue informed by multiple social, economic, and educational factors, the Community Rights Campaign is part of a growing movement that has emerged to challenge long-standing institutionally racist and classist discipline policies that disenfranchise youth of color in the LAUSD.  Despite the 2008 implementation of the district’s so-called School Wide Positive Behavior Support System, egregious racial disparities in discipline are still rampant in the LAUSD.  The entire City Council should get behind this motion and send a strong message to LAUSD that its culture of youth disenfranchisement will not be legitimized by law enforcement’s suppression tactics on the streets. 

Sikivu Hutchinson is the founder of the Women’s Leadership Project, which is based at Gardena and Washington Prep High Schools.  She is also the author of Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars and the forthcoming Godless Americana: Race and Religious Rebels.

God's Body, God's Plan: The Komen Foundation Furor and Abortion as Black/Latino Genocide

"If you are a Bible believing Christian yet,
you don't believe that GOD can and will take care of you
and your baby, HIS "gift" to you,
then you are calling HIM a liar!
Uh...do you really want to do that?"

 By Sikivu Hutchinson

This is God’s body, the girl says. She is one of a group of middle school students participating in a youth workshop on misogynist images in media. The subject has turned to abortion, and her peers nod vigorously in agreement. Imani Moses, a high school senior who is facilitating the workshop as one of my Women’s Leadership Project students, challenges her to examine her position—“does God sleep, eat, live in and control ‘this body’ 24/7?” She asks, pointing to her own body. “No, this is my body, and I control it.” A ripple of unease goes through the room, as the girls chew on Imani’s defiance. Making the leap from God to self-determination is blasphemous for some. Yet, the persistence of these beliefs underscores the special peril the current fight over abortion rights poses for women of color.

Over the past several years, Black and Latino fundamentalist anti-abortion groups have vigorously aligned themselves with the white Religious Right in the battle to takedown family planning. Indeed, the recent furor over the Susan G. Komen Foundation’s decision to withdraw funding for Planned Parenthood highlighted the role of Eve Sanchez Silver, founder of a little known group called the International Coalition of Color for Life. According to the Los Angeles Times, Sanchez Silver, a former medical research analyst for and charter member of the Komen Foundation, has been a leading advocate against Planned Parenthood within Komen.

The International Coalition of Color for Life frames its mission as “protecting minority life from birth to natural death.” Its website is chock full of shrill abortion-as-God’s-scourge propaganda. To bolster its claims that abortion is genocide images of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger are stamped with Nazi swastikas. Historically revisionist assessments of Planned Parenthood conveniently omit the connection many early 20th century progressive Black activists made between family planning, birth control, abortion, and black liberation. Tellingly, prominent Nazis like Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Mary McLeod Bethune and Ida B. Wells supported Sanger’s controversial work with the Birth Control Federation of America. As African American historian Dorothy Roberts contends in her book Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction and the Meaning of Liberty, “Sanger (may have) adopted the eugenicists’ view of the dangers of racial deterioration…but she rejected their biological explanation for its cause…she held uncontrolled fertility responsible for bringing children into conditions of poverty and deprivation.” Roberts unpacks the nuances of Sanger’s views and policies, noting that “it appears that Sanger was motivated by a genuine concern to improve the health of the poor mothers she served rather than a desire to eliminate their stock.”

However, by using Sanger as a smokescreen to vilify abortion, anti-abortion foes of color are really savaging women’s right to agency. Twenty first century women’s liberation demands that women of color have safe, legal, and unrestricted access to abortion. As reproductive justice organizations like Sister Song have made abundantly clear, contemporary women of color are not serviceable wombs for the agenda of patriarchy, the state or organized religion. It is precisely because of right wing opposition to universal health care coverage that Black, Latina, Asian, and Native American women are more likely to rely on the wraparound health care services that Planned Parenthood provides. Yet, in chastising bad Black and Latino women about the genocidal evil of abortion, groups like the International Coalition of Color want to keep women of color grossly misinformed and subservient. In one especially fraudulent Power Point slide on the group’s website, Sanchez Silver claims that Komen’s “Pink Money Cycle” actually increases breast cancer in women because abortions cause breast cancer. This particular bit of right wing fantasy is just as reality-based as climate change denial. There is no scientific evidence that abortion causes breast cancer, nor is their medical research to back the pro-death anti-abortion lobby’s persistent claim that induced abortion (rather than spontaneous abortion, i.e., miscarriage, or “God’s” preferred form of abortion) is more likely to lead to death.

The National Cancer Institute (NCI) has refuted the claim that abortion increases a woman’s breast cancer risk. According to the NCI: “The relationship between induced and spontaneous abortion and breast cancer risk has been the subject of extensive research beginning in the late 1950s. Until the mid-1990s, the evidence was inconsistent. Findings from some studies suggested there was no increase in risk of breast cancer among women who had had an abortion, while findings from other studies suggested there was an increased risk. Most of these studies, however, were flawed in a number of ways that can lead to unreliable results. Only a small number of women were included in many of these studies, and for most, the data were collected only after breast cancer had been diagnosed, and women’s histories of miscarriage and abortion were based on their “self-report” rather than on their medical records. Since then, better-designed studies have been conducted. These newer studies examined large numbers of women, collected data before breast cancer was found, and gathered medical history information from medical records rather than simply from self-reports, thereby generating more reliable findings. The newer studies consistently showed no association between induced and spontaneous abortions and breast cancer risk.”

The fact remains that more women die during childbirth than they do from abortions. However, in the words of GOP patron saint Ronald Reagan, facts continue to be “stupid things” for Christian fascists. Thus the website also boasts that carrying a baby to full term protects women from developing breast cancer. Evidently if girls and women want to protect themselves from getting breast cancer later in life continuing a pregnancy by rape and/or incest is a viable immunizer.

Significantly, the Coalition of Color preaches a hellfire and damnation theme that is carefully crafted to exploit the cultural anxieties of “superstitious” people of color. Pregnant women who might be searching for reality-based options and resources for unwanted pregnancies are exhorted to just believe that God has a plan. The site claims that, “If you are a Bible-believing Christian yet you don’t believe that God can and will take care of you and your baby, His gift to you, then you are calling him a liar.” Bulging numbers of African American foster care and homeless youth are apparently the result of the unwillingness of apostate black women to cling blindly to faith in God’s plan. In California Black youth represent nearly 30% of the foster care population, 50% of the homeless population and 30% of those incarcerated in juvenile facilities. Yet Religious Right charlatans that preach an anti-government mantra are vociferously opposed to progressive health care, birth control, foster care and school discipline policies, as well as to repealing racist sentencing laws and prisoner reentry policies. Is the Coalition of Color willing to accept responsibility for the scores of poor children of women of insufficient faith? Or what about those holy rollers who trusted in God’s plan but can’t quite accept that experiencing rape and incest is a gift? Black and Latina women live in hyper-religious communities that have disproportionately high rates of rape and sexual assault. Restricting abortion access is clearly part of God’s plan.

Early Black and Latino family planning and abortion rights advocates understood that reproductive justice was crucial to dismantling racism and white supremacy. Christian fascists of color want to revert to a medievalism that would enslave and dispossess Black and Latino families and children, pimping women of color as Old Testament sacrificial lambs.

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