Massa Mitt Pisses and Calls it Rain

By Sikivu Hutchinson

Massa “I'll piss on you Negroes from a great height and call it rain” Mitt shoulda been run out on a rail instead of booed at the recent NAACP convention. After slobbering over the stereotypically devout Black audience with all God’s chilluns got wings bromides he went on to tell them he would repeal the Affordable Care Act because, don’t you know, none of us should rely on big govt unless we’re helming a hedge fund and wanking Big Brother. Yes, he shoulda been run out on a rail and forced to do Mormon last rites at his multi-million dollar New Hampshire compound for the scores of black HIV/AIDS patients dropping dead every day. Or provide long term coverage to the homeless student of mine (unable to find a job due to her felony conviction) who racked up thousands in emergency room costs for an ulcer. Or play Florence Nightingale to the cousin who landed at the County hospital after suffering a gunshot wound; homicide and AIDS being leading causes of death for young black men. But Massa Mitt was in good company today as the House voted to repeal ACA and release the pressure valve on two years of pent up white nationalist sound and fury over government handouts to poor folk only a fraction of whom will be covered by the ACA due to Red State refusals to expand Medicaid.

Of course, by buckling on single payer the Obama administration has been no friend to African Americans who have the highest unemployment rates (over 14% nationally), lowest life expectancy, and greatest residential segregation of any group in the country. Back in 2009 when Obama was still fine-tuning his tough love message scolding Black America about sagging pants and deadbeat dads, African Americans were told that a rising tide lifts all boats. There was no need for targeted government programs for jobless homeless African Americans because mainstream social welfare policies would benefit them equally. Obama’s stance has always been disingenous given that the wealth gap between blacks and whites is staggering and even affluent blacks generally live in poorer neighborhoods than do lower-income whites. As Margaret Kimberly of Black Agenda Report contends “Of course this black man is president in large part because he doesn’t identify with the political aspirations of black people. He famously said there is no black America or white America, and the degree to which he was embraced by millions of black people only adds to the denial of the severity of our situation.” Romney’s NAACP sideshow only obscures how miserably the Obama administration has failed African American communities in a GOP wet dream of post-racialism.

'It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)*: In Memory of Alfee Enciso

S.Segal, J.Woods, Y.D. Hutchinson, T.Thigpen & Alfee
at Ms. Hutchinson's retirement from King-Drew HS, 2009

By Sikivu Hutchinson

Bob Dylan, barnstorming wordsmith and one of Alfee Enciso’s favorite artists, once said that “he not busy being born is busy dying.”  Alfee was always in the process of being born; as a teacher, writer, friend, athlete, public intellectual, and skeptic par excellence who never took anything on faith, abhorred dogma, and rammed his finger in the face of complacency every chance he got.  One of my most vivid early memories of him was when he strutted around our living room in high dudgeon after he and my mother Yvonne Divans Hutchinson had weathered another long day at Markham Middle School.  A student had stolen $50 (big big money in 1984) from his desk and he was royally pissed, railing against the injustice of it, jabbing a broomstick in the air for dramatic emphasis.  After one too many jabs the broomstick hit the ceiling, sending plaster raining down on the floor.  Sheepishly, Alfee dissolved into his trademark Cheshire cat grin, muttering forgiveness of the culprit who “probably needed the money more than I did.”

And that was Alfee; empathic satirist, eternal student.  As one of my master teacher mother’s first Markham mentees he internalized her lessons about teaching as radical humanist art and ethics.  Over the years I had the chance to see this wild man mix of swagger and sweetness in action with his students, young and old, from Dorsey and Washington Prep High Schools to L.A. County’s annual teacher conference.  He roved and ruled his classrooms like a prize fighter, inspiring all who entered to think critically about the sociopolitical condition of their communities in a global context.  At Dorsey he presided over classes of often brilliant but disaffected students who, like many in the LAUSD, had had it drilled into their heads that youth of color were incapable of intellectualism or scholarship.  Having learned from my mother’s rigorous example Alfee’s approach was to bring it on—lavishing his students with both multicultural and canonical “Great White Men” literature, steeping them in the poetry of black and Latino culture, schooling them in how institutional racism was at play from everything to the fast food that they ate, the crappy chronically late public buses they had to ride traveling through South L.A., and the draconian prison system that ensnared their friends and family at an early age.  Alf-Dog, as my mother affectionately called him, embodied all that was right about Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed—he ate, slept, and breathed teaching as life’s art and work; recognizing no dividing line between being literate about books, being literate about the world and being literate about the bitter paradox of America’s sham “democracy.”

In an era where many young men of color are socialized to believe that being hard and swaggering is the currency of real manhood, Alfee wasn’t afraid to show compassion and emotion to his students.  Once, when I was observing him at Dorsey while working for the LAUSD school board he broke down out of frustration with the sullen self-hating disdain they expressed during our discussion about black/brown tension at the school.  The kids shifted in their seats mockingly, unsettled by the “heresy” of seeing a grown man and an authority figure cry.  The boys in that room who called Mr. Enciso soft were just trotting out the patriarchal script they’d learned about men’s proper roles.  But, like many of us who teach, Alfee’s tears sprung from rage and profound impatience with American public education: impatience with the glacial pace of progress in so-called inner city schools, impatience with the sloth and corruption that deifies professional mediocrity, and impatience with how little time his students had to get out alive and punch through to freedom.  And this is what I will miss the most about him; the critical consciousness, ferocity, and courage that he brought to the classroom of life, blazing into it with a 100 mph sense of mission; knowing that if you weren’t busy being born every day you were busy dying.

*Disillusioned words like bullets bark
As human gods aim for their mark
Make everything from toy guns that spark
To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark
It’s easy to see without looking too far
That not much is really sacred

While preachers preach of evil fates
Teachers teach that knowledge waits
Can lead to hundred-dollar plates
Goodness hides behind its gates
But even the president of the United States
Sometimes must have to stand naked

An’ though the rules of the road have been lodged
It’s only people’s games that you got to dodge
And it’s alright, Ma, I can make it

                                    --Bob Dylan, 1965

The GOP's Tired, Poor, Huddled Masses

By Sikivu Hutchinson

With the final countdown to the election the GOP and the Religious Right are desperately trying to get their compassionate conservatism on. After months of spewing white supremacist Minuteman rhetoric about dangerous illegals, Mitt Romney has come, hat in hand, to Latinos with a “kinder gentler” message. President Obama’s granting of work permits and freedom from deportation to undocumented youth upped the ante for Romney. Speaking recently before the National Association of Latino Elected Officials Romney didn’t dare reiterate his infamous demand that undocumented Latinos “self-deport.” Instead, he trotted out bromides about keeping “strong families” together in a blizzard of limp pandering. Recently the New York Times reported that some evangelicals are (shockingly) advocating a softer stance toward undocumented immigrants. Like those freshly-scrubbed Mormon missionary boys who descend ritualistically onto the third world/inner city, some evangelicals are bug-eyed over the prospect of fresh meat from the “barrio.” The smartest among them have read the tea leaves and checked the collection plates. Latinos are the fastest growing segment of the evangelical population. Latino parishioners are fueling a resurgence of Pentecostalism in the U.S. and filling in the gaps of an aging white demographic in decline. Taking a hard line white supremacist stance on immigration is political suicide for the GOP and the Religious Right. As they continue to do a tortured 180 on immigration policy the Right will ratchet up classic divide and conquer narratives tied to bootstrapping and a racialized mythos of hard work. These messages ultimately pivot on an implicit contrast between immigrant Latinos and African Americans.

In her book Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison argues, “The rights of man…an organizing principle on which this nation was founded…was inevitably yoked to Africanism…the concept of freedom did not emerge in a vacuum. Nothing highlighted freedom—if it did not in fact create it—like slavery. Black slavery enriched the country’s creative possibilities. For in that construction of blackness and enslavement could be found not only the not-free…but the not-me…It is no accident and no mistake that immigrant populations (and much immigrant literature) understood their ‘Americanness’ as an opposition to the resident black population.”

This contrast between the immigrant trajectory of seized opportunity (and earned citizenship) versus the resident black population’s essential otherness, is a subtext of the GOP’s anti-government platform. Every school age child of color has been indoctrinated into Statue of Liberty shtick declaring that somewhere back in the mists of time white people were poor backward immigrants clawing tooth and nail to make it on America’s gold-paved streets. Every child of color is supposed to know that whites who work every day achieve upward mobility against great personal odds. That’s why they don’t see white people living in their neighborhoods or going to their schools. That’s why some of my students associate white masculinity with Donald Trump caricatures of wealth and privilege. The white immigrant narrative is privileged as the most authentic version of personal ingenuity and achievement. Exposed to textbook stories of heroic white historical figures that triumphed against adversity students of color are taught to believe that all white work is hard work. Dirt poor whites whose ancestors grew up in log cabins, escaped pogroms in Eastern Europe, potato famine in Ireland, and Bubonic plague in England made America the proud beacon of democracy and free enterprise that it is today. In the late twentieth century Asian and (legal) Latino immigrants picked up the torch. The blaring message to blacks is, if “those tired, poor, huddled masses did it, why can’t you people?”

As nativist and xenophobic as the GOP’s opposition to the Dream Act is it is still mediated by the perception that immigrant workers are hardworking. Much of GOP presidential primary messaging about work—from Newt Gingrich’s racist slurs about blacks waiting for handouts, to Rick Santorum’s “I don’t want to make black people’s live better by giving them other people’s money” comment--evoked the myth of black welfare dependency and white industriousness. Thus, even though immigrants of color will always be perpetual outsiders their citizenship is viewed as hard fought, hard won, and richly deserved. For example, golden boy Republican senator Marco Rubio has become the right’s Hispanic du jour because his autobiography seems to fit neatly into the narrative of American exceptionalism and immigrant enterprise. This narrative dovetails with Latinos’ intermediary racial status. Despite being of mixed black, Asian, Indian and European ancestry the majority of Latinos in the U.S. identify racially as white. Clearly the ambiguity of Latino racial identity was a significant factor in Middle American solidarity with George Zimmerman. Jewish Peruvian-American “white Hispanic” Zimmerman’s $200k defense fund was bankrolled by white fears of the criminal black welfare leeching other. Had Martin been “white Hispanic” and Zimmerman black not only would there have been no defense fund but Zimmerman would have been arrested, charged, and tried in due course.

A few weeks ago an Arkansas Tea Party official got knee-slapping laughs after telling the following widely publicized joke at a gathering:
A Black son asks his mother what democracy means. Her response was, "Well, son, that be when white folks work every day so us po' folks can get all our benefits.”
“But mama, don't the white folk get mad about that?”
“They sho do, son. They sho do. And that's called racism."

So while undocumented Latinos “steal” American jobs, blacks wait for handouts and white people toil for the American dream. Blacks believe living on the dole is “their” birthright; whites and bootstrapping family values minorities fester under the yoke of a welfare state that wants to kill free enterprise with taxes and enslaving regulation. The kinder gentler GOP will exploit this racist propaganda in an explicit appeal to Latino voters’ provisional model minority status. And it will be the soundtrack of 2016.

Myth of a Christian Nation: Norm Allen on Moral Combat

Excerpted from QBR, Quarterly Black Book Review

By Norm R. Allen Jr.

Sikivu Hutchinson’s superbly written and well-researched book, Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars stands out like a sore thumb among the books of “New Atheists” such as Christopher Hitchens, Victor Stenger, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett. Hutchinson puts forth a bold analysis of the political and religious culture wars raging across the U.S. She examines the Religious Right, scientism amongst white secular humanists, the need for social and economic justice, the ethical imperative to defend the rights of LGBTQ people, etc. She does all of this from the perspective of a progressive African American feminist.

Today many White Christians are insisting that America is a Christian nation. Indeed, Mitt Romney is meeting a great deal of resistance to his presidential campaign from conservative Christians that do not believe Mormonism is part of the Christian faith…However, Hutchinson maintains that race and Christianity have become inextricably linked among many White conservatives in the U.S. She maintains that the contention that America is a Christian nation is tied to a belief in White supremacy and fear of the “Other.” This analysis helps explain how the Tea Party used the notion of a Christian nation to foster the “birther idea,” and to maintain that Obama is a Muslim in Christian clothing.
Hutchinson does not simply critique conservative White Christians. She also has strong words for Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the atheist and Somali-born darling of the Religious Right. Ali has been a strong critic of Islam. However, she has been warmly embraced by the ultra-conservative American Enterprise Institute, she has a Eurocentric world view, and she romanticizes the West. Perhaps worst of all, she greatly downplays sexism and homophobia in the Western world. Hutchinson eloquently takes her to task for her shortsightedness.

Hutchinson does not shy away from critiquing womanist icons such as bell hooks. She notes that many Black women such as hooks point to the book Corinthians as a major source of spiritual strength and empowerment. However, Corinthians also contains passages defending patriarchy…thus the Bible presents women with a crippling paradox, when they would be better off rejecting dogma altogether.

The author discusses the effects that storefront churches have on the collective psyche and identity of African Americans. She writes: For example, in North Lawndale Chicago’s ‘community of 1000 churches’ there has been much debate about whether the proliferation of storefront churches is harmful or helpful to the local economy…A 2009 Chicago Tribune article documented community dissatisfaction with which church congregations utilize tax exempt status to open churches in areas where there is little sustainable commercial development…This concern is added to the concern over whether these churches are destroying the tax base of these neighborhoods and preventing job development that might otherwise be attained by developing commercial enterprises. Indeed, Hutchinson refers to an article in which the writer maintains that some storefront churches provide opposition to business development in their neighborhood because it could lead to increases in their rent…

Just as many White conservatives assert that America is a (White) Christian nation, others go farther and link God to small-town (White) America. This is set up in opposition to urban (Black and Brown) America…During the 2008 presidential campaign, Sarah Palin frequently harped on the difference between the values of real Americans living in small towns and the bankrupt inauthentic values of urban Americans. These code words have been crucial in mobilizing White conservatives to oppose Black candidates and stigmatize Black and Brown people. Moreover, they have been used to identify liberals as ungodly and unlikely to look out for the interests of “real” Americans.

Moral Combat discusses much of the little-known story of Black atheists inside and outside organized atheism in the U.S. and deserves a place on the bookshelves of all atheists and readers interested in the past, present and future of Black people in the U.S.

Norm Allen is the editor of the groundbreaking book African American Humanism and The Black Humanist Experience: An Alternative to Religion. He is currently writing a book entitled Secular, Successful and Black: 25 Profiles. He is also the editor of the journal The Human Prospect published by the Institute for Science and Human Values.

The Uppity Negress & the O.G.s

By Sikivu Hutchinson

Word on the street has it that that uppity Negress/bad bitch from Black Skeptics has elicited “complaints” from a cabal of festering white men. Last week PZ Myers reported that he and a few others had gotten an industry memo about her article “Black Atheists Rising” in the International Humanists News journal. Since uppity Negress/bad bitch wasn’t cc’ed she can only guess how the virtual smackdown went but PZ did a good job of checking the o.g. gangstas. In a 2000-plus word article about the social justice outreach and scholarship of non-believers of color seems the O.G.s were most riled about the Negress’ wack critique of white supremacy and scientism in the Kumbaya atheist nation.

Meanwhile, in a galaxy not far far away, the Negress attended the American Humanist Association (AHA) conference in New Orleans. On the way to the hotel and the virtually all white conference she rolled through dilapidated segregated neighborhoods in an air-conditioned shuttle bus. Post-Katrina the income and wealth gap between blacks and whites has become more gargantuan. Black unemployment has skyrocketed, black residential displacement is still prevalent, New Orleans schools are hyper-segregated and charterized, and the city is no less churched than it was several years ago. During a seminar the Negress facilitated on Culturally Relevant Humanism some of the white participants got all bothered when she introduced the alien concept of the dominant culture. The seminar went through a variation of Peggy McKintosh’s “Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” exercise in which race, gender, sexual orientation, and ability privileges are highlighted by who moves where in the room. For example, white folk will never have to worry about their kids being Trayvon Martin. White folk can bet that if they choose to have children they will always be able to see people of their race and/or gender represented in textbooks as authority figures and leaders in science and philosophy. Historically, from the postwar FHA to mortgage lender Countrywide to Louisiana’s Road Homeowner Assistance Program, white homeowners have benefited from affirmative action policies that built white wealth and institutionalized segregated residential patterns. Being of the dominant culture means never seeing it. It means having a near religious belief that good meritocratic shit like living wage jobs, home loans, tenure, and safe communities just come to you because you’re more enlightened, talented, disciplined, and hard working than those lazy shiftless racial others who are in church 24/7 and don’t subscribe to evolution.

During the seminar AHA development director Maggie Ardiente (an outstanding leader and the only other woman of color there) and Dr. Anthony Pinn both reflected on how they are constantly being told by whites in the “movement” that they don’t see them as people of color, don’t see their race, implicitly see them as exceptions, ad nauseum ad infinitum. As Pinn argues in his essential book African American Humanist Principles, white American Humanism was based on the elevation of the (white) universal subject and the construction of the racial other:

“European humanism and white American humanism develop under the assumption of human worth and integrity. That is to say, these two modalities of humanism emerge in light of an assumed value and worth. They develop as the “surface” of Renaissance and Enlightenment confidence. Yet, for those of African descent it is a different story. They are the underbelly of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment in that the advances that shape these two periods occur in part because of the slave trade, and the overdetermination and dehumanization of Africans. Mindful of this, one can safely say African American humanism is a reaction against modernity and its ramifications. The ‘freedom’ upon which modernity rests…was not meant for Africans; rather African bodies provided the raw material for this freedom.”

Radical humanism seeks to dismantle the naturalization of white supremacy as the invisible template for rational civilization. Because the o.gs don’t have to know that being Trayvon, or Aiyanna Jones ( a 7-year old black murdered in 2010 by Detroit police as she slept in her own bed), is a 24/7 reality for black children in colorblind America. From the time they are kindergartners to the time they are college students, youth of color are told that Western traditions reflect a universal aesthetic and cultural standard against which all other traditions are measured. They are trained not to see that white men dominate Western art history and education. They are socialized to believe that Western traditions reflect universal objective standards of beauty and truth. These standards tell them what the deep complexities of authentically human experience are, rather than that of their own cultures and communities.

The “Talented Tenth”
Humanism won’t mean a damn thing in their world without the right to self-determination. It has no weight or relevance without a social and gender justice movement that demands equitable access to education, living wage jobs, housing, reproductive health and universal health care as a moral human right. My Women’s Leadership Project (WLP) students challenge and redefine what culturally relevant humanism looks like on a daily basis through their resistance against racist sexist expectations. At the end of the month WLP seniors will receive First in the Family scholarships from a local nonprofit for their kick ass activism and academic performance. Students like Ronmely Andrade were never among the Talented Tenth expected to go on to college. A month ago Ronmely was headed to the military after graduation, swayed by the Marines’ relentless on-campus recruitment campaign. A gifted speaker and presenter, she later expressed misgivings about going to boot camp and training for a career as a mechanic. While so-called inner city schools in South and East L.A. are besieged by military recruiters the more affluent predominantly white schools on the Westside and in the Valley get the college recruiters and the A-G college prep classes with highly qualified teachers who don’t take off after two years. In an era of educational apartheid, the Americana fever pitch of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines is unheard of on these campuses because it is a given that their students will be going on to college, not dying on the frontlines.

Ronmely is an agnostic from a Catholic background and works long hours at Jack in the Box to help support her family. She is a natural born leader who exudes a steely poise and control in front of student audiences that are often hostile to hearing about sexual violence from assertive young women of color. I have been an admirer of her fierceness ever since she came into the program. When I was her age no one ever came to our classrooms to talk to us about sexual violence or sexual harassment. Even though many of us were being sexually harassed or assaulted daily by peers, predator teachers and relatives there was no engagement with the role this played in our sense of self-image and life expectations. There was no feminist youth movement to address misogyny and internalized sexism in communities of color. Criminalized as un-rapeable ho super-sluts women of color weren’t true victims of sexual violence. It was accepted that they should remain silent about their victimization, lest they be smeared as uppity castrating bitches detracting from the “real” issue of the brutalization of men of color. In a recent blogpost on reproductive justice 12^th grader Brenda Briones writes, “I have heard many Latino fathers brag about their promiscuous sons. I have never heard a Latino parent brag about a promiscuous daughter. In accordance with their Catholic or Christian beliefs, ‘good daughters’ are expected to stay virgins until marriage. This double standard makes boys think that young women are sexual objects that can be used to prove to the world that they are ‘true players.’ When we as a community, uphold these views, we tell young women that their value is rooted in their sexuality and not their talents or intellect.” A talented writer with a high GPA, Brenda will be attending a community college in the fall because she is undocumented and does not qualify for federal financial aid. In her experiences with college counselors WLP program coordinator Diane Arellano reports that undocumented high school students like Brenda are often explicitly told that there is no college path for them.

This year, with Diane’s guidance, Brenda and her fellow WLP students started an AB540 group to advocate for undocumented youth on their campus. Drop-outs, racist push-out policies, transfers, and incarceration winnow the numbers of 9^th graders who eventually graduate. Next week during their graduation they may sit on a football field that is only two thirds full; bad uppity “bitches” ready for their lifelong battle with the O.G.s.

No Justice: A Look at Domestic Violence Against Native American Women

By Carmen Rivera

In the United States, Native American women are the demographic group that is most often the victim of violence, both domestic and otherwise. Many officials are
calling for expanded forensic nursing research in Native American communities
and thus, an increasing number of people are doing both traditional and onlineforensic nursing programs. However, the real cure to this endemic problem may not be increased investigation efforts.

According to the Dart Center for Journalism, one in three Native American women will be
raped within her lifetime. And, according to reporting done by the National
Organization for Women, Native American women are victims of violence at rates that are three and a half times that of the national average for women.

A study done by the National Institute of Justice, entitled Violence
Against Indian Women, demonstrates that many assaults of Native American women are related to the perpetrator’s abuse of alcohol. Additionally, few victims seek assistance. Women who were surveyed as part of the study stated that if they were a victim of
violence, they would be uncomfortable seeking help from authorities because they
would not want to ostracize their spouse. This is often because many tribal
authorities, and sometimes even abuse counselors, are known to be abusers
themselves, and therefore these individuals would have no interest in addressing
the problem.

Additionally, according to women who participated in a focus group, there is
limited awareness of the extent of violence within the Native American community, because there exists a cultural dissuasion from openly discussing it. This limited awareness also prevents women from reporting violence or seeking help. Lastly, there is no infrastructure for men and perpetrators of violence to seek counseling
or assistance, something that the women who participated in the study stress is also important going forward.

Moreover,this cycle of violence is exacerbated by poor or ineffective law enforcement,
particularly because of the jurisdictional problems related to Native American
reservations. Reservations have their own police force, that is expected to
respond to complaints about violence or assault. However, according to the
National Organization for Women, many of these officers do not take Native
American females’ complaints seriously, nor do they not follow up on them.
Moreover, according to law, reservation police are only able to prosecute fellow
Native Americans – which means that if a non-Native American were to abuse a
female, it would become a federal case. And, in fact, seventy percent of
violence committed against Native American women is committed by non-Native
Americans.

Yet, the federal government seldom takes the initiative to prosecute these
individuals. This failure to prosecute has reached such epidemic proportions
that Attorney General Eric Holder recently formed a federal task force, the
Violence Against Women Federal and Tribal Prosecution Task Force as a way to
address the problem.

In recognition of the particular problems facing Native American women, congress
has added language to the Violence Against Women Act to specifically assist
Native American women by giving tribal prosecutors more power. The new language
in the act would also add protections for female members of the gay and
transgender community and female illegal immigrants. However, according
to the Huffington Post, because of these provisions, Republicans are currently unwilling to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act, and claim that such additional measures are the result of Democrats’ “scheming.” Therefore, whether the act is ultimately reauthorized is an open question, as is the level of commitment by the Federal Government to stop this problem.

Carmen Rivera is a freelance writer who is passionate about building universally safe communities. Shoot her an email if you ever want to discuss an article

"Return" of the Welfare Queens: Feminism, Secularism, Anti-Racism

The percentage of white feminists who are concerned about racism is still a minority of the movement, and even within this minority those who are personally sensitive and completely serious about formulating an activist challenge to racism are fewer still. Barbara Smith, Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology

By Sikivu Hutchinson

In the American imagination, Black women are the poster children for disreputable irresponsible motherhood and Latina “illegals” a close second. From birth to adolescence every girl of color must navigate a political climate in which Ronald Reagan’s racist welfare queen caricature casts long shadows. Ending its noble boycott of covering black women, the L.A. Times recently served up some red meat for welfare queen watchers. The front page featured an extensive profile of 27 year-old Natalie Cole, a jobless unmarried unskilled black mother with four kids. Entitled “Caught in the Cycle of Poverty” the article trots out an expert from Harvard who sagely proclaims that “poverty is bad for kids”; offering no further analysis on how the richest most militarized nation on the planet pimps out its children. Instead, we are regaled with Cole’s hot mess of personal failure and pathology. Coming from a long line of young single mothers, by the time she was 17 she was raising two children. She can’t be bothered to do a résumé or use birth control to avoid having a fifth child. The prayer "God in heaven, hear my prayer keep me in thy loving care" is taped to her bedroom wall. Needless to say she will not be getting her TLC, Oxygen or Lifetime reality show anytime soon.

The article was especially timely, tragic, and enraging because I recently found out that one of my most inquisitive students is pregnant at 16. Several of my Women’s Leadership Project alums, who worked their asses off to become the first in their families to go to college, speak of friends that have had children shortly after graduating from high school. As budding feminists they are overly familiar with the “validation” pregnancy supposedly provides working class young women of color inundated with media propaganda that hyper-sexualizes black and Latina bodies and demonizes abortion.
In this South Los Angeles school-community only a small fraction of the student body goes on to college and many youth are in foster care, often having to raise themselves. Small evangelical store front churches grossly outnumber living wage job centers, God and Jesus are touted as some of the biggest “cultural” influences, and high teen pregnancy rates are a symptom of the expendability of “other people’s children” (to quote education activist Lisa Delpit). Thirty years ago scoring a living wage job with benefits was still a possibility for a South L.A. teenager with only a high school diploma. Now, having a college degree is the bare minimum for getting a decent paying job. However the regime of mass incarceration has made the barriers to college-going even higher for youth of color. One in six black men has been incarcerated and in some instances whites with criminal records elicit more favorable responses from employers than do black or Latino applicants with no records. Mainstream media focus on the staggering unemployment rates of men of color has eclipsed attention to the economic downturn’s equally devastating impact on black women. Deepening segregation, diminishing job prospects due to the gutting of public sector employment (23% of black women are employed in public sector jobs) and mental health crises have pushed more women of color into the church pews, or, alternative spirituality, with a vengeance.
So what does the intersection of non-theism and feminism mean within the context of the New Jim Crow? And what might secularist feminism mean for women of color when the vast majority of them still view feminism as a “white” thing, chronically disengaged from critical issues of economic justice? These were some of the issues I cared about coming into CFI’s first ever Women in Secularism conference. The event was organized by DC CFI director Melody Hensley, who did an excellent job of bringing together a cross-section of writers, activists, and academics to discuss the politics of sexism, theocracy, women’s rights, and secular organizing. I was pleased to finally meet atheist feminists like novelist Alyson Miers, author of Charlinder’s Walk and Atlanta radio host Charone Pagett in person. Nonetheless, the overwhelmingly white audience highlighted the quantum leap that remains in making humanism, secularism, and atheism culturally relevant to communities of color.

One of the highlights of the conference was Wafa Sultan, a physician, internationally renowned activist, and L.A. resident. Sultan spoke movingly about her experiences with misogynist violence and repression in Syria, detailing her niece’s tragic suicide after enduring an abusive forced marriage. Like the Bible, woman-hating is embedded in the very language and doctrine of the Koran (she alluded to most of the occupants of Islamic hell as being female). Sultan insisted that if Americans can lob bombs and send drones to Middle Eastern countries they should certainly be allowed to develop secular schools there; an item that is clearly not high on America’s militarist agenda. While powerfully condemning Islam, she sidestepped the issue of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East vis-à-vis how Western occupation has historically aggravated Muslim fundamentalism rather than spur secular movements and women’s rights in countries like Iran and Iraq. She poignantly compared living under Islam to hell then proceeded to criticize American women for “complaining” about their civil rights (and ostensibly cozier existences). Her dismissal was jarring in a nation in the throes of white Christian fascist/Tea Party/American Taliban backlash—which ape the very fundamentalist traditions white nationalists demonize in the “primitive” Middle East—against women’s rights, LGBT equality, undocumented immigrant rights, and economic justice. Perhaps sensing the cognitive dissonance her scold elicited she circled back and expressed solidarity with American women at the end of her talk.

Sultan, Greta Christina, Annie Laurie Gaylor and Elizabeth Cornwell from the Richard Dawkins Foundation discussed the benefits and drawbacks of religion on a panel that delved into everything from anthropology 101 to organizing strategies. Discussing the need to organize across political interests Greta gave props to the Secular Students Alliance, referencing the appeal of LGBT advocacy to younger activists seeking to coalition-build. On the subject of why male non-believers greatly outnumber women non-believers in most societies, Cornwell stressed the gender specific needs of women vis-à-vis caregiving and childrearing. She argued that women are effectively compelled to seek the social and community protections provided by organized religion. Greta argued that men didn’t need the comforts of religion because they already enjoyed gender, race and class privileges in a stratified society. Hence, women who break away from social and cultural conventions risk greater ostracism and moral stigma than do men (such as being labeled a slut/fallen woman or bad mother).

I spoke on a panel about the intersection of feminism and non-theism with fellow bloggers/writers Rebecca Watson, Jen McCreight and Ophelia Benson. Having received a slew of Internet hate mail and rape threats, Watson called out male atheists who love to rail against Islamic patriarchy and female genital circumcision whilst paternalistically denying sexism in the New Atheist movement. McCreight challenged the audience to push back against sexist exclusion of the views of women activists and writers who speak out on women’s rights and the politics of diversity. But more than simple diversity radical intersectionality demands that the movement go beyond the canned mantra of religion versus science toward an anti-racist anti-sexist anti-heterosexist vision of secular social justice.

In her book Women in the Church of God in Christ Anthea Butler discusses how “church mothers” sought sanctification as a form of social agency within sexist Black Church hierarchies. An alternative to ordination, sanctification allowed black women to “negotiate for and obtain power both within the denomination and without it…Church members pursued sanctification through…fasting, prayer, scripture study, and other disciplines, creating moral and spiritual authority.” In short, church mothers in COGIC created meaningful spaces to compensate for their exclusion from official channels of power and authority. They also negotiated morality in a context in which Black women’s bodies were constructed as the criminal sexual racial other set against the backdrop of white innocence, reason, and Western civilization. No Cinderella, Snow White, Rapunzel or Sleeping Beauty. During the panel I framed this history vis-à-vis the explosion of fetal homicide, race-selection abortion, and other anti-family planning laws that disproportionately criminalize women of color as pathological breeders. Despite being less than 9% of the U.S. population, black women are the largest segment of the skyrocketing female prison population. Black children are six times more likely to have a parent or guardian in prison. And colorism plays a role in black female sentencing and incarceration rates as well. According to a recent study done in North Carolina prisons dark-skinned black women were more likely to receive and serve longer sentences than lighter-skinned black women. The War on Drugs, draconian Three Strikes laws, suspension and expulsion policies that fuel the school-to-prison pipeline and the gutting of the social welfare safety net have deepened black and Latino criminalization.

But these are not secular issues that are privileged in traditional humanist feminist discourse. As labor activist Siobhan Brooks notes in her article “Black Feminism in Everyday Life,” “(my mother) did not relate to white feminism because the poverty of women like her was never an agenda for them. I think largely the white mainstream feminist movement rarely considered issues of class regarding motherhood…Growing up I knew better than to get pregnant because of my mother’s warnings about how I would end up on welfare, like most of our female neighbors who were single mothers. Many hadn’t completed their education. My mother did not hold these views because she claimed to be feminist; she held these views because she knew firsthand the interlocking systems of racism, poverty, and sexism.” For Natalie Cole and all those "other people's children," humanist feminism has got to be down for this radical challenge.

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.