Code Red Homophobia: Homelessness, HIV and Black Religiosity

 

By Sikivu Hutchinson

(Excerpt from the forthcoming book Godless Americana: Race and Religious Rebels)

For the past several months, Crenshaw Boulevard in predominantly black South Los Angeles has featured a series of striking billboards condemning homophobia and its role in the HIV/AIDS epidemic.  The billboards are the work of the black gay activist group In the Meantime Men, headed by Jeffrey King.  Sounding a “code red alarm” on the raging HIV/AIDS epidemic amongst African Americans King said, “The staggering rates of increased teen suicides in the last five years, and the uncontrollable increase of teen homelessness in America have awakened our senses to the damaging effects of homophobia in the Black community.  Every year, thousands of Black LGBT people are displaced from their homes, families, churches, and communities due to their sexuality, gender, gender identity, and gender expression. This has resulted in a mass influx of homeless youth on the streets of Los Angeles and other cities throughout the nation.”  [King will be a panelist at the upcoming “Confronting Homophobia in the Black Church” roundtable hosted by Black Skeptics Los Angeles at Zion Hill Baptist Church on February 27^th]  With African Americans comprising the majority of new HIV cases in the U.S., the epidemic has devastated black communities nationwide.  Yet the refusal of mainstream black America to seriously confront how homophobia and black religiosity drive homelessness and HIV only deepens the killing fields.

In her book Invisible Families Mignon Moore notes that “some in the Black gay community use religion to validate their identities as same-gender loving people.”[i]  Rejecting the Bible’s condemnation of homosexuality, gay African American Christians focus instead on what they believe to be the loving, compassionate, universalist message of Jesus.  As one respondent in Mignon’s book says, “I do believe God loves me and even though they may not agree with what I am I think that this is between me and God.”[ii]  For many African American LGBT folk, faith is intimately tied to cultural identity and is not easily shorn even in light of the social conservatism and heterosexism of mainstream black America.  Indeed, according to a study by UCLA’s Williams Institute, when compared with their white counterparts, African American LGBT folk are more likely “to attend religious services, to engage in prayer, and to self-identify with a religious affiliation.”[iii]  Straight, gay, bi and trans African Americans live together in segregated communities where racism, white supremacy, and criminalization shape their shared lived experiences.  Save for the drumbeat of white normalcy portrayed in TV, film, and advertising, our worlds are overwhelmingly black and brown.  Thus, it is not surprising that gay African Americans are invested in the same religious cultural traditions that prop up straight normalcy yet may afford them with a sense of community.  Despite the overall increase in secular Americans people of color have not embraced secularism in significant numbers. 

Yet, countering the homophobic dogma of organized religion is only one aspect of LGBTQ enfranchisement.  And it is for this reason that existing Humanist organizations are inadequate for queer youth of color.  The needs of LGBTQ youth of color can’t be adequately addressed by culturally homogeneous or colorblind approaches that don’t acknowledge the intersection of heterosexism, white supremacy, and racism.  For example, queer youth of color are especially vulnerable to becoming homeless.  Family economic instability, sexual abuse, religious dogma, discrimination at school and in local neighborhoods often precipitate homelessness amongst African American queer youth.  The nexus of foster care and mass incarceration has also dramatically increased homelessness amongst youth of color.  Youth who age out of foster care have few resources to fall back on, putting them at risk of becoming homeless.[iv]  Youth who come out of the juvenile or adult prison systems may be unable to find jobs or housing due to employment applications that require criminal felony disclosures.

With its illusion of glamour and accessibility, the city of Hollywood is a popular magnet for runaways and homeless youth.  The majority of Hollywood’s homeless youth are African American.  Forty percent of all homeless youth in the community identify as LGBTQ.[v]  Floating spectrally in the hills above the workaday traffic, the old Hollywood sign is a faded beacon and gilded promise for the klieg lit dreams of youth everywhere.  It’s purported that thousands of young people used to dam up at the now desolate Vine Street Greyhound terminal off of Sunset Boulevard every year.  Many sought refuge from personal trauma and upheaval; hungry for a new beginning, a semblance of family, home, and, true to the cliché, a shot at fifteen minutes of fame.  Hollywood is home to a network of homeless youth shelters run by organizations like the L.A. Gay and Lesbian Center and Covenant House.  As the largest privately-funded homeless youth shelter in the nation, the faith-based Covenant House has historically been averse to the needs of LGBTQ youth.[vi]  After years of discrimination against trans and gender queer youth, Covenant House Texas implemented culturally responsive policy that specifically addressed the targeting of trans youth.[vii]  According to Houston’s Out Smart magazine: “Since the leaders who followed its founder were Catholic nuns, its service has always included a religious component.  With little official acceptance of gay people coming from the Catholic Church, Covenant House has not been encouraged to focus on LGBT-specific programs and training.”[viii]  Writer Rachel Aviv echoed this view in a New Yorker article on queer homeless youth.  She noted that the organization’s “Catholic underpinnings have complicated the shelter’s response to increasing numbers of gay residents.”[ix]  One young lesbian Aviv interviewed complained that she felt pressured to go to church.  After she objected to a staff member’s heavy proselytizing “they sent the pastor to talk to” her.[x]  Promoting a new book about several inspirational homeless teens, the head of Covenant House has said that “we are each made in the image and likeness of a loving God.”[xi]  But having been despised and demonized by “God” for so long, when the script is flipped and an authority deems that God is suddenly loving and forgiving; why is God necessary at all?

When my colleague Josh Parr and I ran a homeless youth leadership group at Covenant House California in Hollywood from 2009 to 2012, some youth struggled to be housed according to their gender identity.  Conflicts about sexuality and gender often played out in our group.  Amber*, one of our female transgendered interns, got into fights with a cisgendered female youth leader who had “problems” with having her as a roommate.  In the general population of the facility there was clear tension between the “hard” bangers, and so-called gang-related males (who had come directly from the juvenile system), and openly queer and questioning youth.  Both groups navigated public identities that had been demonized as criminal, other, and threatening.  Being both homeless and of color already made them vulnerable to racist police who often roust and profile homeless people of color on the streets with impunity.  According to the Center for American Progress, of the “approximately 300,000 gay and transgender youth who are arrested and/or detained each year (more) than 60 percent are black or Latino.”[xii]  Carrying on the charade of hyper-masculinity, some of the hard boys were conflicted by their own inability to be truly free; to be comfortable in their own skin as bi or gay young men.  Most of the residents had not gone through any training or focused discussion on homophobia and gender identity.  The faith-based culture of the organization could not address much less affirm the multiple layers of queer of color lived experience.  What also became apparent with our youth interns was that the generally conservative culture of Covenant House could not help them reconcile the deep divide between their elusive dreams of TV, film, and music industry stardom and the reality of crushing poverty that homeless youth face.  Although the facility provides some job search resources, the more important long term goal of college access is a major stumbling block for permanently transitioning youth of color out of homelessness.  Because their lives are marked by constant physical, social, and emotional upheaval, homeless and foster care youth have lower college-going rates and higher attrition rates.[xiii]

These issues were a perfect storm in the life of "Todd", one of our most dedicated interns.  Bright and well-spoken, Todd had come to Covenant House from a background of sexual abuse and prostitution.  He seesawed between wanting to go to nursing school and cosmetology school.  Speaking to high school students about his experiences on the streets trading sex for food, pocket change, and shelter, he emphasized the dangerous options queer youth have after being rejected by their families.  At home and in the street, trans and queer youth are more likely to experience sexual abuse and sexual assault.  Lacking meaningful job skills, resources or education, Todd and many other youth at Covenant House were forced to rely on survival sex to stay afloat.

Racialized stereotypes about normative black and Latino gender roles also place trans youth at high risk, both on the streets and in schools.  The brutal 2008 murder of gender non-conforming teen Lawrence King by a male student at an Oxnard middle school shone a national spotlight on transphobia and violence.  But the fact that King was a working class boy of color, possibly grappling with racist cultural misperceptions about what his “rightful” gender identity should be, was not examined in mainstream discussions about the tragedy.  The 2009 suicides of Carl Walker Hoover and Jaheem Herrera, eleven year old boys of color who had been harassed at school because they were suspected of being gay, did not make headlines.  At the same time, bullying-related suicides involving white gay youth were more widely publicized and seized on as national calls to action.[xiv]  These cases were highlighted in magazines and on cable TV and network news.  Town halls were convened, experts were tapped, and bullying prevention became the mantra in public schools.  But the mainstream view that youth of color aren’t deserving victims prevents them from getting the mental health intervention and social reinforcement that they need.  Layer on being queer in a homophobic culture that demands hyper-masculinity from young men of color and feminine submission from young women of color (vis-à-vis heterosexual relationships, physical contact with males, caregiving, and life aspirations) and gender non-conforming youth of color are doubly and triply victimized.

Although many homeless youth have to resort to prostitution and survival sex, the issue is especially acute for women of color.  Racist/sexist notions of black female hypersexuality and pure white womanhood influence the way black women are perceived in the dominant culture.  As I argue throughout this book, women of color have never had the luxury of looking down on white women from pedestals or plantation houses.  The legacy of the dirty rapacious black Jezebel or spicy “bitch in heat” Latina shapes the way young women of color are perceived as naturally sexual and hence born prostitutes.  Lesbians of African descent are triply stigmatized by cultural demands for racial, sexual, and gender respectability.  For all American girls, conventional gender mores emphasize sexual purity and unswerving allegiance to men.  Narratives of home, hearth, and romance are supposed to enflame every girl’s desire.  From an early age, girls of color are socialized with the heterosexist script that being desired by a man and having children should be their authentic destiny in life.  Nowhere is this message more fiercely promoted than in the global toy industry.  Shoehorning girls into dolls, domestication, and dress-up, the global toy industry rigidly polices gender roles, reinforcing heterosexual conformity.  More insidiously, big box retailers and toy store conglomerates from Middle to urban America explode with princess merchandise.  With its emphasis on dressing up, hooking up, melodrama, pink power, and pageantry, the rise of the Disney princess industry has made hyper-femininity (laced with token displays of “girlish” spunk and “independence”) the national creed for millions of girls.  Consequently, there is little space in American culture for young queer women of color who are not perceived as “femme” or actively seeking male validation. 

Talking openly about homophobia during a workshop facilitated by my Women’s Leadership Project and Gay/Straight Alliance (GSA) students at Washington Prep High School in South L.A., some of the male students pushed back when asked whether or not they had an obligation to defend a gay friend who was being harassed.  Predictably, the football players in the group were the most vehement.  They felt that there was a clear line between the way gay and straight males behaved.  With its rigid culture of hyper-masculinity and big endorsement deals tied to alpha male and All-American girl superstardom, organized sports have long been a stronghold of anti-gay discrimination.  According to the Los Angeles Times, there are virtually no active professional sports figures that are out[xv].  So if a gay male was acting “gay” (i.e., flamboyant) at school then he was asking for a beat down.  I don’t want to seem homophobic, one student said, but that’s not “natural.”  Nature determined what was moral.  “Gaydar” (being able to tell who was and was not gay largely based on stereotypes about gay male effeminacy) was a truism that even the most conscious students believed in.  The girls in the GSA asked whether the ball players would feel the same if someone tried to jump them because they were black males.  Would it be ok for racist police, white supremacists, or other men of color to target them for being while black?  That’s different, some said, but others were silent, letting the analogy sink in.  If we had had the space for debate most would’ve talked about the physical fact of their bodies, arguing that blackness is an indelible biological fact, a magnet for every storeowner, cop or teacher who views black youth as guilty until proven innocent.  Pastors, community leaders, and other adults have drilled it into them that equating gayness and blackness is sacrilegious; a ruse manufactured by elite white gays to claim oppressed status and mooch off of African Americans’ civil rights legacy.  As the students thought about their allegiances, a teacher who has been a leader on social justice issues at the school challenged them to speak out.  He likened their moral complicity with homophobia to society’s indifference to the racism and sexism they experience every day.  Several years ago the school was slapped with an anti-gay bias discrimination suit that led to a settlement.[xvi]  Since then district policy around bullying and harassment has become more stringent, mandating that teachers and administrators report bias incidents and attend anti-bullying trainings.  Though important, mandates and anti-bullying trainings are ultimately band-aid correctives that don’t disrupt heterosexist American gender norms, identities, family structures, and cultures.  Similarly, simply including Hughes, Bayard Rustin, Gloria Anzaldua, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich or other LGBT literary and historical figures in a textbook without the cultural context of their struggles and vision is a variation on the charismatic great man/woman one trick pony.  And setting untrained teachers adrift in the classroom without culturally responsive professional development makes these policies virtually worthless for affecting long term change in classroom pedagogy.

Because segregated post-industrial capitalist America allows few authentic cultural spaces in communities of color, churches are dubious sanctuaries at best.  Some of the students in our GSA say that their churches accept everyone without judgment.  But when we probe more deeply they cannot recall open embrace of LGBT families or relationships from the pulpit.  Nationwide, gay African Americans and Latinos are more likely to be raising children in same-sex relationships.[xvii]  Thus, for many, “acceptance” means silence.  In its article “Black Churches May Be More Friend than Foe to Gay Congregants,” the Center for American Progress challenges the dominant culture’s belief (amplified during California’s landmark 2008 anti-gay marriage initiative Proposition 8) that black communities and churches are more homophobic than their white counterparts.[xviii]  The article contends that gay folks’ “relationship with black churches in fact provides safe spaces and a steadfast social network that helps them deal with societal oppression at large.”[xix]  It quotes the Reverend Delman Coates of Maryland, “who…says he has seldom come upon the antigay vitriol that black churches are alleged to promote (and) that, at most, some churches may employ a code of silence around sexuality, but few actually preach division and hate from the pulpit.”[xx]  But Coates’ distinction between explicit anti-gay sentiment and “benign” silence is a disingenuous one.  Lesbian activist and writer Reverend Irene Monroe is critical of the view that the Black Church is a more welcoming space for queer and same-gender loving African Americans.  Although a number of black pastors followed President Obama’s lead when he finally declared his support for same sex marriage in early 2012, Monroe points out that:

Church doctrine throughout African-American denominations hasn't changed on the topic of homosexuality, keeping the church tethered to an outdated notion of human sexuality and a wrongheaded notion of what constitutes civil rights…Many African-American ministers still believe the institution of marriage, at least within the black family, is under assault, and that LGBTQ people further exacerbate the problem.  For these ministers, some of whom support LGBTQ civil rights broadly but draw the line at same-sex marriage, espousing their opposition to same-sex marriage is a prophylactic measure to combat the epidemic of fatherlessness in black families.  In scapegoating the LGBTQ community, these clerics are ignoring the social ills behind black fatherlessness, such as the systematic disenfranchisement of both African-American men and women, high unemployment, high incarceration, and poor education, to name a few.[xxi]

Gay-friendly faith organizations dangle the promise that being queer, moral, and “good with God” are compatible.  But like the original sin of sexual temptress Eve and other dirty reprobates soiled with the shit of the Fall, this goodness comes with caveats and conditions.  Recently, I had a conversation with a local pastor who was struggling to address homophobia amongst his parishioners.  Some of them were vehemently opposed to a lesbian couple who wanted their partnership blessed in a church ceremony.  The pastor has expressed his acceptance of LGBT parishioners but was clearly shaken by the congregation’s response.  Tolerant pastors always discover that it is one thing to be tolerant in word and another to be moral and just in deed; given the inhumanity of the Bible.  Ultimately, to be part of the regime of Christian goodness there must be constant vigilance against the fundamentalist barbarians at the gate of Kumbaya who police whether or not “homos” get into heaven. 

Believers who support same sex marriage and LGBT equality insist that this is a bootleg un-Christian version of god.  Trust us, they say, to rescue God from the flat earth fundamentalists.  Liberal Christians and spiritualists alike insist that the “real” god—their god—is a loving, kind, benevolent, New Testament friendly patriarch (or matriarch).  Their god is a fount of inspiration, a benign spirit for good that moves and grooves within everyone and embraces all comers regardless of creed or deed.  The good believers assure us that this is so.  But they are always looking over their shoulders at the corrupt fire breathing believers nipping peskily at their heels like night of the living dead zombies.  They are subject to the same gyrations and justifications as fundamentalists for why their version of god is good, just, and right; worthy of the prizefight and fitting of the title.  In the 1970s Joyce Carol Oates short story “Shame” a pastor corrects a young woman who asks him about the certainty of religious authority figures:  “You don’t have the right idea,” he says, “It isn’t non-believers who doubt, but believers.”[xxii]

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[i]Mignon Moore, Invisible Families (Berkeley: UC Press, 2011), pp. 182, 206-207.

[ii]Ibid., p. 207.

[iii] David M. Barnes and Ilan H. Meyer, “Religious Affiliation, Internalized Homophobia, and Mental Health in Lesbians, Gay Men, and Bisexuals,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry (Volume 82, Issue 4), October 2012, pp. 505-515.  The study was conducted exclusively from 2004-2005 to New York city.  Though the study was not exhaustive, the “results supported the general hypothesis that non-affirming religion was associated with higher internalized homophobia.”

[iv] It’s estimated that one in seven foster care youth become homeless.  See “Hopes and Hurdles: California Foster Care Youth and College Financial Aid,” Report by The Institute for College Access and Success, 2009, p. 5.

[v] “No Way Home: Understanding the Needs and Experiences of Homeless Youth in Hollywood,” Report from Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, 2010, pp. 18-19.  The overrepresentation of African Americans is also reflected in the broader Los Angeles County homeless population.

[vi] Nicholas Ray, “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Youth: An Epidemic of Homelessness,” National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute and the National Coalition for the Homeless, 2006, pp. 4-6.  The report questions the granting of service provision funding to religious organizations that have historically viewed homosexuality and gay people as sinful.  Under former president George W. Bush, faith based initiative subsidies were indiscriminately doled out to religious organizations with no accountability.  Under the faith based initiative policy religious organizations can discriminate in hiring and service provision.  Covenant House is a recipient of faith based funding and has only recently begun to adopt culturally responsive policies that allow trans youth to be considered as the gender they identified with, rather than their biological sex, and live in non-segregated quarters.

[vii] Covenant House Texas was accused by LGBT activists of “identifying its transgender clients according to the gender shown on birth certificates and…ignoring complaints of bullying and discrimination.” Josef Molnar, “Covenant House Opens up to Transgender Youth,” Out Smart, June 16, 2011, http://outsmartmagazine.com/2011/06/covenant-house-opens-up-to-transgender-youth-gender-preference-now-recognized-by-center.

[viii]Ibid.; See also, Ray, pp. 4-6.

[ix] Rachel Aviv, “Netherland,” The New Yorker, December 10, 2012, p. 65.

[x] Ibid.

[xi] Tom Gallagher, “Helping Kids, One Bold Kindness at a Time,” National Catholic Reporter, October 13, 2012, http://ncronline.org/news/people/helping-kids-one-bold-kindness-time.

[xii] Jerome Hunt and Aisha Moodie Mills, “The Unfair Criminalization of Gay and Transgender Youth: An Overview of the Experiences of LGBT Youth in the Juvenile Justice System,” Center for American Progress, June 29, 2012, p. 1.

[xiii] The Institute for College Access and Success, p. 2.

[xiv] The bullying-related suicides of Phoebe Prince and Tyler Clementi elicited national coverage; prompting condemnation from president Obama and the creation of the “It Gets Better” anti-bullying campaign.

[xv] As the Los Angeles Times reports, “Even though public opposition to same-sex marriage and gay rights is rapidly eroding, the locker rooms and clubhouses of the country's four major sports leagues remain among the last bastions of homophobia in the U.S.”  The article states that there have been no active professional sports players in the NFL, NHL or NBA that have come out during their careers.  See Kevin Baxter, “In Pro Sports, Gay Athletes Still Feel Unwelcome,” Los Angeles Times, December 29, 2012. http://www.latimes.com/sports/la-sp-sports-homophobia-20121230,0,5283191.story.

[xvi] Among the charges were that LGBT students were being disciplined more harshly and bigoted religious condemnations were made toward out students and faculty.

[xvii] See for example, Francine Ramsey, Marjorie Hill, et al, “Black Lesbians Matter: An Examination of the Unique Experiences, Perspectives and Priorities of the Black Lesbian Community,” The Zuna Institute, July 2010, pp. 5-6; Sabrina Tavernise, “Parenting By Gays More Common in the South, Census Shows,” New York Times, January 18, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/19/us/19gays.html.  According to this article, childrearing in the South is more prevalent than in any region of the country and the majority of gay Southern parents are people of color.  Black and Latino couples are “twice as likely as whites to be raising children.”

[xviii] Aisha C. Moodie-Mills and Karen Miller, “Black Churches May Be More Friend than Foe to Gay Congregants,” Center for American Progress, October 30, 2012, http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/lgbt/news/2012/10/30/43299/black-churches-may-be-more-friend-than-foe-to-gay-congregants/.

[xix] Ibid.

[xx] Ibid.

[xxi] Irene Monroe, “Will Obama’s Support of Marriage Equality Keep Some Blacks Home on Election Day?” The Huffington Post, September 25, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/irene-monroe/will-obamas-support-of-marriage-equality-keep-some-blacks-home-on-election-day_b_1895246.html.

[xxii] Joyce Carol Oates’ “Shame,” The Wheel of Love, New York: Fawcett, 1970, p. 106.

Rape, American Style

By Sikivu Hutchinson

When I was five years old I was sexually assaulted by neighbors.  Ours was a tranquil post-white flight neighborhood of single family homes, obsessively tended lawns and keeping-up-with-the-Joneses home improvement. It was the mid-seventies; before black women’s experiences with rape had come into broader public consciousness through works like The Color Purple and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.  The term sexual assault was largely unknown. The language that rape prevention activists now use to validate the everyday terrorism girls and women deal with was not a part of our vocabulary or classroom curriculum. In my critically conscious upbringing I was raised to clearly understand the racist police who abused and murdered us, the racist criminal justice system that jailed us, and the racist cultural history that rendered us invisible. I was taught to revere the black warriors who crusaded against the holocaust of slavery and its aftermath.  But I was not taught to know, understand or identify the casual predators that moved in and out of our lives without detection or censure; the parasites who posed as strong upstanding black men in the light of day and terrorized with impunity behind closed doors buttressed by violent silence.

Last month’s barbaric gang rape and murder of a 23-year old female student on a bus in Delhi, India was a stark reminder of this violent silence and the global expendability of poor women of color in so-called democratic societies. The suspects—who were recently charged with rape and murder—allegedly attacked the young woman in order “to teach her a lesson” for being out with a man. Commenting on the international outrage that the crime has elicited against the backdrop of India’s economic ascent, writer Kishwar Desai reflected that “a certain class of men is deeply uncomfortable with women displaying their independence, receiving education and joining the work force. The gang rape becomes a form of subduing the women, collectively, and establishing their male superiority.” India is dead last on Trust Law’s 2012 list of 19 best and worst countries for women’s rights. Muslim fundamentalist Saudi Arabia is number 18. The U.S. is number six. But like South Africa (number 16) and Brazil (number 11), institutional racism, sexism, and heterosexism determine access to health care, reproductive rights, and economic opportunity in the U.S. In her article “Black Women, Sexual Assault, and the Art of Resistance,” Brooke Axtell writes that “the Department of Justice estimates that for every white woman that reports her rape, at least 5 white women do not report theirs; and yet, for every African-American woman that reports her rape, at least 15 African-American women do not report theirs.” Between 40-60% of African American women have experienced sexual assault by the age of 18.

Decades after “Denim Day,” “Take Back the Night” and other global rape awareness movements were popularized my students are still living the reality of violent silence. Nearly every girl in my Women’s Leadership Project (WLP) feminist mentoring program has been the victim of sexual assault or abuse. Initially, most have no language to articulate their anger, much less their post-traumatic stress experience. The repressed rage that girls of color carry with them about rape and sexual harassment comes out in shame, blame, and self-hatred. It’s spit out in the casual misogyny of their embrace of epithets like “bitch” and “ho.” It’s displayed in the yards of Rapunzel-esque weaves that they swath themselves in to obliterate their “ugliness.” And it is manifest in the increasing number of “very young girls” that are sucked into prostitution; brutalized by gang rape and “pimped out” by men they view as father figures. During a recent day of dialogue moderated by WLP students at Washington Prep High School many girls were loath to identify sexual violence as a significant factor on campus. There were numerous anecdotes about girls being threatened with gang rape as well as adult male campus security guards sexually harassing girls. Nonetheless, it was female behavior, and not male behavior and the culture of the school, which was criticized. In the grand scheme of the community the experiences of girls of color don’t matter. Far too often in mainstream discourse, rape is only politically significant when it is framed as a phenomenon that happens “over there”, in the backward “third world,” or “here” to a young white female victim in the civilized U.S.

In the aftermath of the young Indian student’s death, the outcry against the country’s misogynist culture of rape, murder, and dehumanization will hopefully be a watershed for legislation protecting women from sexual assault and intimate partner violence. But the patriarchal nationalist resentment that writer Desai portrays as India’s affliction also drives the savage anti-feminist backlash in the United States and its culture of violent silence.

 

Nice White Boys Next Door

By Sikivu Hutchinson

Standing in line at the California Science Center the day of the mass murder at Sandy Hook Elementary school, my students wondered aloud about the race of the shooter.  “More than likely he was white,” they agreed. As the only people of color waiting to be admitted to the exhibit, their open question about race elicited visible unease from a group of elderly white women across the line from us.

According to a Mother Jones timeline of mass shootings from the 1980s to the present, the majority of American mass murderers have been white males.  The most infamous young killers—the Columbine High shooters, Jared Loughner, James Holmes, and now Adam Lanza—share a common cultural theme and national narrative. “Deranged” loners who came from lower to upper middle class nuclear families, their murder sprees forever shattered white suburbia’s veneer of normalcy.  Over the past decade, the post-mass murder mantra has been grindingly familiar—“this couldn’t/shouldn’t/wouldn’t happen HERE, in our idyllic (white) suburban community.”  Catastrophic violence is implicitly marked as the province of the other, the inner city, the cesspit jungle where poor children (of color), according to GOP sage Newt Gingrich, have no work ethic and thus no “habit of I do this and you give me cash, unless it is illegal.”

And yet, methodically plotted acts of epic violence committed by young white males with mini arsenals aping video game assassins are increasingly the hallmark of “HERE”.  So no doubt the elderly white women’s unease came from a sense of deep existential displacement.  When you’ve been suckled on Ozzie and Harriet, its “hard” to have your whiteness referenced as a source of violence; especially by people of color.

As the unraced universal subject, white people are simply unaccustomed to being explicitly identified as white.  For many, the tired colorblind party line of white privilege means that just talking about race is racist.  Universal means normal, and even the most heinous white criminals (Gacy, Bundy, Dahmer, and the list goes on) are humanized by a back story of psychoanalysis, cable TV biopics, books, and pop culture reportage.  The wages of whiteness means not having to know the classic people of color ritual—i.e., that when big crime news breaks its pro forma for many African Americans and Latinos to find out the race of the perpetrator and then those of the victims.  If the perpetrator is white there is a collective sigh of relief that Middle America won’t have another dark savage, immigrant or Muslim community to demonize.  If the victims are of color, there is a short window before the media’s attention fades (ala the August massacre of six at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin) and shifts to more important matters like Lindsey Lohan or missing white girls.

Black and brown children learn very early on that perceptions of race and criminality are intimately connected.  In high school when my friends and I found ourselves at the business end of Inglewood PD officers’ rifles because someone in our car “looked” like a burglary suspect, it was a rite of passage initiation.  The killing of African American teenager Trayvon Martin was a lightening rod because American youth of color saw the failure to bring his killer to justice as symptomatic of the devaluation of their lives.  Guilty until proven innocent, youth of color never have the privilege of being universally perceived as the “nice” boy (as Lanza has been described) or girl next door that wouldn’t hurt a fly.  

According to a 2010 Blair-Rockefeller survey, many whites in post-racial America believe that blacks and Latinos are more lazy, unintelligent, and untrustworthy than either whites or Asians. If white Middle America views people of color as not having “white” values and “white” aptitude levels, then it’s no mystery why mainstream media pathologize people of color as naturally criminal and violent.  Black criminality can be boiled down to a rancid stew of shiftlessness, absentee fatherhood, and irresponsible motherhood.  Latino criminality stems from too much babymaking and gangbanging.  But like the moribund immigrant urban jungle of 19^th  social reformer Jacob Riis’ nightmares, it’s the “inner city” that’s the guilty co-defendant.  

Nonetheless, mass murder in an urban context is rare and mass shootings in schools of color are virtually unheard of.  Homicide is a leading cause of death for young African American men.  But contrary to the rap stereotype of Glock-toting men of color, an overwhelming majority of people of color are pro-gun control, while the majority of the white electorate is not.  The high school assailants in the Littleton, Colorado, the Jonesboro, Arkansas; and Santee, California shootings were steeped in a NRA besotted gun culture that fetishizes readily available firearms as the ultimate medium for violent white masculinity. 

However, these youth were instantly transformed into symbols of troubled, tragically “misunderstood” teens.  National conversations about the perils of bullying dominated the airwaves.  It was accepted that these tragic figures were “our boys,” our recklessly wasted youth.  It was conventional wisdom that preventive mental health resources could have minimized their inner turmoil.  As the bloggers Three Sonorans note in their piece, “White Privilege and Mass Murder in America,” “whenever white men commit mass murders it is just a freak isolated incident, but when we look at other crime statistics for minorities the reason given is that it is something innate to their culture, to their family.  It is those people.”

With Columbine there was tacit understanding that these boys’ acts were symptomatic of a potentially imperiled national heritage.  Conversely, any time violence erupts in a black or Latino context it’s a racial indictment, an indictment of a community, not a reflection on the rogue acts of lost boys from salt of the earth homes. 

As my students and I left the Science center, bracing for more news about the scope of the attack, it was clear that the tragedy would dominate the news for weeks to come.  The senseless slaughter of children from the “perfect” town may finally prompt serious bipartisan legislation to curb the barbaric gun lobby. But it will not prompt analysis of the violent masculinity at the heart of whiteness.  And if any of these nice white boy shooters had been black the national sentiment would have echoed the biting comment made by my student Jamion: “Send those niggers back to Africa.”

Leaving Jesus: Women of Color Beyond Faith

By Sikivu Hutchinson

Excerpted from The Feminist Wire

The 24-hour prayer sessions are the true test of a warrior for Jesus. They require Herculean stamina, the patience of Job, the rigor of elite marathon runners hitting the wall in a fiery sweat pit at high altitude, primed for God’s finish line. In many small storefront Pentecostal churches these “pray-a-thons” are women’s spaces; hubs of music, food, caregiving, and intense witnessing. My student Stacy Castro* is a bass player in her Pentecostal church’s band. She is also the pastor’s daughter and a regular participant in the pray-a-thons, a mainstay in some evangelical congregations. Much of her weekends are focused on church activities. And though she is an intelligent gifted speaker, up until her participation in the Women’s Leadership Project she thought little about pursuing college and wanted to go to cosmetology school. Stacy’s aspirations are not atypical of students at Washington Prep High School in South Los Angeles. In a community that is dominated by churches of every stripe only a small minority go on to four year colleges and universities.


Over the past decade, Pentecostal congregations have burgeoned in urban communities nationwide, as Pentecostalism has exploded amongst American Latinos disgruntled by rigid Catholic hierarchies, alienating racial politics, and sexual abuse scandals. The gendered appeal of Pentecostalism is highlighted in a 2008 American Religious Identification Survey which concludes that, “Latino religious polarization may be influenced by a gender effect, as in the general U.S. population, with men moving toward no religion and women toward more conservative religious traditions and practices. Two traditions at opposite poles of the religious spectrum exhibit the largest gender imbalance: the None population is heavily male (61%) while the Pentecostal is heavily female (58%). Italics added.”[i]

In my book, Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars, I argued that the literature on secularism and gender does not capture the experiences of women of color negotiating racism, sexism, and poverty in historically religious communities. The relative dearth of secular humanist and freethought traditions amongst women of color cannot be separated from the broader context of white supremacy, gender politics, and racial segregation. Harlem Renaissance-era writers Nella Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston are generally acknowledged as pioneering twentieth century black women freethinkers. Yet what few women’s freethought histories there are celebrate the political influence of prominent nineteenth century white women non-believers, many of whom were suffragists and abolitionists. None contextualize these women’s influence vis-à-vis the race and gender politics that shaped both the feminist and freethought movements. For example, I have yet to see an appraisal that seriously addresses the racism and xenophobia of forerunning 19th century freethinker Elizabeth Cady Stanton (who touted the cultural and intellectual superiority of white women over immigrants and people of color in her vehement opposition to the 15th amendment granting black men the vote) or the “curious” absence of women of color from freethought movements.

Historically African American women did not have the luxury to be freethinkers because they were constructed as the racialized sexual other. Their bodies were the backdrop to European American notions of individual liberty, humanity, and natural rights. Their labor was the raw material for European American intellectualism. European American freethought traditions were predicated on the enslavement of the racialized sexual other. Within the context of slavery and, later, Jim Crow, women like Stanton, Ernestine Rose, and other first and second wave white feminist freethinkers would not have had the license to be secular were it not for the dialectic between the civilized white Western subject and the degraded amoral racialized sexual other. Alice Walker powerfully evokes this theme in her essayIn Search of Our Mother’s Gardens, which contemplates the contradictions of black female creativity and “genius” within the holocaust conditions of slavery. She asks:

Did you have a genius of a great-great-grandmother who died under some ignorant and depraved white overseer’s lash? Or was she required to bake biscuits for a lazy backwater tramp, when she cried out in her soul to paint watercolors of sunsets, or the rain falling on the green and peaceful pasturelands? Or was her body broken and forced to bear children (who were more often than not sold away from her)—eight, ten, fifteen, twenty children—when her one joy was the thought of modeling heroic figures of rebellion, in stone or clay?

Black working women were not supposed to be geniuses. In the West, genius and Godliness are intimately bound to each other. Black women’s lives were too “cluttered” with the debris of the everyday—the cooking, cleaning, minding, managing, and tending that comes with the earthly terrain of caregiving—to soar to the heavens with geniuses. Small wonder then that the spaces they did find themselves in, that were available to them, became wellsprings for expressions of Godliness, both subversive and conforming. That the vast majority of black women were only afforded access to the worlds of work, the family, and church meant that their “genius” would by necessity be a reflection of those worlds. In the turbulence of antebellum America “God” became ordinary black women’s medium for expressing genius, creativity, artistry, mastery, and invention. Hence, secularism was a dangerous and untenable position because of the way black dehumanization was institutionalized. Where would black women go to be affirmed as persons? The courts, where their rights were not recognized? The Constitution, where their bodies were vessels? The education system, where their culture was demeaned as savage, primitive, and un-Christian? Government, where their bodies were deep profit for some of the nation’s most esteemed legislators and moral philosophers? White churches, where they were debased as Jezebels and amoral Children of Ham?

For Latinas coming from Catholic traditions, the ubiquitous image of the pure as the driven snow self-sacrificing Virgin Mary is the traditional model for femininity. But the Virgin’s white purity is only validated by the fallen dark whore; the black, Asian, Latina or Native American woman whose body, in the words of bell hooks, is “the sign of sexual experience.” As writer Yasmin Davidds Garrido notes, “It often seemed to me that unless I behaved just like the Virgin Mary I wouldn’t be good enough to win God’s approval. In order to be considered a good girl, I had to be quiet, submissive, and obedient…This is one way Catholicism coerces young girls to mute their voices.”

This is the backdrop against which women of color struggle with religious and secular belief systems. Even as the moral weight of their communities—reinforced by the dominant culture—is placed on them, many continue to seek refuge in faith and faith traditions because they provide a sense of purpose, direction, and meaning. Responding to a survey I conducted on high school aged young women and faith, twelfth grader Vanessa Linares* agreed that African American and Latina women are packing the pews because many of them “believe that women of color need faith/religion to be moral.” Thus, popular reality shows like the Bad Girls Club and platinum-selling pop artists like wannabe Barbie doll rapper Nicki Minaj show young women of color that hyper-sexuality is a quick and dirty form of “validation” for a select few. These women may appear to be flouting conventional sexual mores with “fuck you” alpha female sexuality but they are still rigidly bound by them. And by the same token the goddess cult that so many women of color flock to is also a cul-de-sac. Goddesses, queens, princesses, and other icons of so-called spiritual authority are by definition floating above the “sorry” muck of mere mortals. As Women’s Leadership Project program coordinator Diane Arellano comments:

Somewhere in college, I felt the need to proactively counter the general assumption that as a Mexican woman, I must be a Catholic or Christian. This conscious shift in my identity was informed by my interests and participation in activism. When I searched for models of Latino activists, I was very disappointed to see or read about “seeking strength” from ‘La Virgen’ or claiming their work is the work of ‘God.’ I thought about how oppression functions in communities of color and asked myself, isn’t there a good argument that can be made about the Church’s role in institutionalizing the oppressive gender, race, class, and sexuality paradigms that these activists are fighting so hard against?

2016: The Empire Strikes Back

By Sikivu Hutchinson

By Sikivu Hutchinson

Over the past four years President Obama has promoted Wall Street’s capitalist siege against working and middle class homeowners. He has sanctioned drone attacks on thousands of innocent Middle Eastern people. He has ignored the deepening crisis of African American unemployment, foreclosure, and mass-incarceration. He has presided over more deportations of undocumented immigrants than George W. Bush and literally excised the word “poor” out of his political vocabulary. The list of his concessions to militarist, corporatist, and faith-based public policies that undermine progressive social change is long. For much of his first term, Obama has indeed done a good job of consolidating empire. That said the defeat of Mitt Romney and smarmy Ayn Rand minion Paul Ryan should stand as a warning and “teachable moment” to the forces of bigotry, white supremacy, xenophobia, homophobia and Christian fascism that hate-mongering, race- and red-baiting are not enough. In the end, the so-called 53% that Romney cynically whipped up in lynch mob solidarity was not enough. Nor was the shrill coalition of older, white “government is the Anti-Christ” voters that have tried to demonize public employee unions and wipe out decades of civil rights gains for working people. Nor was the relentless propaganda for gutting health care for children, the mentally ill and the disabled. Nor were the welfare queen-mongers who wrapped themselves in the dirty flag of God and Country on the backs of “shiftless” black people and breeder “illegals”. These forces will destroy what remains of social welfare in the U.S. But the multiracial electorate of students and workers that organized to defeat Romney represents the true face of the nation. Some of my students were motivated to vote for Barack Obama out of the belief that a Romney presidency would have virtually guaranteed a new form of slavery —one in which women of color would be imprisoned by the backlash against reproductive rights, education, and workers’ rights. Four years ago so-called “personhood initiatives” were still largely unknown. Four years ago it was still possible to transfer from a community college in two years without system delays and financial aid had not yet become a fantasy. Four years ago the percentage of black homeless and foster care youth had not yet reached crisis proportions.

These are the realities that young people of color face in a state that is in the midst of its worst fiscal crisis in generations. If President Obama squanders the energy and direction of this newly galvanized constituency with more corporate toadyism and welfare for the super-rich 2012 will be the last gasp before 2016’s full court GOP insurgency with a “reformed” Ryan in sheep’s clothing and a kinder gentler brown surrogate to placate the “hordes.”

Trailblazing Black Women Scientists: Carol Mae Jemison in L.A.!



Dr. Carol Mae Jemison



Devin Waller

My 4 year-old daughter wants to be an astronaut, but what images in the mainstream media does she see representing astrounauts and space explorers? Buzz Lightyear and the predominantly white male trailblazers who guided the Mars Curiosity Rover.  On Sunday, November 4th, trailblazer and inspiration Dr. Carol Mae Jemison, the first black woman astronaut, will be in Los Angeles at the California Science Center and the California African American Museum (CAAM) to “give personal accounts of traveling on the Endeavour and life inspirations that led to her becoming a trailblazer.” Dr. Jemison has a B.A. in chemical engineering and an M.D. from Cornell University. In her autobiography Find Where the Wind Goes: Moments from My Life, Jemison reflected on how, after professing interest in being a scientist to one of her teachers, she was told to set her sights on being a nurse instead. As a sixteen year-old undergraduate at Stanford University, she was practically shunned by her physical science instructors.

Although her experiences occurred during the sixties and seventies, the dominant view of who is a proper scientist has not changed. Planetary geologist Devin Waller echoed Jemison’s experience recently when she spoke to Women’s Leadership Project students at Gardena and Washington Prep High Schools. Ms. Waller, who was just appointed Project Manager over Science Research and Artifacts at the California Science Center (where the Endeavour is now housed), related how she was treated like an oddball who clearly didn’t belong in upper division science courses by her predominantly white male classmates in the UCLA Physics department. Devin was the only African American woman at UCLA to receive a bachelor’s in Astrophysics in 2005. During her talk with WLP, she highlighted her early interest in science and her mother educator Linda Watts' efforts to expose her to science exploration despite there being no family members or role models who’d pursued science in her immediate community. She also reflected on her persistence at getting into the Geolophysics program at Arizona State University (again as the only black woman in her department), despite not having a background in geology.  During her tenure at ASU Devin worked on the predecessor to Curiosity and did well-received research on dust devils.

Dr. Jemison will be at CAAM at 2 pm.

The Spectator Sport of Black Women Bashing

By Sikivu Hutchinson

In the 1990s, The O.J. Simpson murder trial polarized America and highlighted domestic violence as a national cause célèbre.  At the center of the storm was Simpson’s wife, the blond Orange County-bred Nicole Brown Simpson, who’d suffered years of domestic abuse by an NFL legend deified as a pop culture god.  After O.J. Simpson was acquitted of murdering Brown Simpson white America wanted his scalp. Nicole was the perfect victim, the beautiful tragic heroine who died too young at the hands of a savage.  The trial of the century hinged on redeeming a white woman’s honor and bringing her Negro killer to justice.  Brown Simpson was grieved globally, transformed into a symbol of the deadliness of intimate partner violence and martyr of a legal system—signified by the “dumb” "biased" black female jury that acquitted Simpson—run amok. 

The underside of the verdict and the relentless valorization of Nicole Brown Simpson was the disreputable black female abuse victim.  Each year thousands of black women are shot, stabbed, stalked, and brutalized in crimes that never make it on the national radar.  Black women experience intimate partner violence at a rate of 35% higher than do white women.  Intimate partner violence is a leading cause of death for black women, yet they are seldom viewed as proper victims and are rarely cast as total innocents.  This is the backdrop to the tale of a group of white high school students in New York who thought it would be cool to don blackface and reenact the 2009 beating of pop star Rihanna by Chris Brown at a pep rally.  Like the gleefully bloodthirsty white audiences that gathered to view 20^th century lynchings, there has always been a robust market for white consumption of black pain.  A big part of the white audience’s glee came from not seeing Rihanna as a proper victim.  For white Middle America, intimate partner violence is only funny as spectator sport if the person being beat is viewed as other.  From the right wing’s Moynihan-esque propaganda on black welfare queen matriarchs to recent abortion-as-black-genocide messaging, black women’s bodies are fair game for institutionalized acts of violence, terrorism, and control.  So for a lily white school to find the brutal beating of a black woman hilarious is par for the course in a misogynist white supremacist culture that deems black women less than human. 

There is a deep connection between the current backlash against human rights for women and the white kids’ pep rally.  During the recent presidential debate, gender justice issues were reduced to hollow rhetoric about equal pay.  Mitt Romney prattled on about having “binders full of women” while President Obama tried to link the provisions of the Affordable Care Act with improving employment opportunities and equal pay for working women.  Although Obama rattled off a few vital health and family planning services provided by Planned Parenthood, the GOP assault on abortion rights went unmentioned.  Violence against women comes in many forms, and by ramming through law after law of draconian anti-abortion, fetal homicide, and “personhood” policies through state legislatures nationwide the GOP has become the foremost lynch mob of civil rights.  As the poorest, least compensated women in the workforce, women of color suffer disproportionately from the dismantling of reproductive health care.  But they are also brutalized by both parties’ promotion of corporate handouts, tax cuts for the wealthy, and denigration of social welfare programs that specifically target poor and low income families. 

Yet, violence against women of color is so far outside of the radar of social justice organizations, much less the context of mainstream politics, that it even elicits little outrage amongst many young women of color.  Over the past few years, whenever I have classroom discussions about the Chris Brown/Rihanna incident students roll their eyes and snort in exasperation.  Some girls dismiss the issue as an endless rehash.  More insidiously, others express the view that Rihanna was somehow complicit in her own beating.  She must have done something, she must have hit him first, she must have provoked it in some way with her mouth, attitude, body—is the typical blame-the-victim refrain.  

Not seeing themselves portrayed as worthy of human dignity, respect, and value has inured them to the unrelenting violence of explicitly anti-black anti-female media images.  According to a Pitzer College study, girls who are consistently exposed to “sexist violent rap videos were more accepting of teen dating violence.”  Training young women of color to come to voice, to identify the normalized violence that they experience on a daily basis, is one of the biggest challenges of feminist of color organizing.  Critiquing the pep rally incident, my Women’s Leadership Project students all agreed that the brutal beating of a Taylor Swift, a Britney Spears or even a Nicole Brown Simpson wouldn’t fly as spectator sport at a black high school.  The tragedy is that they all believed that Chris Brown’s beating of Rihanna would.