“God Sent the Shooter:” White Christian Terrorism and the Assassination of George Tiller

By Sikivu Hutchinson

“God sent the shooter,” the signs wielded by anti-abortion protestors at the funeral of slain doctor George Tiller proclaimed. Last week’s assassination of abortion provider and feminist George Tiller in a Kansas church on the so-called holy seventh day was not only a barbaric act of religious cowardice but a terrorist assault on the rights of women. Tragically similar to the 1998 murder of New York doctor Bernard Slepian, Tiller’s murder was the culmination of years of attempted murders, death threats, bombings and arson attacks waged against abortion providers by white Christian terrorists.

Despite the scope of this orchestrated campaign mainstream media rarely identify these acts or those who commit them as “terrorist.” Those who invoke Christian fundamentalism as justification for their barbaric incursions against women and their allies are dismissed as aberrations, even though the profiles of the killers are always the same, the suspects—generally disaffected white middle aged males, aligned with a crackpot anti-government militia and/or fundamentalist ethos steeped in the bloody retribution of the Old Testament—virtually plucked from central casting.

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

Christian fundamentalism has always objectified women’s bodies as patriarchal property and territory for reproductive control. It’s no surprise then that these white men deem themselves to be Christian soldiers in the war over the wombs of Middle American and Southern white women. It’s also no surprise that the Bible Belt, fount of hyper-religious public policy that demonizes sex education and contraception, has the highest teen pregnancy rates in the country. Christian fundamentalist dogma is about keeping ‘em barefoot, knocked up and in obeisance to a God that would rather see an impoverished 12 year-old incest victim carry her rapist father’s baby to term and suffer lifelong psychological trauma than undergo a safe legal abortion and have a reasonable expectation for a future. And it is immoral, radically anti-woman positions like these which make the “pro-life” misnomer appropriated by the anti-abortion movement so infuriating. In the militant anti-choice universe the lives of real babies living in poverty and their real mothers and real families are of no consequence next to protection of the religiously decreed “rights” of the unborn. White male anti-abortion terrorists can’t get similarly exorcised about cuts to women’s health care benefits and pre and postnatal care to mothers in real time because it would mean ceding control to flesh and blood women.

Tiller’s assassination also dovetails with a dangerous shift in public opinion regarding the future of choice for American women imperiled by unwanted pregnancies. Influenced by a decade of unrelenting right wing propaganda that equates abortion with murder and abortion providers with Nazi eugenicists, polls indicate that a growing majority of the American public has adopted a “pro-life” stance and is willfully ignorant about the life-giving and life-saving potential of legal abortion. Dispatching shooters from “God,” the anti-abortion movement must accept responsibility for the murderous religious rhetoric that led to the assassination of George Tiller and the terrorist assault on the rights and lives of American women.

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

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"Out of the Closet:" Black Atheists

By Sikivu Hutchinson

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

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

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

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

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

www.blackfemlens.blogspot.com
www.womenofcolormediajustice.com

Silence Equals Death

"Because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated." – Kimberle Crenshaw, "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex."









By Sikivu Hutchinson

There is silence in the classroom. Even amidst the clockwatching ten minutes-before-the-bell-rings clamor of a typical high school class there is silence, deafening and thick as quicksand. I have asked the class a question about the widespread use of the words “bitch” and “ho” to describe young women of color on campus and several boys are holding forth in response. They are the same four opinionated boys who have been the most vocal throughout these sessions, always ready with a quip, a deflection or, sometimes, serious commentary that reveals deep wisdom. They are bursting with perspective on this topic, but the girls in the room are silent. Some twist in their seats, some study the tops of their desks in calculated boredom, transporting themselves outside of the room, slain by the language of dehumanization. Finally a few girls chime in and say they use the terms casually with friends, as in “my bitch or my ho,” supposedly neutralizing their negative connotations akin to the way they use the word “nigga.” Some claim the words are justifiably used to describe “bad girls” who are promiscuous and unruly, not realizing that black women have always been deemed “bad” in the eyes of the dominant culture, as less than feminine, as bodies for pornographic exploitation. When I wondered aloud whether white women call themselves bitch as a term of endearment I got uncertain responses. My guess is that they don’t, not because white women are necessarily more enlightened and self-aware than women of color on gender, but because white femininity is the beauty ideal and hence the human ideal. Despite the misogyny that pervades American culture there is inherent value placed on the lives of white women. Every aspect of the image industry affirms their existence, and the spectrum of culturally recognized white femininity extends from proper and pure to “sexually liberated.”

This is exemplified by the tabloid media’s obsession with missing white women and white girls. Plastered on websites like AOL, relentlessly rammed down our collective throats in titillating morsels with whiffs of sexuality and scandal, poster child Caylee Anderson and company are a metaphor for Middle America’s Little Red Riding Hood fetishization of white femininity. Tabloid narratives of imperiled white females highlight the suburban virtues of white Middle America and not so subtlely evoke the social pathologies of the so-called inner city. Indeed, the spectacles of grief, mourning, and community outrage trotted out on CNN and FOX not only program viewers to identify with the injustice that has been done to the victim and her family, but to her community. In the world of 24-7 media these victims become our girls, our daughters, while the “bitches” and “hos” of the inner city symbolize the disorder and ungovernableness of an urban America whose values must be kept at bay.

In many regards this is part of the same “post-feminist” trend of telling women to sit down and shut up, to internalize the values of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy and stay in their place. A generation of Bush militarism and corporate reign over media has turned sexualized violence against women into a billion dollar industry, as illustrated by global romance with gangsta rap, violent video games and Internet pornography. Yet the desensitization of young black women to these trends is perhaps the most painful. When I talk to my students about the staggering rates of sexual assault and intimate partner abuse in black communities they are quick to judge themselves and their peers for inciting male violence. Unable to see themselves and their lives as valuable they slam other girls for being “hoochies” and sloganeer violent misogynist lyrics without a second thought. Awareness about the relationship between pervasive violence against black women in the media and male behavior is lacking. During the 2008-2009 school year a few South L.A. schools have been willing to partner with media literacy organizations like the Women of Color Media Justice Initiative on a gender equity curriculum that trains young people to engage in media advocacy. But unless we change the self-hating mindset of many young black women, silence—as the gay HIV activist saying goes—does equal death, and we are poised to lose another generation to a media-colonized sense of self worth.

Sikivu Hutchinson is the editor of blackfemlens.org, a commentator for KPFK 90.7 FM and co-founder of the Women of Color Media Justice Initiative, a partnership with the Los Angeles Commission on the Status of Women, the Ida B. Wells Institute, Mother’s Day Radio and the Women’s Leadership Project.





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Redefining the Stimulus

By Sikivu Hutchinson

What if an economic stimulus package took into account the real cost of living in the United States, the wealthiest nation on the planet with the most raggedy family social welfare net in the post-industrial world? Said stimulus package would acknowledge the reality of working families and the gendered economy of raising and socializing children and working outside of the home. Said stimulus package would include mandatory childcare provisions, paid family leave, universal health care and funding for family planning to ensure that working women remain in the workforce. Said package would include a provision for generating urban jobs where the majority of people of color, segregated from exurban professional networks, must live and work.

With provisions for expanding unemployment and health insurance president Obama’s stimulus package addresses some of these issues. But ever the bipartisan Pollyana, Obama has been furiously courting Senate Republicans, countering a Rush Limbaugh-fueled backlash to the stimulus. In a one hand giveth, one hand taketh away gesture, Obama signed the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) bill into law, making the kids of working families who don’t qualify for Medicaid eligible for health coverage—then quietly dropped a stimulus provision for family planning after Republicans expressed opposition. Obama characterized the SCHIP bill as a “down-payment” on his campaign pledge to provide health coverage for all Americans. But his massaging of Republicans in Congress makes it questionable whether he will have the political stamina to negotiate the creation of expanded health care coverage in the midst of insurance companies and conservatives hellbent on demonizing health care reform as socialist.

In the wake of a campaign season marked by studious avoidance of poor and working class women and men of color, it was almost otherwordly to hear President Obama publicly assert while signing the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, that women of color receive even less pay than their white female counterparts. Based on a lawsuit from a 19-year veteran of Goodyear Tires, the Ledbetter Act holds that due process for wage discrimination should extend beyond a 180 day window for filing. Obama’s bill recognized the brutal reality of pay discrimination—namely that it often takes years to discover and document inequities in pay. The years of pay disparities that women suffer not only translate into lost income but lost savings, lost capital, lost resources and lost time.

Single women of color still make the least, work the longest paid and unpaid hours and have the most riding on them if they fail as providers. And the bitter fact remains that single black women are the primary breadwinners in many urban African American families. As job losses and foreclosures continue to ravage urban black communities, the frontline impact will be on single parent families who can’t float on the feel good uplift of the president’s inauguration in place of a real safety net. With community colleges under strain due to the state budget deficit, adult education will be an iffy means of retraining a service-oriented workforce in the skill sets needed for the green jobs the administration has hyped. Then, there is the matter of finding affordable daycare for the children whose parents need retraining. As it is, working black parents must navigate a maze of providers and regulations to find affordable daycare. The recent tragedy of the murder-suicide of a Los Angeles couple terminated from their jobs at Kaiser for falsifying a signature on a daycare application underscores this painful dilemma.

In their “government handouts for Wall Street arrogance,” Republicans and some Democrats are riding the one trick pony of even more individual and business tax cuts as a remedy for the economic meltdown. Despite his concessions to Wall Street, the GOP and the Clinton establishment in his cabinet choices, Obama has signaled a willingness to piece together the social welfare net—now it’s up to us to make sure that his bipartisan Pollyannish-ness doesn’t derail the change mantra he swept into office on.

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

Grand Theft Auto: The Underbelly of Cadillac Records

By Sikivu Hutchinson

Midway through the recently released Cadillac Records, director Darnell Martin’s film on the groundbreaking record label Chess Records, Martin depicts rock pioneer Chuck Berry unleashing his signature “Sweet Little Sixteen” guitar riffs against scenes of surfing revelry. Berry’s song was notoriously pilfered by the Beach Boys in their song “Surfin’ USA,” a homage to white California youth subculture. Chewed up and spat out by an imperialist marketing machine, Berry’s music becomes yet another Jim Crow soundtrack for Americana pleasure. The first African American female to direct a studio film, Martin’s take on the Chess saga breathes new life into the all too familiar history of gifted black musicians ripped off by a white record promoter. Chronicling the rise of Chess artists Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Berry, Little Walter and Etta James, Martin highlights their struggle to gain fair compensation and recognition in a culture whose appetite for “black music” would ripen into a multi-million dollar industry during the 1950s. The avarice of record company owner Leonard Chess, who amassed a fortune from the music of these artists, paying them off with Cadillac cars and shady contracts, is a vivid reminder of the plantation ethos that drives American pop music.

It’s no revelation to say that white appropriation of African American derived music and idioms has been a cornerstone of mainstream American cultural identity, yet Martin’s film throws the question of consumption, commerce and the capitalist subtext of white pleasure into vivid relief. In the film young white women flock to black guitar players at segregated concerts, parading their relative racial and sexual freedom, oblivious to the consequences for black men. For white Americana, the rise of 1950s rock and R&B transformed racial otherness into a more mainstream adventure, a resort vacation into unexplored vistas of self-discovery that even white consumers with a few cents for a 45 record could take. White postwar prosperity and suburbanization made blackness all the more appealing because of its transgressive potential. As long as actual black people remained “out there,” in segregated urban ghettos and rural communities, black cultural production would continue to be a seductive bromide.

The 1956 Interstate Highway Act paved the way to white suburbia and ignited a car culture that was baptized in the sounds of rock and R&B. As suburban white flight exacerbated residential segregation, black music became the commodity of choice for a new generation of young white consumers. Yet in the film, scene after scene of crushing poverty, racist police abuse and public humiliation endured by Waters and company underscores the parasitic relationship between white consumption and spatial apartheid. For scores of white record buyers and musicians, classics such as Wolf and Willie Dixon’s “Backdoor Man” and Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven” would become standards, while segregated black spectators would grow up watching Hollywood scenes of white romance and redemption against the backdrop of black music.

Like Motown, Stax Records and other black-dominated labels, the work of the Chess artists established a new language for white self-invention while foregrounding the disparity between white and black postwar opportunities. The parallels between this history and the commodification of hip hop are compelling. As hip hop has spanned the globe netting mega millions for white corporations it has become another metaphor for imperialist exploitation of black America. Though Berry ultimately won song writing credit on Surfin’ USA after a threatened lawsuit, the film leaves us with the image of the hip swiveling Elvis Presley; his legacy and global empire forged on the backs of African American geniuses unknown and unrecognized in American music history.

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

Modeling Submission: Gender and Consumerism

By Sikivu Hutchinson

During the presidential campaign it became customary for ill-informed pundits to make declarations of gender equality because there were two female candidates running for high office. Feminist critics pondered the implications of having elite white women in the race, while Barack Obama gave a nod to gender by promising to address the pay equity gap when elected.

Now that the campaign has ended, the economy smolders and a trillion dollar bailout-fueled deficit looms, the prospect of seriously addressing the pay gap at the federal level looks bleak, due to opposition from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on Congressional wage reform bills. Despite all the inspirational sisterhood rhetoric that Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama inspired during the campaign, there was little focus on the actual circumstances of working women of color, who comprise the majority of the American (paid and unpaid) workforce and a big portion of American consumers. The myth that educated women of color have equal access to all professions regardless of their obligation to home and family persists despite a sweeping report from the Public Policy Institute of California which concluded that the gender divide in wages and occupational equity has widened. Women are still concentrated in lower-paying service sector jobs and excluded from more lucrative male-dominated science, engineering and technology fields. And women, surprise, surprise are still saddled with the majority of childcare.

So this myth of equal access has particular relevance to the way girls and boys are “gender programmed” into their roles as providers and caregivers by consumer culture. Girls’ social construction as objects and boys’ construction as active subjects begins right out of the womb. From clothes to toys to media images, gender programming amounts to little more than political propaganda on how to be male or female. Non-gender conforming little girls and boys are marginalized by the near-Victorian enforcement of gender hierarchies for children. When navigating the explosions of pink and blue in the infant and toddler clothing aisles the divisions are clear—based upon the designs and insignias that manufacturers slap on their clothes, little girls are to be pampered, indulged as sweet, beautiful, precious and deferential. Boys, on the other hand, are to be productive, self-sufficient, enterprising, rough and, ultimately, violent. Despite the inroads women have made into “non-traditional” careers, many children’s catalogues still feature scenes of boys engaged in rough and tumble or discovery-oriented play and girls decoratively draped around toy stoves, kitchen sinks and life-size dollhouses. These images of domesticity reinforce the not-so mixed messages that girls get from Bratz Dolls hawking multiculti coquettishness to pop singer Ashanti’s Donna Reed-style sex kitten video “Good-Good”—namely, that having professional aspirations is fine but make sure that you are fetching, non-threatening and know how to keep your man happy in the process. Female submissiveness is a given that young women internalize and act out in their interpersonal relationships, even as they see strong women of color all around them struggle with raising families and working jobs with no benefits.

For boys, gender programming results in conformity to destructive social norms. When they talk about gender the teens I work with often reflect on how they are taught to suppress their emotions in order to appear strong and invulnerable. Invulnerability translates into acceptance from both their male “homies” and female peers. For some, life in working class black and brown communities demands adopting a code of “hardness,” one that is reinforced by the glorification of violent masculinity that they see in white-dominated TV, film, network news and video games. Yet while young white men are validated by the media regime, the stakes are higher for men of color. The heinous levels of assault and murder of black girls and women and the homicides of black boys who die at the hands of their so-called “niggas” exemplify the self-annihilating influence of sexism and patriarchy. Just as the national economic crisis imperils communities of color the crisis of destructive gender socialization amounts to low-intensity warfare on youth of color. And until we begin to empower young people to redefine and re-envision the boundaries of masculinity and femininity we will continue to be under siege.

http://www.blackfemlens.blogspot.com/