Call to Atheists and Secularists to Defend Women's Right to Abortion and Birth Control

In observance of the January 22nd anniversary of Roe v. Wade, Sunsara Taylor and I have drafted the following statement seeking signatories. We also call on bloggers to write, post and speak in support of abortion rights this Sunday. Please follow this link to the petition to add your signature:

Atheists and secularists generally pride themselves on respect for science, opposition to harmful religious myths, and a fierce defense of the separation of church and state. Yet there is a critical need for atheists and secularists of conscience to collectively challenge the current moral, cultural, and political siege upon women’s right to self-determination. Flowing from each of these principles, we call on atheists and secularists to make public their support for women’s right to abortion and birth control. Due to the insidious climate of anti-abortion propaganda and legislation these basic rights are being viciously imperiled.
Nearly 90% of U.S. counties have no abortion provider. 2011 saw 92 new abortion restrictions enacted throughout the states, shattering the previous record of 34 adopted in 2005 under President Bush. Doctors who provide abortion are terrorized and killed. In many communities, Crisis Pregnancy Centers (CPCs), funded by powerful Religious Right foundations and staffed by non-medical personnel, outnumber legitimate reproductive health facilities. Due to this climate of misogynist persecution the moral stigma and shame cast on women who get abortions is as great as ever. Women of color and working class white women who live in communities without adequate reproductive health care are disproportionately impacted by these policies.

But that is not all. Birth control is also under attack. Pharmacists refuse to fill prescriptions. “Personhood” amendments threaten to criminalize miscarriages and ban all contraception. And President Obama openly upheld Kathleen Sebelius’s unprecedented decision to overrule the FDA, thereby banning over-the-counter distribution of Plan B (emergency contraception).
All this constitutes an affront to science. Fetuses are not babies. Women are not incubators. Abortion is not murder. Fetuses have the potential to become babies but until they are born they are a subordinate part of a woman’s body and they are not independent biological or social beings.

 All this is rooted in harmful religious myth. More @ Defend Abortion Rights

Ethnic Studies, MLK & Great Men

By Sikivu Hutchinson

In one of the first scenes of the 2006 film Walkout, the day-glo radiance of L.A. suffuses a group of Lincoln High School seniors discussing their future prospects.  It is 1968, and most of them have been told by their school guidance counselor that secretarial or vocational school is their best bet after graduation.  Walkout is a flawed, yet rousing dramatization of the “Chicano Blowouts” of the late 1960s, a series of student-led anti-racist protests in East Los Angeles schools that are routinely omitted from mainstream portraits of the civil rights era.  Watching the film with a rapt group of high school students this past week reinforced the travesty of the recent suspension of Mexican American Studies in Tucson, Arizona.  The suspension is part of broader restrictions on Ethnic Studies programs that supposedly foment the “overthrow of the U.S. government” and “resentment” against other racial groups.  Forty four years later, the “back-in-the-day” scenarios the Lincoln students faced are nakedly relevant to black and brown students nationwide; textbooks with no Latino historical figures, minimal access to college preparation classes, low college-going rates, high drop-out rates, a school-to-prison pipeline, and a yawning economic gap between the sun-kissed neighborhoods of the tony white Westside and their own.

What resonated most strongly with my students was the divide between the models of youth resistance they saw on the screen and the narrative of invisibility rammed down their throats in overcrowded classrooms day after day where they learn that white people, and a few exceptional individuals of color, generally male, made history.  For many of them, civil rights activism is something that outsized icons like Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks “did” long ago in a galaxy far far away.  In most K-12 classrooms there is no engagement with King’s radical stance on capitalism, the American war machine and Western imperialism, nor contextualization of Parks’ and the Montgomery bus boycott’s significance for women’s liberation.

For my predominantly female class, learning about teenaged civil rights activists like Claudette Colvin and former Lincoln High organizer Paula Crisostomo was eye-opening, not only because of the revelation that teenaged young women were on the frontlines, but because of their battles with sexism and misogyny.  In 1955, the fifteen year-old Colvin preceded Parks in refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a segregated Montgomery bus.  On the way to the police station white officers reportedly took turns guessing her bra size.  After her arrest, Colvin was deemed to be an unsuitable civil rights role model because she was dark-skinned, working class, and had become pregnant by an older man.  As a leader of one of the most important educational equity protests in Los Angeles, Crisostomo was at the epicenter of an essentially nationalist Chicano movement that viewed sexism as a marginal concern. In her book Black, Brown, Yellow,and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles, researcher Laura Pulido notes that, “Most nationalisms are fundamentally masculinist projects predicated on redeeming the male subject.” Sexism in K-12 education and the nationalist ethos of many social movements of color have precluded the inclusion of women of color feminism in social science curricula. 

As my twelfth grade students prepare for the next phase of their lives, many of them express outrage over “just having learned” that women like them, from communities like theirs, organized against white supremacist patriarchal systems of so-called democratic “opportunity.” They are better able to make connections between the constant sexual harassment that they experience and the tokenization of women of color in American history. Stoking this rage toward critical consciousness and politicization is why K-12 Ethnic Studies based on intersectionality has enduring academic and intellectual value.  It is as much a part of King’s and Parks’ legacies as “I Have a Dream” bromides.

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

Our Feminist Future

By Sikivu Hutchinson, From the Feminist Wire

On the school grounds they call each other bitches with machine gun fury. This is the “new” term of “endearment”; a grand show of eye-rolling, teeth-sucking hardness to a world that chews them up, spits them out, and leaves them for dead, stranded between Virgin Mary and Jezebel. The righteous fury that they direct at and expect from each other is a function of criminal invisibility and zero expectations. Who would expect them to do anything more than pop out babies, latch onto some man, and live in the shadows of mainstream America’s white supremacist Barbie-Disney princess infantilizing caricature of womanhood? When I first met Sanaa and Karin* as 9^th and 11^th graders while teaching classes for my Women’s Leadership Project (WLP) feminist mentoring program, I was immediately impressed by their agile minds, sage observations, and sharp wit. Karin was in foster care after losing both her parents; Sanaa was one of six siblings from an emotionally turbulent home environment with little parental support. As the founder of WLP, which is based in South Los Angeles high schools, I train my students to do peer education on the everyday impact of sexism, heterosexism, misogynistic language, violence against women, and media imagery. Central to WLP’s peer training is enabling our students to develop a humanist critical consciousness about their shared struggle around paradigms of the sacrificial good black/Latina woman of faith.

I have been fortunate to have the assistance and vision of Diane Arellano, herself a mentee and former student of mine from the California Institute of the Arts. As an emerging artist and activist in her own right, she has been deeply committed to our goal of developing partnerships between black and Latina young women. Our program also provides reproductive justice resources, HIV/AIDS prevention education, and peer mentoring for undocumented youth. The high schools where our programs are based have high dropout rates and low four-year college going rates. In some instances, students can go all four years at these schools without knowing what California’s “A-G” college preparation requirements are.

Both Sanaa and Karin blossomed as speakers and feminist activists, challenging mainstream notions of what it means to be a girl of color...MORE @ The Feminist Wire 

Faith Pimps, Secular Conspiracies

By Sikivu Hutchinson

In American politics, patriotism, race-baiting and faith-based pandering are the last refuge of a scoundrel. And this political season militant GOP appeals to white Christian evangelicals have veered into neo-Cold War hysteria. One of the most powerful scenes in Orwell’s 1984 was when Party member O’Brien succeeds in brainwashing protagonist Winston Smith into believing that 2+2 equals 5. The Religious Right has been practically virtuosic in its 2+2=5 mass doublespeak; convincing mainstream America that Christians are the new minority and that commie pinko “secular progressives” (Bill O’Reilly’s preferred “smear”) are at the helm of a socialist conspiracy. The latest salvo in right wing doublespeak comes from Rick Perry, playing the Christian victim card in a desperate bid to remain relevant in the hinterlands. Primed for the Iowa caucus, Perry’s new campaign ad opens with an alpha male declaration that he is not “ashamed” to say he is a Christian. The ad then blasts the very Christian-identified Obama’s “war” on religion, the indecency of allowing gays to serve openly in the military and the prohibition on prayer in schools.


When Newt Gingrich coined the term “secular socialist”machine to flog his new book in 2011 he was just another overpaid neo-con on the rubber chicken circuit. In the years since he was forced out of the House in disgrace, he sleazed up to evangelicals with a Ted Bundy-esque conversion/redemption line—“humbly” laying his sins as a serial philanderer and ethics violator at the feet of God. Now his rise as frontrunner in the GOP race ensures that Glock force culture war rhetoric, diverting attention from the GOP’s war on the working class, will continue to command center stage. Good Christians know that poor children, who, according to Gingrich, never see anyone working in their crack-ridden, pimp-patrolled, drive-by riddled urban jungles, should rightfully be shoveling the shit of the bootstrapped middle class. This is what God intended. Poverty doesn’t speak the language of hard work, thrift and enterprise and poor children mean lazy Blacks and Latinos, shuffling from classrooms to prison cells. In a rigidly segregated downwardly mobile society the GOP’s moral assault on workers’ human rights and protections for poor children is the perfect template for a fascist Christian nationalism.

Sikivu Hutchinson is the author of Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars.

WORLD AIDS DAY & Gender Justice Education

From The Feminist Wire

What will need to happen to achieve the goal of eliminating new HIV infections, AIDS related deaths, and discrimination? What can we do, collectively, to get to zero?




By Sikivu Hutchinson

Young women of color are at the epicenter of this crisis. My Women’s Leadership Project students are kicking off two days of World AIDS Day peer education. So as an educator who mentors teenaged girls in South Los Angeles schools, I believe preventive education has to begin with breaking down the myths and stereotypes associated with heterosexist relationships, misogynist media images and patriarchal gender norms that undermine young women’s right to self-determination. Increasingly, working class African American and Latina women are being indoctrinated into a decidedly misogynist, anti-feminist view of womanhood and sexuality that has both a secular and faith-based tenor. Coming from highly religious households, many of my students have been socialized to believe that their “authentic” destinies lie in getting and pleasing a man. They struggle with the challenge of developing their own voices, preparing for college, careers and intellectual pursuits whilst battling the insidious tide of a so-called post-feminist universe where hypersexuality is conflated with liberated femininity. Young men of color are also imperiled by heterosexist, masculinist gender norms that promote hard thugged-out male identities at the expense of women’s human rights as well as loving/respectful homo-social, heterosexual and same-sex relationships and families. Getting AIDS cases down to zero must involve a revolution of mind and deed; a transformation of the way masculinity, femininity, and sexuality are perceived in the U.S. MORE@ http://thefeministwire.com/2011/12/collective-responses-to-the-hivaids-challenge/

From BOYZ to Gentleman Scholars: Literature as Life (Excerpt)

By Yvonne Divans-Hutchinson

I am a nationally board certified teacher and a veteran of forty three years as an English teacher in middle and high school in South Los Angeles. A product of South L.A. myself, I have always been concerned about the so-called achievement gap of African Americans, especially African American males. Despite the dismal statistics regularly trumpeted by the media—lowest academic achievement, highest in unemployment, lowest in college degrees earned, highest number incarcerated—I know that, with effective, culturally sensitive instruction, our young men can—and will—achieve. In fact, my greatest joy in the last two years of teaching came from my participation in the All-male Academy (AMA) at one of my former schools, an urban magnet high school.  The AMA was established in 2004 to address the absence of African American males in Advanced Placement classes, the discrepancy between one young man’s  score of advanced on the CST and his academic achievement—he received an F in English—and the disproportionate number of referrals and suspensions (51%) among male students, who were only 30% of the student population.

Due to competition from other medical magnet schools, on the eastside and in the valley, our once widely diverse population has diminished since its creation twenty-nine years ago as the first medical magnet high school in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Conceived by a group of African American community activists and parents, it has long been a haven for high achieving students of color and those who want to pursue careers in medicine and science. The student body is mostly African American (58%) and Latino (40%) with a small percentage of Asian, African, and Middle Eastern students. Only one-third of the population of 1500 students is male.

Reuniting with the Gentlemen Scholars

When I was invited to become a member of the English Language Learner Inquiry Leadership Team under the aegis of the UCLA Writing Project, I decided to focus on speakers of Black English, the African American Vernacular (AAV). My Gentlemen Scholars, the young men I had taught the last year before I retired in 2009, immediately came to mind. From the first day that they entered my class as ninth graders, I addressed them as “Gentlemen Scholars.” In his book Teaching Reading to Black Adolescent Males, educator Alfred Tatum discusses Black male literacy development in the context of “the turmoil milieu.” He underscores the importance of considering the environment of poverty, family problems, crime, gangbanging, police brutality, and racism, and “its implications for literacy among black males who attend school in America’s economically starved urban centers.” Vershawn Ashanti Young,  an African American assistant professor at the University of Iowa, emphasizes that being scholarly or acting like a “nerd” is viewed in “the hood” as unmanly or “acting white.”

I set out to counteract these negative perceptions and encouraged my freshmen to act like “schoolboys” instead of “homeboys.  “Homeboys,” I had been informed by one of my male students long ago, “did not carry books; that’s for schoolboys.” Because I had continued to visit my school since retirement, I knew that my former “schoolboys” were now seniors and that about half of them had remained in the All-male Academy for the entire four years.

As a past department chair and mentor to a few of the younger teachers at King/Drew, I had maintained my relationship with my ex colleagues. Consequently, I had no qualms about approaching  Ms. Code,*  the current teacher of my former all male class with a proposal to “borrow” the gentlemen back for a short time to do my study. She had guided the young men through the eleventh grade  American Literature/Contemporary Composition class. She was in  the midst of  teaching the first semester of  their senior World Literature/Expository Composition class.  When I asked to take over the class second semester, she graciously assented. 

That Is the Question

Both Ms. Code and I recognized that the chief characteristic of the class as a whole was their garrulousness. They reveled in talk. Their conversations were rousing (and sometimes rowdy) and usually dominated by a few, highly articulate members of the class, mostly Black students. Geneva Smitherman refers to “the natural talent for oratory prevalent among African Americans.  The man of words—be he preacher, poet, philosopher, huckster or rap song creator—receives the highest form of respect in the black community.  The verbal adroitness, the cogent and quick wit, the brilliant use of metaphorical language, the facility in rhythm and rhyme evident in the language of . . . many black students, may all be drawn upon to facilitate learning.”  As I reflected on my interactions with my former Gentlemen Scholars, Smitherman’s words resonated loudly.  I wanted to maintain that level of involvement and encourage all students toward oratory, or in our case, academic discourse. While I am aware of the educational trend toward focusing on black students who speak the so-called African American Vernacular(AAV), or Black English (Ebonics), and encouraging  “code switching,” in their written and spoken discourse, I did not choose to employ this approach. Code switching involves teaching speakers of AAV to learn and use so-called standard English** in formal and academic settings. They then “switch back” to Black English during informal or personal encounters with other African Americans. During my observations, modifying the students’ use of language did not strike me as imperative.  I have noted that the more well-read students are, the more conversant they are with “standard English.” Avid readers become steeped in language, unconsciously absorbing vocabulary and syntax.

Hence, I decided to explore the question: Which research-based strategies will prove most effective in enhancing the reading, writing, and thinking skills of the African Americans in my all male Senior World Literature/Expository Composition class?

Since the course was devoted to World Literature and expository composition, the class had already read widely in the literary canon: Oedipus, Hamlet, Beowulf, Things Fall Apart. Their activities included Socratic Seminars, small group and whole class discussions, graphic representations, written responses to open-ended questions about the literature, the production of individual and group performances enhanced by media and technology, and composing essays. They had reflected on many ideas, values, and issues of universal concern, especially those of relevance to them. One of their favorite topics was the nature of manhood. They pondered such questions as What makes a man a man? What is a real man? What does it take to become a man?

Tatum emphasizes, “Texts connected to larger academic, cultural, economic, political, social, and personal aims help …young [African American] males define who they are and what they can become; help them become resilient and move them to engage positively with others for their own benefit and that of the larger society.” With his admonition in mind, I set out to explore their notions of manhood more deeply. I had chosen two novels that met Tatum’s criteria, Always Outnumbered Always Outgunned by Walter Mosley, an African American author and gods go begging by Alfredo Vea, a Mexican American author. However, I could only teach one novel during the ten to twelve weeks of my guest teaching. Admittedly, my focus was on African American students, but my class also included young men of Latino descent. I needed to choose a text that would resonate with them as well. Meanwhile, I was very much interested in how the young men responded to the “Big Idea”—the nature of manhood—that had occupied them the first semester.

* Pseudonym

**Some scholars refer to it as “the language of the wider culture” or “the language of power.”

Yvonne Divans-Hutchinson is a veteran English teacher of forty-three years in LAUSD.  She has taught at Markham Junior High/Middle School and King/Drew Magnet High School of Medicine and Science. She is a National Board Certified teacher, a member of the UCLA California Writing Project, and an instructor in Teach LA/Teach Compton Teacher Intern Program for UCLA Extension

Sikivu's "Savvy Sister of the Week" Interview

This week I'm profiled as Savvy Sister of the Week by My Savvy Sisters Editor
Te-Erika Patterson:

MSS: Being Black, feminist and atheist sounds like a triple punch in the face to the "Miss Manners" generation. Can you remember what it was like to form these feminist and atheist views?

Sikivu: I grew up in a secular household, so I had a leg up on skepticism, freethought and intellectual curiosity. Both my parents were what I would call “activist scholars.” Some of my earliest memories coming of age in South L.A. in the 70s and 80s were of going to demonstrations, public forums and meetings on social justice issues relevant to the black community, particularly around the pervasiveness of police terrorism and police misconduct during that era. I was also exposed to authors, intellectuals and historical figures of African descent (many of whom embraced freethought) very early on, so this became my moral foundation. My parents ensured that I had literature from black women thinkers and writers. My father gave me my first anthology (by Mari Evans) on black women writers in high school and my mother was a nationally esteemed English teacher heavily into forerunning womanist/feminist writers like Toni Cade Bambara, Alice Walker and Toni Morrison. These were my values. Consequently, Christianity, supernaturalism and belief in God really had no bearing on my sense of ethics, justice, fairness and identity.

MSS: Outing yourself as an atheist in this society could be painful and scary. Why is it important to you to share your views on spirituality or the lack thereof?

Sikivu: My world view as a non-believer and a humanist goes beyond the question of spirituality. There have always been black free thinkers and secular humanists who have challenged the ways in which Western notions of personhood, public morality and Manifest Destiny-style justice pivot on racial/sexual otherness and the imperialist dehumanization of people of color. The dominant culture simply doesn’t acknowledge these traditions as being a legitimate and culturally relevant part of black intellectual history and social thought. For example, mainstream discourse fetishizes black religiosity and deifies MLK as a strictly religious figure and thinker without reference to the humanist underpinnings of black liberation struggle. So my charge is to bring secular humanist traditions to the fore and contextualize them in terms of the human rights struggles that people of African descent are still waging in this so-called era of American exceptionalism, post-racialism and post-feminism.

MSS: Is Feminism an anti-man movement? In your eyes, what is it?

Sikivu: The idea that feminism is “anti-man” is an absurd caricature. In its most radical humanistic form, feminism is a movement for the recognition of the absolute human rights of women, their families and communities. It seeks to break down heterosexist and patriarchal models of masculine and feminine that straightjacket all genders into binary oppositional roles. Patriarchy and sexism...More @http://www.mysavvysisters.com/2011/11/my-savvy-sister-of-week-sikivu.html