Sikivu Hutchinson's Blog
May 27, 2014
The Obamas’ Race to the Bottom
MichelleObamaBrownAt60.jpg by Sikivu Hutchinson
Michelle Obama’s recent speech on the anniversary of the Brown decision gave every indication that she understands structural racism and injustice in education. However, her husband’s Race to the Top program has “opened the floodgates to privatization, dumbed-down curricula, and a permanent regime of high stakes testing which undermines teacher creativity and guts teachers’ unions.”
April 29, 2014
The Sterling Shuffle: Unpacking White Jewish Racism
WhitesJews.jpg by Sikivu Hutchinson
For the moment, a Jewish sports franchise owner is the most prominent racist in the United States. Donald Sterling’s conduct serves are a reminder that “the illusion of lockstep black-Jewish solidarity on liberal political coalition-building has long masked the reality of white Jewish privilege and investment in white supremacy.”
March 13, 2014
Why Sikivu Hutchinson's Book is Relevant to an Angry Ex-Muslim
By Maryam Moosam-Clark
In Godless Americana: Race and Religious Rebels, Sikivu Hutchinson takes us on a roller coaster ride through the different, interacting forms of underprivilege that affect People of Color in the United States, past and present. Throughout much of the journey, despite giving numerous examples a minority person can relate to, she maintains a measure of intellectual distance necessary for proper analysis. This changes on the final pages, where she shares one historical and two personal experiences of loss (one still bearable for someone who is a parent, one not) which make everything discussed in the book suddenly and painfully concrete. Godless Americana is thoroughly researched and properly sourced, which is not a given for an activist book and should make the lives of racism denialists somewhat harder. Sikivu’s mastery of language, as she alternates between intellectual and activist, makes for a very captivating read, especially considering the sobering nature of the book’s content.
More @ http://thefeministwire.com/2014/03/si...
In Godless Americana: Race and Religious Rebels, Sikivu Hutchinson takes us on a roller coaster ride through the different, interacting forms of underprivilege that affect People of Color in the United States, past and present. Throughout much of the journey, despite giving numerous examples a minority person can relate to, she maintains a measure of intellectual distance necessary for proper analysis. This changes on the final pages, where she shares one historical and two personal experiences of loss (one still bearable for someone who is a parent, one not) which make everything discussed in the book suddenly and painfully concrete. Godless Americana is thoroughly researched and properly sourced, which is not a given for an activist book and should make the lives of racism denialists somewhat harder. Sikivu’s mastery of language, as she alternates between intellectual and activist, makes for a very captivating read, especially considering the sobering nature of the book’s content.
More @ http://thefeministwire.com/2014/03/si...
December 11, 2013
The Souls of Black Boys
sh_souls_of_black_boyz.jpg By Sikivu Hutchinson
Black males are now down to about 1% of current UCLA freshmen. It's neoliberal California, where black boys are destined for marginal labor if they're lucky or pipelined to prison if they're not. Still, community activists in Los Angeles are fighting back, trying to nurture and prepare the next generation of black organizers, scholars and intellectuals.
November 17, 2013
Godless Americana: Vanguard of the Freethought Movement
By Randall Fleming, Morningside Park Chronicle
http://www.morningsideparkchronicle.c...
In Godless Americana, Sikivu Hutchinson is daring, resourceful and able.
She is the current vanguard regarding the freethought movement, and she recognizes those women who in the past have been the vanguard as well.
She makes distinctions that have long been ignored by the “mainstream” agnostics, atheists and secular groups. She backs all of it up with thorough research and well-warranted vitriol that sums up the centuries wherein America’s peculiar past has contributed to an exclusion of black women by the suffragette and other freedom-seeking movements.
What puts Hutchinson in the vanguard is her ability to recognize the dynamics of why and how the exclusion has and continues to occur: non-white peoples— and in particular, black people—have sought religiosity and churches as sanctuary where no real sanctuary exists in America. (The 1963 church bombing in Huntsville, AL proved this.) As such, churches have become the de facto centers of culture in the community.
Hutchinson deftly argues that while the problem in the last few decades is the gross corruption that this single center of culture has attracted, the fundamental problem is the spiritual, intellectual and financial subjugation required to be a significant member of a church.
On the flip side, the vast privilege enjoyed by white people—built on the backs of chattel slavery, a topic which does not require deep discussion in this brief review—has allowed for the luxury of freethinking in its many forms...
http://www.morningsideparkchronicle.c...
In Godless Americana, Sikivu Hutchinson is daring, resourceful and able.
She is the current vanguard regarding the freethought movement, and she recognizes those women who in the past have been the vanguard as well.
She makes distinctions that have long been ignored by the “mainstream” agnostics, atheists and secular groups. She backs all of it up with thorough research and well-warranted vitriol that sums up the centuries wherein America’s peculiar past has contributed to an exclusion of black women by the suffragette and other freedom-seeking movements.
What puts Hutchinson in the vanguard is her ability to recognize the dynamics of why and how the exclusion has and continues to occur: non-white peoples— and in particular, black people—have sought religiosity and churches as sanctuary where no real sanctuary exists in America. (The 1963 church bombing in Huntsville, AL proved this.) As such, churches have become the de facto centers of culture in the community.
Hutchinson deftly argues that while the problem in the last few decades is the gross corruption that this single center of culture has attracted, the fundamental problem is the spiritual, intellectual and financial subjugation required to be a significant member of a church.
On the flip side, the vast privilege enjoyed by white people—built on the backs of chattel slavery, a topic which does not require deep discussion in this brief review—has allowed for the luxury of freethinking in its many forms...
November 12, 2013
In Cold Blood: The Murder of Renisha McBride
McBride.jpg by Sikivu Hutchinson
The 19-year-old Black woman had just gotten a job at the Ford Motor Company when she was shot in the face with a shotgun by a white homeowner after seeking help after a car crash. Her killing “is part of a long legacy of black female murder victims who have been devalued in a misogynist apartheid system of state-sanctioned violence that thrives on the urban/suburban racial divide.”
September 17, 2013
Public Enemy or Talented Tenth? The War Against Black Children
school-to-prison.jpg by Sikivu Hutchinson
Blacks are the scapegoats for America’s failure to keep pace in the world. “For a nation brainwashed into believing the U.S. is an exceptionalist beacon, the underachievement of black students has become both shorthand for and explanation of its low standing in academic rankings.” The truth is, America programs Black kids to fail at every level of the education system.
August 20, 2013
Godless Americana: "Incredibly Provocative, Impressively Researched"
By Norm Allen, Jr.
From The Humanist Magazine
"Godless Americana is an incredibly provocative book, containing something to infuriate practically anyone who reads it. And I suspect that the author wouldn’t have it any other way."
Sikivu Hutchinson is an author and activist who promotes a progressive—and aggressive—conception of humanism that is at once feminist, anti-racist, anti-homophobic, anti-classist, and anti-imperialist. She has no patience for nontheists who focus primarily on church/state separation, evolution, and other issues that, in her view, are being promoted particularly by white males within the secular movement. In response, Hutchinson asserts that humanism will only appeal to the masses of “people of color,” women, LGBT individuals, and other historically oppressed groups if it addresses structural and systemic causes of poverty and oppression.
Godless Americana is an impressively researched book that deals with a number of subjects that most nontheists rarely, if ever, discuss at their gatherings or in their literature. For instance, the book makes the case that many white humanists tend to blindly, even proudly, embrace scientism. While noting the importance of science, Hutchinson calls attention to the fact that racism exists in science and in medicine. Moreover, she challenges the notion that black girls aren’t interested in science due to hyper-religiosity. Rather, she states that the contributions of scientists of color are simply not touted in textbooks and lesson plans.
In her hometown of Los Angeles, Hutchinson acknowledges the lack of Advanced Placement (AP) courses for black and Latino high school students. However, students taking these courses are much more likely to earn degrees in hard sciences and engineering. Hutchinson writes:
In 1999, students from the Inglewood Unified School District in Los Angeles successfully sued to get more AP courses at their schools. The suit charged that black and Latino students were systematically denied access to college preparation courses that were standard fare at white schools in Los Angeles County.
In a related story from Bartow, Florida, sixteen-year-old student Kiera Wilmot mixed together toilet bowl cleaner and aluminum foil in a science experiment at her school earlier this year. As a result, there was an explosion. The Bartow Police Department, the Polk County Sheriff’s Office, and Bartow High School pressed two felony charges against her. Feminists and civil rights activists protested vehemently, claiming it was just another example of the cradle-to-prison pipeline that exists for African Americans and society’s failure to encourage black girls to pursue science...More @ The Humanist Magazine
http://thehumanist.org/september-octo...
From The Humanist Magazine
"Godless Americana is an incredibly provocative book, containing something to infuriate practically anyone who reads it. And I suspect that the author wouldn’t have it any other way."
Sikivu Hutchinson is an author and activist who promotes a progressive—and aggressive—conception of humanism that is at once feminist, anti-racist, anti-homophobic, anti-classist, and anti-imperialist. She has no patience for nontheists who focus primarily on church/state separation, evolution, and other issues that, in her view, are being promoted particularly by white males within the secular movement. In response, Hutchinson asserts that humanism will only appeal to the masses of “people of color,” women, LGBT individuals, and other historically oppressed groups if it addresses structural and systemic causes of poverty and oppression.
Godless Americana is an impressively researched book that deals with a number of subjects that most nontheists rarely, if ever, discuss at their gatherings or in their literature. For instance, the book makes the case that many white humanists tend to blindly, even proudly, embrace scientism. While noting the importance of science, Hutchinson calls attention to the fact that racism exists in science and in medicine. Moreover, she challenges the notion that black girls aren’t interested in science due to hyper-religiosity. Rather, she states that the contributions of scientists of color are simply not touted in textbooks and lesson plans.
In her hometown of Los Angeles, Hutchinson acknowledges the lack of Advanced Placement (AP) courses for black and Latino high school students. However, students taking these courses are much more likely to earn degrees in hard sciences and engineering. Hutchinson writes:
In 1999, students from the Inglewood Unified School District in Los Angeles successfully sued to get more AP courses at their schools. The suit charged that black and Latino students were systematically denied access to college preparation courses that were standard fare at white schools in Los Angeles County.
In a related story from Bartow, Florida, sixteen-year-old student Kiera Wilmot mixed together toilet bowl cleaner and aluminum foil in a science experiment at her school earlier this year. As a result, there was an explosion. The Bartow Police Department, the Polk County Sheriff’s Office, and Bartow High School pressed two felony charges against her. Feminists and civil rights activists protested vehemently, claiming it was just another example of the cradle-to-prison pipeline that exists for African Americans and society’s failure to encourage black girls to pursue science...More @ The Humanist Magazine
http://thehumanist.org/september-octo...
July 7, 2013
Colorblind Lies & Godless Americana: An Excerpt
Over the past several years, the Right has spun the fantasy of colorblind, post-racial, post-feminist American exceptionalism. This Orwellian narrative anchors the most blistering conservative assault on secularism, civil rights, and public education in the post-Vietnam War era. It is no accident that this assault has occurred in an era in which whites have over twenty times the wealth of African Americans. For many communities of color, victimized by a rabidly Religious Right, neo-liberal agenda, the American dream has never been more of a nightmare than it is now. Godless Americana is a radical humanist analysis of this climate. It provides a vision of secular social justice that challenges Eurocentric traditions of race, gender, and class-neutral secularism. For a small but growing number of non-believers of color, humanism and secularism are inextricably linked to the broader struggle against white supremacy, patriarchy, heterosexism, capitalism, economic injustice, and global imperialism. Godless Americana critiques these titanic rifts and the role white Christian nationalism plays in the demonization of urban communities of color.
Historically, Americana has symbolized mom, Apple pie, and the idyllic innocence of little white kids with fishing poles grinning from Norman Rockwell paintings. The dark underbelly of Americana is the lawless urban racial Other—the fount of all that threatens American progress. During the 2012 presidential campaign, this apocalyptic theme was sounded again and again by Religious Right GOP presidential candidates like Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum. Dubbing President Obama the “food stamp president”, Gingrich was an especially effective demagogue for capitalist class entitlement. Railing against child labor laws, Gingrich commented that:
Really poor children, in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works so they have no habit of showing up on Monday…They have no habit of staying all day, they have no habit of I do this and you give me cash unless it is illegal.
When I mentioned Gingrich’s diatribe during a training session with a group of African American and Latino teachers, it was clear to them that the “really poor children” Gingrich was talking about weren’t Appalachian white children or “Honey Boo Boo” from the hit reality show of the same name. Gingrich’s “really poor neighborhoods” (rife with illegal activity) were not the mythic trailer parks and Bruce Springsteen blue collar salt-of-the-earth suburbs where the majority of the nation’s white welfare presumably recipients live. These were not the neighborhoods that produced the really poor children Gingrich exhorted to work as unpaid janitors in under-resourced, overcrowded “inner city” schools.
As a symbol of moral failure and ghetto pathology, American public education has always been red meat for the far right. But what is more insidious is that both the Obama administration and the Right have joined forces in ravaging public education. The Obama administration’s 2009 Race to the Top policy has opened the floodgates to privatized schools, dumbed-down curricula, and a permanent regime of high stakes testing that undermines teacher creativity and guts teachers’ unions. Nationwide, public schools have been targeted for charter conversion by foundations, corporations , and hedge fund managers on the hunt for desperate inner city school districts. The neo-liberal magic bullet for “reforming” K-12 education is carving schools up for the highest corporate bidder.
Historically, Americana has symbolized mom, Apple pie, and the idyllic innocence of little white kids with fishing poles grinning from Norman Rockwell paintings. The dark underbelly of Americana is the lawless urban racial Other—the fount of all that threatens American progress. During the 2012 presidential campaign, this apocalyptic theme was sounded again and again by Religious Right GOP presidential candidates like Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum. Dubbing President Obama the “food stamp president”, Gingrich was an especially effective demagogue for capitalist class entitlement. Railing against child labor laws, Gingrich commented that:
Really poor children, in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works so they have no habit of showing up on Monday…They have no habit of staying all day, they have no habit of I do this and you give me cash unless it is illegal.
When I mentioned Gingrich’s diatribe during a training session with a group of African American and Latino teachers, it was clear to them that the “really poor children” Gingrich was talking about weren’t Appalachian white children or “Honey Boo Boo” from the hit reality show of the same name. Gingrich’s “really poor neighborhoods” (rife with illegal activity) were not the mythic trailer parks and Bruce Springsteen blue collar salt-of-the-earth suburbs where the majority of the nation’s white welfare presumably recipients live. These were not the neighborhoods that produced the really poor children Gingrich exhorted to work as unpaid janitors in under-resourced, overcrowded “inner city” schools.
As a symbol of moral failure and ghetto pathology, American public education has always been red meat for the far right. But what is more insidious is that both the Obama administration and the Right have joined forces in ravaging public education. The Obama administration’s 2009 Race to the Top policy has opened the floodgates to privatized schools, dumbed-down curricula, and a permanent regime of high stakes testing that undermines teacher creativity and guts teachers’ unions. Nationwide, public schools have been targeted for charter conversion by foundations, corporations , and hedge fund managers on the hunt for desperate inner city school districts. The neo-liberal magic bullet for “reforming” K-12 education is carving schools up for the highest corporate bidder.
June 25, 2013
Walking on the "Wild Side"? 20 Feet From Stardom & the Black Female Gaze
Ike-and-Tina-Turner-67419-13.jpg by Sikivu Hutchinson
Who will tell the story of the Black female back-up singers that shaped generations of Black and cross-over music? A new documentary titled 20 Feet From Stardom makes the attempt. “20 Feet” captures the deep travesty of obscurity, marginalization and, often, poverty, that these pioneering artists faced.”
