Sikivu Hutchinson's Blog, page 2
May 31, 2013
The Immortals: Excerpt from Godless Americana
Since then, the white nationalist terrorist movement to “save” the unborn has claimed the lives of several activist doctors and clinic workers. By demonizing these frontline providers the movement has jeopardized the lives and families of scores of women from the South to the Midwest. It has ginned up the narrative of black and brown women as dangerous irresponsible breeders and revitalized the shorthand of the American plantation when empire began and ended with black women’s bodies.
May 6, 2013
Mad Science or School-to-Prison? Criminalizing Black Girls
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Studies show that Black children do not commit more offenses in the classroom than whites and Latinos. Nevertheless, “in many American classrooms black children are treated like ticking time bomb savages.” Black girls are suspended from school more than any other ethnicity – except Black males.
April 30, 2013
Prison House of Textbook History: Remembering the Chicano Blowouts
sikivu_hitchinson-godless.jpg by Sikivu Hutchinson
1968, the year of the biggest high school walkout in U.S. history, was not so different than the present. “Then, as now, there was no room for analyses of sexism, racial apartheid, heterosexism, and patriarchy and how our lived experiences diverged from the corrupt pedagogy of the American dream.”
July 17, 2012
Wages of White Affirmative Action: Predatory Lending & The Ghetto
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by Sikivu Hutchinson
Whites are “returning” to South Central Los Angeles, the place they left for the suburbs in federally subsidized waves generations ago. The lure: cheap housing in neighborhoods savaged by color-coded lending policies. And so it is that whites whose exit from South Central was smoothed by racial advantage, return in the same way. White dislocation is called a tragedy, while the uprooting of Blacks is dubbed “gentrification.”
June 26, 2012
The GOP’s Tired, Poor Huddled Masses
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by Sikivu Hutchinson
Having based much of American exceptionalist mythology on the cult of white immigrant “values” – and the matching slander that African Americans are values-poor – the Right will increasingly “ratchet up classic divide and conquer narratives tied to bootstrapping and a racialized mythos of hard work.” That suits many Latinos just fine. “Despite being of mixed black, Asian, Indian and European ancestry the majority of Latinos in the U.S. identify racially as white.” Plus, “Latino parishioners are fueling a resurgence of Pentecostalism in the U.S. and filling in the gaps of an aging white demographic in decline.”
March 27, 2012
White Picket Fences, White Innocence
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by Sikivu Hutchinson
The whole country was taught the intrinsic goodness of Dick and Jane, the freckled young picture book stars of the American dream. A more ancient social primer informed us of the inherent criminality of kids with names like Trayvon. George Zimmerman, the watchdog of a gated community, “was upholding the time-honored tradition of white homeowners’ associations that protected white communities from dark interlopers.” His “lesser white status” as a person of partial Latino ancestry, “is part of what legitimized Zimmerman’s self-defense claim.”
White Picket Fences, White Innocence
trayvon_dick_n_jane.jpg
by Sikivu Hutchinson
The whole country was taught the intrinsic goodness of Dick and Jane, the freckled young picture book stars of the American dream. A more ancient social primer informed us of the inherent criminality of kids with names like Trayvon. George Zimmerman, the watchdog of a gated community, “was upholding the time-honored tradition of white homeowners’ associations that protected white communities from dark interlopers.” His “lesser white status” as a person of partial Latino ancestry, “is part of what legitimized Zimmerman’s self-defense claim.”
February 14, 2012
God’s Body, God’s Plan: The Komen Foundation Furor and Abortion as Black/Latino “Genocide”
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by Sikivu Hutchinson
Money and religion make strange bedfellows. The most right-wing forces in U.S. politics have cultivated Black and Latino allies to label abortion rights advocates as nothing less than enemies of God. Yet, “It is precisely because of right wing opposition to universal health care coverage that Black, Latina, Asian, and Native American women are more likely to rely on the wraparound health care services that Planned Parenthood provides.”
God's Body, God's Plan: The Komen Foundation Furor and Abortion as Black/Latino "Genocide"
sikivu_hitchinson.jpg
by Sikivu Hutchinson
Money and religion make strange bedfellows. The most right-wing forces in U.S. politics have cultivated Black and Latino allies to label abortion rights advocates as nothing less than enemies of God. Yet, “It is precisely because of right wing opposition to universal health care coverage that Black, Latina, Asian, and Native American women are more likely to rely on the wraparound health care services that Planned Parenthood provides.”
December 6, 2011
Black Scholarship, Non-Theism and Radical Politics: Where are the Writers?
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by Sikivu Hutchinson
To hear white institutions tell it, Black non-theists have nothing important to say about the human condition. But, in fact, “Black secular humanist critical inquiry stretches back to Frederick Douglass's era to the Harlem Renaissance and into the 1960s Black Power movement.” Such thinkers have been central to “a tradition of Black liberation struggle against white supremacy.”
