Humanists in the Hood: Unapologetically Black, Feminist, and Heretical

By Sikivu Hutchinson

Feminism and atheism are "dirty words" that Americans across the political spectrum love to debate—and hate. Throw them into a blender and you have a toxic brew that supposedly defies decency, respectability, and Americana. Add an "unapologetically" Black critique to the mix and it's a deal-breaking social taboo. Putting gender at the center of the equation, progressive "Religious Nones" of color are spearheading an anti-racist, social justice humanism that disrupts the "colorblind" ethos of European American atheist and humanist agendas, which focus principally on church-state separation. These critical interventions build on the lived experiences and social histories of segregated Black and Latinx communities that are increasingly under economic siege. In this context, Hutchinson makes a valuable and necessary call for secular social justice change in a polarized climate where Black women's political power has become a galvanizing national force.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Apr 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9781634311991

Sikivu Hutchinson

Sikivu Hutchinson is the author of Imagining Transit: Race, Gender, and Transportation Politics in Los Angeles (Lang, 2003), Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars (Infidel Books, 2011), Godless Americana: Race and Religious Rebels (Infidel Books, 2013), the novel White Nights, Black Paradise (2015), on Black Women, Peoples Temple and the Jonestown massacre and Humanists in the Hood: Unapologetically Black, Feminist, and Heretical (Pitchstone, 2020). She is also the author of the plays Grinning Skull, Narcolepsy Inc, and White Nights, Black Paradise

Book preview

INTRODUCTION: THE STONE COLD HERE AND NOW

In my own work, I write not only what I want to read—understanding fully and indelibly that if I don’t do it no one else is so vitally interested, or capable of doing it to my satisfaction—I write all the things I should have been able to read.

—Alice Walker, Saving the Life That Is Your Own: The Importance of Models in the Artist’s Life, 1976

Feminism and atheism are dirty words that Americans across the political spectrum love to hate and debate. Throw them into a blender and you have a toxic brew that defies decency, respectability, and Americana. Trot them out in debates about abortion or LGBTQI rights and you can unite white conservative evangelicals and Black Hoteps (Black folks who subscribe to a narrow version of Afrocentrism) in a sneering, strange-bedfellows lovefest.

I came to feminism as a baby atheist growing up in South Los Angeles. My first pangs of unapologetic godlessness were in Catholic school. Sitting in dreary religion classes run by sanctimonious white male teachers made me despise the Bible, its moral hypocrisies, and its violent woman-hating language. It was inane to me that a centuries-old good book could dictate that I remain silent, bow down to patriarchs, step back as chattel, and view my body as an impure vessel of original sin redeemable only through self-sacrifice and submission to a male deity. It was madness that these atrocities could be justified by the unquestioned moral righteousness of a Christian tradition that condoned slavery, rape, and homophobia. The beauty and majesty of the good book, and the omnipotent god at the cosmic switch of the universe, were a patent lie in the face of all the suffering and inequality I saw right in front of me. So, while some were able to compartmentalize these fascistic tenets, cherry pick the good stuff ad nauseum, and divorce the bad stuff from God, I decided that it didn’t make sense to give the Bible—nor any so-called holy book that gave supernatural beings dominion over mere earthlings—a pass. Why not cut out the theological claptrap and chuck gods altogether? Why not concede that the crazy quilt of theistic belief systems, creeds, and dogmas that sprawl across cultures and nations was a far greater testament to human artfulness than godly omniscience? As a twelve-year-old, accustomed to hearing about how that conniving temptress Eve screwed up folks’ residence in the Garden of Eden, it was clear to me that much of the policing of femininity that I and other girls encountered had a strong basis in Christian religious dogma. From the moment we’re assigned the female gender at birth, girls’ sexuality is a commodity, an object, an asset, and a liability to be marketed, bought, sold, and controlled in a birth-to-death cycle in which girls and women are straightjacketed by a litany of dos and (mostly) don’ts. Don’t sit this way, walk this way, talk this way, dress this way. Don’t go there, hang out with them, drink, smoke, act like a bitch, act like a ho, act like a dude, get yourself raped or knocked up. And when you get older, supposedly beyond the regime of the sexualizing male gaze, don’t ever think you will be relevant, whether you have kids or not. At every stage, organized religion, through the language of a grindingly policing theism, is there to impose boundaries and limits.

The Catholic school that I went to for one year was a perfect training ground for this dance of invisibility. In the Reagan years, it was widely viewed by some middle-class Black and Latinx parents as an antidote to the bad schools in South L.A. and neighboring Inglewood (then a predominantly Black community that had been largely white up until the late 1960s). On the surface, the school’s virtually all-white faculty and ethnically diverse student body were poster children for multicultural integration. Beneath that shiny facade, the school had the usual cauldron of hierarchies: bullying cliques, authoritarian religious bureaucrats, predatory jocks, and favorites-playing teachers. Then, as now, private religious schools were microcosms of a segregated two-tier educational system. Middle-class and working-class parents of color desperate to give their children a leg up bused them to elite schools hoping against hope that the racial tensions that fueled post–Brown v. Board of Education desegregation battles wouldn’t affect their babies. These tensions were crystal clear at my high school. Upper-middle-class to affluent white students lived in tony single-family homes and condos that dominated the multimillion dollar beachside community where the school was based. Black and Latinx students crammed public buses, traveling from the demonized inner city to the mostly white Westside. The implications of this dichotomy would shape my budding consciousness about public education, public space, race, and gender. Institutional racism, sexism, and heterosexism were critical to the disciplinary regime of the white savior patriarchs and matriarchs who adopted a missionary mentality about youth of color while policing girls’ bodies and conduct. Girls who violated the dress code were shamed and forced to put on skirts provided by the male dean (a double standard that was not imposed on boys).

Although Catholic dogma and Catholic hierarchy informed this regime of power, authority, and control, I saw no significant difference between these practices and those of other Christian power structures that also enforced binaries of good/bad, self/other, male/female, gay/straight, and Christian/heathen, while giving so-called religious leaders a cover for immorality and bigotry. Very early on, I was a humanist and feminist without necessarily having the language to break it down that way. Being humanist and feminist demands questioning received dogmas and slaying sacred cows whose very existence depend on your erasure. To subscribe to a human-centered notion of morality, ethics, and justice as a Black woman is an outlier position that carries social, political, and professional risks. Much of the emerging literature (including blogs and thought pieces) on Black atheist and humanist experience chronicles the perils of Black folks’ rejecting theism. According to the Pew Religion Research Forum, 87 percent of African Americans are religiously identified, making them among the most religious ethnic groups in a nation that is itself majority religious and Christian. Given these daunting stats, faith is a strong prerequisite for political viability in the United States overall and in the African American community in particular. The only contemporary national-level politician of any ethnicity to declare his atheism while in office was former California congressman Pete Stark (who waited for several decades before doing so and was voted out of office five years later).

Although a handful of whites in national office have since proclaimed their humanism or refused to identify a theistic belief system, running for public office as an openly identified humanist nonbeliever of African descent is political suicide. For generations, fledgling and veteran Black politicians have relied on a robust network of Black churches and faith-based organizations to help launch or sustain their careers. Megachurch congregations like West Angeles, Faithful Central, and First AME in South Los Angeles are frequent pitstops for African American and white politicians looking to curry favor with Black voters. When former President Barack Obama began campaigning in 2007 he strategically emphasized his Christian religious beliefs and membership in Chicago’s Trinity United Church (Trinity’s pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, was subsequently accused of making racist comments—allegations that conservatives used to try and discredit Obama). Obama’s eagerness to do so was viewed as a way to dispel rumors that he was an atheist or Muslim. It was also perceived as a bid to establish race cred with African American voters dubious of his biracial, African and European American background.

During the 2020 presidential race, Senator Kamala Harris, the first Black female Democrat to run for president since Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm in 1972, announced her candidacy to a crowd of ecstatic supporters with the declaration that she had faith in god. Insofar as faith is shorthand for being considered authentically Black, god-fearing Black politicians are exempt from the knee-jerk suspicions associated with nonbelievers, because being a Christian believer is reflexively linked to having moral values in the American mainstream.

Would Harris’ supporters have reacted as enthusiastically if she’d said she had faith in humans and that this naturally superseded faith in god? It’s all but guaranteed that she would have been vilified in the press, hounded off the stage, and kicked to the curb politically, branded as damaged goods. How dare a Black woman candidate profess anything but unswerving devotion to Father God, Jesus, Him? And yet, nothing in Harris’ platform required god belief or a theistic outlook on the world. Indeed, a feminist humanist perspective on the social construction of inequality, justice, and morality is critical of faith-based belief systems’ capacity to articulate a moral universe precisely because of the arbitrary nature of deity worship. As secular scholar Phil Zuckerman writes in his book What It Means to Be Moral: Why Religion Is Not Necessary for Living an Ethical Life, the intensely subjective, changeable, and highly interpretive nature of god-based morality (like certain animal species, there are hundreds of different deity-based belief systems in the world) makes it impossible for humans to know with absolute certainty what God’s will is and what he/she/they/it deem to be ironclad, beyond question mores.

It’s become pro forma to note that Christians, Muslims, Jews, and believers from other faiths routinely cherry pick what they like and discard what they don’t from their holy books. Flipping it another way; do gods give a damn about universal health care, access to stable, affordable housing, and the right to earn a living wage with benefits for everyone? What use are gods who don’t protect bodily autonomy and the right to self-determination for queer, nonbinary and gender nonconforming folks? What use are they if they don’t protect these rights for women or folks with disabilities? What do supernatural deities say about these specific socioeconomic, cultural, and social issues? Why do they remain abjectly silent if they are in fact omnipotent and omnipresent? Of course, the short, reductive answer is that these are contemporary human matters that didn’t exist eons ago when gods first dropped knowledge on the holy men entrusted with codifying and relaying their wisdom to the unwashed masses. But, if gods are all-knowing, why do they rely on imperfect messengers to unpack and screw up interpretations of their doctrines across the centuries? If they are all powerful why do they allow predators and thieves to infest the leadership of every major religious denomination on the planet?

This line of questioning echoes Epicurus’ timeless critique of the basic impotence and bankruptcy of theism. Omnipotent, just gods who can’t ensure a universe free from evil, cruelty, and human suffering are not omnipotent, just, or godly. One of the most powerful forerunning feminist, atheist, humanist freethinkers to call out this naked contradiction was the nineteenth-century white Jewish suffragist and abolitionist Ernestine Rose. A socialist organizer and mentor to suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony,

Reviews for Humanists in the Hood

[Sincere Kirabo · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is what a "must-read" looks like! Humanists in the Hood provides us with a compelling critique of white feminism, Eurocentric thinking, capitalism, white-oriented secular humanism, and religious faith.