Godless Americana: Race and Religious Rebels

202 Pages·2013·1.1 MB·English

by  Sikivu Hutchinson

Godless Americana:
Race And Religious Rebels

S I K I V U H U T C H I N S O N
Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication
(Provided by Quality Books, Inc.)
Published 2013 by Infidel Books
Copyright 2013 Sikivu Hutchinson
Hutchinson, Sikivu.
Godless Americana : race and religious rebels / by
Sikivu Hutchinson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. African Americans—Religious life.
2. Civil rights—United States.
3. Religious fundamentalists—United States.
I. Title.
Godless Americana:
Race And Religious Rebels

Sikivu Hutchinson
INFIDEL BOOKS
Los Angeles, CA
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Prison House of Textbook History
Chapter One: American Terror
Chapter Two: God’s Body, Science’s Brain
Chapter Three Straight to Hell: Christian Fascism and Americana
Chapter Four: White Picket Fences, White Innocence
Chapter Five: Prayer Warriors and Freethinkers
Chapter Six: Seeing Things
Chapter Seven: Ungrateful Dead
Endnotes
Selected Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments

In the two years since the publication of my book, Moral Combat: Black
Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars, there has been growing interest
in non-believers of color. Nonetheless, there are still few book length analyses
on the sociopolitical views, lived experiences, and belief systems of
contemporary non-believers of color. Until Moral Combat, there were no books
that placed the emergence of non-believers of color within the broader context of
deepening class, race, and gender disparities in the United States. Godless
Americana continues that discussion. This essay collection is the culmination of
cross-disciplinary research, conversation, community organizing, and classroom
teaching. The issues it addresses are in response to a global climate in which the
forces of bigotry, discrimination, and intolerance have rolled back human rights
in the name of God and public morality. The central question the book poses is
how Humanism can become culturally relevant in an era in which
socioeconomic and educational conditions for communities of color are
increasingly dire.
Given these circumstances, I am grateful to all of the interview respondents
who provided candid feedback on the intersection of atheism, humanism,
feminism, and racial politics. My deep appreciation to my parents, Earl Ofari
Hutchinson and Yvonne Divans Hutchinson, my husband Stephen Kelley, and
friend Kamela Heyward-Rotimi for their support as well as patient, thoughtful
critiques of early drafts of this book. Tom Melchiorre also provided invaluable
assistance with editing and fine tuning. Over the past several years, I’ve always
been able to rely on the support, friendship, and crystal clear insights of Kamela,
Diane Arellano, Heather Aubry, and Sumitra Mukerji for unconditional
affirmation. Thanks are also due to Naima Washington and Donald Wright for
their encouragement, as well as their commitment to social justice radical
humanism. Finally, I am indebted to my students in the Women’s Leadership
Project, especially Eclasia Wesley, Imani Moses, Lizeth Soria, Janeth Silva,
Miani Giron, and Ronmely Andrade. These strong young women continue to
teach, challenge, and inspire me. They are the next generation of feminist
humanist visionaries who will set the stage and lead the way.
Introduction
Prison House of Textbook History

In 1781, Afro-Latinos and Indians founded the city of Los Angeles. Their
settlement followed the design of the original inhabitants, the Gabrielino Indians.
In this so-called city without a history, legend has it that undocumented Anglos
were the real “o.g.” (original) illegals. A few years before the founding of Los
Angeles, a “new” revolution in what it meant to be human unfolded on the
opposite shore in the British colonies. My students know the “romance” of the
American Revolution but not the secret of Los Angeles. In the prison house of
textbook history, they know each other mostly as enslaved “niggers” and
“wetback” interlopers. Growing up, elbow-to-elbow in the same deeply religious
neighborhoods, many are taught to believe that black and Latino culture can be
distilled down to media stereotypes. The dominant culture programs them to
read each other through the narrative of get-rich-or-die-tryin’ hip hop and ghetto
dysfunction, or big Catholic families and job stealing “illegals”. As
kindergartners they were taught to cite the pledge of allegiance as sacred chapter
and verse, hand solemnly over heart, in homage to royal theft. Founding myths
of heroic white men bootstrapping to liberty are intimately bound to their
imagination of the classroom, to its rhythm of shrill discipline and stench of
ground chalk; to a regime of time in which white supremacy and narratives of
progress are the currency of American faith.
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.1 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.2
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 recipients presumably 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.3 Nationwide, public schools have been targeted for
charter conversion by foundations, corporations,4 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. Special needs students, English language learners, and other “problem”
demographics are then shoved out the back door. As the gutting of American
public education proceeds, aided and abetted by both liberals and conservatives,
radical and progressive education activists continue to reshape the dialogue
about the so-called achievement gap in public schools. Culturally relevant or
culturally responsive pedagogy that builds on the lived experiences, cultural
knowledge, language, and world views of children of color has become a
standard, if still controversial, approach to redressing race and class disparities in
education. Culturally relevant pedagogy rejects myths of meritocracy,
colorblindness, and exceptionalism. At its most radical, cultural relevance
critiques institutional structures of racist power and control that render children
of color invisible within mainstream curriculum and instruction. It is based on
the view that challenging traditional Western notions of what it means to be
moral, to be a citizen, and to be human is implicit within the politics of
education and that “teaching to transgress” is a social obligation.
In all my years of post-Jim Crow public education no one ever handed me a
book written by a black woman and said that what she wrote is universal truth. I
was never told that so-called civilizations rose and fell on the power of her
words, or that entire belief systems sprung from her ideas. I was never taught
that the world’s greatest intellectuals worked plantations, were herded onto
reservations, or traveled every day from barrios and “ghettoes” to keep white
people’s children. Intellectuals and philosophers—serious thinkers—were white
men, with no need for a living wage job. They did not ride public buses or clean
houses or go to schools where stop-and-frisk was a routine practice. They did not
have to worry, like my students do, about being assigned to special education
classes because they were chronic discipline “problems” or didn’t speak
“proper” English. They were never told that they would be more likely to get
pregnant and drop-out of school than go on to a four-year college. These vaunted
intellectuals and philosophers were certainly not seventeen year-old East L.A.
girls like Paula Crisostomo, a Mexican-American Filipina activist who helped
spearhead the Chicano student walkouts of 1968. The East L.A. walkouts were
the largest high school student protests in this nation’s history. Thousands of
students boycotted their classes in protest over lack of college access, tracking
policies, discrimination against speaking Spanish in the classroom, and racist
curricula. In 2012, Crisostomo came and spoke to a group of my students at
Washington Prep High School in South Los Angeles. She drew parallels between
the racism she’d encountered during the Vietnam War era and the de facto
segregation of the Obama age. Girls like Ms. Crisostomo were not supposed to
go to college. Homemaking, caregiving, becoming a maid in a white household
on the Westside—these were the common life expectations for young Latinas.
Forty-five years later, young women like my former student Ronmely Andrade
are not among the Talented Tenth who are expected to go on to college. Ronmely
was headed to the military after graduation, swayed by the Marines’ relentless
on-campus recruitment campaign. A gifted speaker and presenter, at the end of
her senior year she expressed misgivings about going to boot camp and training
for a career as a mechanic. After we discussed her options for withdrawing from
boot camp she enrolled in her first year at community college.
For Paula Crisotomo’s generation, the military was pervasive. Youth of color
died in disproportionate numbers fighting and killing other dark-skinned peoples
in Vietnam because college was not an option in the “ghetto.” Despite an
increase in the number of students of color in college, aggressive military
recruitment continues to be a reality for black, Latino, and Native American
students. For many, college preparation and equitable college access are still a
distant dream. For some, simply graduating from high school at campuses where
less than 50% of the entering freshman class makes it to graduation is an
accomplishment. This has become the standard in an era in which the Education
Trust estimates that only “one of every 20 African American kindergartners will
graduate from a four-year California university” in the next decade.5 While
predominantly black and Latino schools in South and East L.A. are besieged by
military recruiters, the more affluent white schools get the college recruiters,
college prep classes, and highly qualified teachers. The Americana fever pitch of
the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines is unheard of on predominantly white
campuses in Los Angeles. It is a given that these students will be going to
college, not dying on the frontlines.
But faced with a school-to-prison pipeline that offers no way out, more and
more girls like Ronmely are eyeing the military as a viable path to college and
careers. As one of the many fierce youth in my Women’s Leadership Project
(WLP) program, Ronmely and her peers define what culturally relevant
humanism looks like in an age of educational apartheid. In 2002 I founded the
WLP, a feminist civic engagement and mentoring program, after being frustrated
by the absence of explicitly anti-racist, feminist programs for girls in the
community. The program was piloted in two South L.A. middle schools during a