Black Atheists And The Values Wars

NEW BOOK ON
BLACK ATHEISTS
AND THE VALUES WARS
Press Release For Immediate Release
Infidel Books Announces:


AFRICAN AMERICANS ARE THE POOREST AND THE MOST RELIGIOUS GROUP IN THE NATION

87% OF BLACK WOMEN ARE REGULAR CHURCHGOERS

THE BIBLE IS THE MOST READ BOOK IN BLACK AMERICA

IS THE BLACK CHURCH MORALLY CORRUPT?

DOES ORGANIZED RELIGION BETRAY BLACK WOMEN?

DOES BLACK AMERICA'S BIBLE OBSESSION HURT BLACK ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT?


MORAL COMBAT: BLACK ATHEISTS, GENDER POLITICS, AND THE VALUES WARS
By Sikivu Hutchinson


The word atheism elicits shock, dread, anger, and revulsion among most African Americans. They view atheism as "amoral," heresy, and race betrayal. Historically, the Black Church was a leading force in the fight for racial justice. Today, many black religious leaders have aligned themselves with the Religious Right. While black communities suffer economically, the Black Church is socially conservative on women's rights, abortion, same sex marriage, and church/state separation. These religious "values wars" have further solidified institutional sexism and homophobia in black communities. Yet, drawing on a rich tradition of African American free thought, a growing number of progressive African American non-believers are openly questioning black religious and social orthodoxies.

Moral Combat provides a provocative analysis of the political and religious battle for America's soul. It examinesthe hijacking of civil rights by Christian fascism; the humanist imperative of feminism and social justice; the connection between K-12 education and humanism; and the insidious backlash of Tea Party-style religious fundamentalism against progressive social welfare public policy. Moral Combat also reveals how atheists of color are challenging the whiteness of "New Atheism" and its singular emphasis on science at the expense of social and economic justice.

In Moral Combat, Sikivu Hutchinson highlights the cultural influence of African American humanist and atheist social thought in America. As the first African American woman to publish a book on atheism, she places this tradition within the broader context of public morality and offers a far-reaching vision for critically conscious humanism.

RELIGION DISPATCHES INTERVIEW WITH SIKIVU HUTCHINSON
About the Author

Sikivu Hutchinson is a writer and senior intergroup specialist for the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission. She received a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from New York University and has taught women's studies, cultural studies, urban studies and education at UCLA, the California Institute of the Arts and Western Washington University. She is the author of Imagining Transit: Race, Gender, and Transportation Politics in Los Angeles (Lang, 2003) and has published fiction, essays and critical theory in Social Text, California English, Black Agenda Report, Free Inquiry and American Atheist Magazine. She is the editor of blackfemlens.org and a senior fellow for the Institute for Humanist Studies.

NOW AVAILABLE AT CREATESPACE.COM

Sikivu Hutchinson is available for interviews and speaking engagements, contact: shutch2396@aol.com

SPRING BOOKSIGNINGS & APPEARANCES: MARCH 3, INTERFAITH VOICES; MARCH 20, CENTER FOR INQUIRY, LOS ANGELES & COSTA MESA; MARCH 23, USC, LIFESTYLE & DESIGN CENTER; APRIL 3, REVOLUTION BOOKS, L.A.; APRIL 16, IHS, NYC; APRIL 28, UNIV. OF S. ALABAMA; MAY 13, ESO WON BOOKS, L.A.;

Planned Parenthood and the Rape of American Women

By Sikivu Hutchinson

Lately, the sound of galloping hooves and rustling white sheets has risen in a deafening squall from the Capitol. Like their Klan ancestors, elite white males in Congress’ political lynch mob are once again savaging communities of color. The House’s vote to gut Planned Parenthood is a criminal act against poor and working class women and their families. In many rural and urban neighborhoods there are few affordable alternatives to the health care provided by Planned Parenthood and other reproductive rights service providers. These clinics are the frontline of preventive care in poor working class white communities and communities of color, providing pregnancy and STD testing, contraception, pap smears, abortions, and counseling for families with little to no health coverage.

Ever since its midterm elections’ sweep, the far right has ramped up its unrelenting drive to theocracy, using reproductive rights as its battleground. Drawing on the sabotage of ACORN, Speaker John Boehner and a host of other GOP and so-called Blue Dog Democrat fascists are bound and determined to take down Planned Parenthood. Extending Hyde Amendment restrictions on federal funding for abortions to private providers is central to their agenda. Too spineless to criminalize women who seek abortions outright, Religious Right politicians instead choose to pillage health care provisions that keep women from falling deeper into poverty, illness, and economic dependence. Hiding behind Orwellian claims of being pro-life, far right politicians exercise draconian control over the bodies of poor women and their families in the name of God, guns, and bloody fetuses. Why not just jail ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out?

It should be no revelation that when poor women are denied access to decent affordable reproductive care—including access to safe abortions—families and communities suffer. While federal and state governments dismantle education and health care funding, the American military regime goes untouched. Because black and Latino communities are on the frontlines of imperialist military recruitment and educational inequity, few people of color would argue that government handouts to the military industrial complex should trump education funding. However, reproductive justice just doesn’t have the same political cache or urgency amongst progressives of color. Consequently, conservative reactionary forces within the African American community have successfully allied with the Religious Right in a revived anti-abortion billboard campaign targeting black women. This propaganda has cropped up recently in black and Latino Southern California neighborhoods. By implying that aborting black babies makes them an “endangered species,” these billboards evoke plantation era regimes of social control.

In essence, bad “genocidal” black women don’t know their place, don’t know that they were put here to be God’s sacrificial vessels and don’t seem to grasp that only evil promiscuous misguided Jezebels get knocked up. They also haven’t gotten Sarah Palin’s telegram...
MORE@ http://blackfemlens.blogspot.com/2011/02/planned-parenthood-and-rape-of-american.html

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

Obama: An American Magician Extraordinaire!

If Obama didn't exist, would there be a Tea Party?

If we didn't have a President hell bent on spending money with a guarantee that the money spent would instantly or almost instantly, disappear because it would be devoured by the wealthy who already have more than they know what to do with and thus do nothing, or to a war/national security/spying effort that produces bullets which, when used, disappear, or tear gas or other armaments so dangerous that their intended use is unconscionable and counter productive, and a spy network that couldn't see a full blown Egyptian Revolution in progress even though it was inaugurated with the recent textile strike by thousands( wasn't it the Iron building fire that started the U.S. on Labor Unions?)

Obama gives Federal money, the people's money, to the banks without charging interest; the very crooks who know better than anyone how to make money disappear, how to "go bankrupt" along with corporations too big to fail and we, the workers watch that money disappear, no longer in circulation. Like magic, it disappears before our very eyes.

The next Obama magical feat will be to disappear the
targeted social security money( that is probably already eaten up by the ever-hungry, clandestinely,)
the middle class,
the workers.
We'll all become slaves of the State
the poor, that pathetic segment of the American population that is in need; always hungry enough to become whatever the Magician wants us to be.

With Obama at the helm,
(the American/corporate driven, owned manipulated Supreme King anointed by God, be He/She Christian, Muslin or Jewish supported, financed by those who make money while they sleep and reap restful anxiety free life styles marred only with the occasion ripple the slightly ahead of their time Tea Party engenders as they capitalizing on the alleged poverty of Government and when they insist on bringing to the fore their "creative" solutions-- the only contradiction being their mandate to keep Government out of everything except, of course, a woman's body)
WE Will Win!!!!!

Are you ready?

Have you hidden your Gold in your backyard, bought your own generator, created a secure cache of guns, ammunition? Have you bought into a religion of your choice and talked to your children to prepare them for better days here on Earth and in Heaven; mostly the latter? Have you?
And what about the bomb shelter your late relatives built? Is it up to date, ready for use?
Be assured. It can't be long now. Obama will get the Job done.

We are on the brink of the second. a Real American Revolution!

Only the young can stop us now.
Or can they?

Linda Zises
reporter at large

Channel 5 Football: Black vs. White

Sunday afternoon football: Fox Channel 5 does is again.


Watching The Redskins vs. the Giants' Sunday afternoon football game January 2, 2011 brought to the sports hungry-public an experience in watching the rudiments of prejudice unfolding.

If I didn't know better, viewing this sports event would have seened like a battle between the all Black team, the Redskins, against the all White team, the Giants, dominated by quarterback (no space between Manning who is White.

During the entire two hours of my viewing I saw only Caucasian faces in full prolonged frontal view while the few Black men shown on the screen were presented in profiles.

There was one view of a line of several Black men sitting on the bench, with an underlying impression that these men were lazy. All were Redskin team players. In contrast, no Giant player was presented sitting down. The Giant team players and coaches were seen standing, talking, making the game look like an active, energy-driven sports event..

And the pictures that appeared on the screen made it seem as if the officials, the coaches, and the referees were predominantly White men. If this is true, this reenforces the notion of insidious prejuduce not just in the filming of the game, but in the game itself.

The Fox channel 5 presentation, containing the deliberate one-sided filming of the game, is an example of insidious prejudice, a way of subliminal influence on people without their full awareness of what is being done to them.

This view of the bad Black Redskins vs. the good White Giants team is pure fantasy, a creation of virtual Fox reality.

The only real element in this Sunday afternoon football game filming was the prejudice that Fox brought to the viewing public without restraint.

Linda Zises

Manifest Destiny Revivalism

By Sikivu Hutchinson

During the 19th century, the “Manifest Destiny” of the United States was one of “God-ordained” expansionism. African slaves, indigenous peoples, Mexican nationals and other “non-Europeans” were deemed aliens and enemy combatants, anathema to the democratizing force of America. Using that “old time religion” to shepherd the flock on the 47th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington Glenn Beck’s “Divine Destiny” revival deftly mines this history. Beck’s decision to hold the event on the March on Washington anniversary has elicited outrage amongst civil rights organizations who accuse him and the radical right of hijacking the legacy of the civil rights movement. Reeking of sulfur, hubris and the visionary charlatanism of 1920s revivalist Aimee Semple McPherson, Beck claimed that the Divine Destiny event will provide “an inspiring look at the role faith played in the founding of America and the role it will play again in its destiny.”

Decrying the cultural primitivism and backwardness of the Muslim world, twenty first century Christian zealots seeking to preserve human rights as the province of white supremacy continue to put the lie to American exceptionalism. Over the past week the Islamphobic vitriol of demagogues like Beck, Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich have paid off in cold blood. The recent stabbing of a Muslim cabdriver in New York and the hate attack against a Fresno, California Islamic center (by an organization calling itself the American Nationalist Brotherhood), are the tragic but all too predictable results of the nationalist chest beating that masquerades as empathy for the victims of 9/11.

In a climate in which the militant right wants to dismantle civil rights freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution, Beck’s evocation of “divine destiny” is all of a piece. Throughout American history, recourse to the transparent word of God has always been the last refuge of scoundrels wielding the Bible and the bayonet as protections from the ungovernable hoard. Thus, it is fitting that this naked evocation of the language and legacy of Manifest Destiny comes during a period when the right has launched a campaign to repeal the 1868 14th amendment, which was originally initiated to confer citizenship onto freed African slaves. As Kevin Alexander Gray writes in Counterpunch, “in the Reconstruction period, as now, racism and white supremacy loomed large in public debate. Back then, opponents of the amendment talked about ‘public morality’ being threatened by people ‘unfit for the responsibilities of American citizenship.’’ Now the self-appointed defenders of public morality have come full circle, drunk on a cocktail of xenophobia, anti-immigrant hysteria and jingoism.

Vaulting ahead of the pack, Republican Congressman Lamar Smith, one of the staunchest critics of the 14th amendment’s provision of birthright citizenship, introduced the Birthright Citizenship Act of 2009 into the House. The statute would deny citizenship to children born in the U.S. to undocumented women, stripping away yet another civil right that ostensibly distinguishes the U.S. from fascist governments. Smith’s legislation is a reminder of the connection between slavery and expansionism. In the 1840s, the concept of manifest destiny was used to justify the U.S.’ brutal occupation of Mexican territory. Cultural propaganda demonizing and dehumanizing indigenous Mexican populations provided American imperialism with the aura of moral righteousness. Commenting on the U.S.-Mexico War, it was no less than “radical” poet Walt Whitman who stated: "What has miserable, inefficient Mexico—with her superstition, her burlesque upon freedom, her actual tyranny by the few over the many—what has she to do with the great mission of peopling the new world with a noble race? Be it ours, to achieve that mission!"

Back in the good old days of docile slaves and vanquished savages, there were no ambiguities about who deserved to be accorded rights. God ordained the universality of European American experience, civilization and moral worth. Non-white peoples either submitted to the Enlightenment principles and values of the culturally superior West or were extinguished. States rights were citizens’ last vestige of protection from the trespasses of big government. So it is no mystery then why the ideology of 19th century expansionism and evangelical Christian revivalism has gained fresh currency amongst a “reloading” white nationalist insurgency. As the freshly inked graffiti on the vandalized Islamic Center in Fresno proclaimed, “Wake up America, the Enemy is here.”

Sikivu Hutchinson is the editor of blackfemlens.org and a senior fellow for the Institute for Humanist Studies.

The Milk of Sorrow: "The Frightened Tit"

By Claudia Llosa, the film stars Magaly Solier as Fausta,

Plot: Our heroine Fausta (translated, means a girl who is full of fear) suffers from "The Milk of Sorrow" (which is, in the Peruvian-indigenous tradition, an illness), suffers from the desease she believes is transmitted through the breast milk of women who were raped in the Shining Path’s war of terror in Peru. The film begins with scenes from the death of her Mother followed by her obtaining sleep-in work in a wealthy home in Lima.

The plot and narrative are half the story. Providing a view into Peru from the vantages of both its very wealthy and its very poor is the other half. There is endemic cruelty, callousness at both extremes: a rampant lack of sensitivity among all parties. This even-handed expose is what helps to make The Milk of Sorrow a great film, a politically irrefutable statement.

Personally I would be depressed if I had to live the lonely life of the wealthy woman whose life is propelled by her drive for general recognition. The paucity of people in her life to meet her innate human need to be loved, wanted/needed, appreciated propels her onward and forward to the stage where she sings to so many people who when lumped together in the audience look like specks of confetti. No wonder she is depressed, detached and addicted to pills to stay "healthy".

But equally depressed and depressing is the depiction of the poor woman, Fausta, who suffers from the Peruvians illness the Milk Of Sorrow. the spoiled, Beast Milk – milk contaminated during the violent acts of Rape (during the 1980 Shining Path’s war of terror) that resulted in her birth.

The insensitivity to Fausta, the now grown woman with a potentially ripe vagina of her own and the weight of her mother's dead body that must be buried, is overwhelming horrifying partly because of the emotional cruelty heaped upon her by a community that refuses to empathize with the demands her poverty places upon her.

The juxtaposition of the her cousin's wedding festival and all that it entails with the wealthy woman's onstage performance is augmented with the internal contrast of the wedding versus Fausta's pressing need to bury her mother.

First, the mother's body is stored under a bed on top of which is the bridal gown for the plump, happy, soon-to-be-wed cousin and then, what was to be a grave for Fausta's mother's body to be buried in, becomes a watering hole for the delight and fun of the overheated travelers.

In every aspect the film Director offers the scenes as internal contrasts to each other. This is not an easy feat to achieve. Claudia LLosa's success is what makes this film so special.

Even the terrain, the pictures of what Peru looks like, are presented with such severity of difference from the daily needs for a gardener because of the wealth of flowers, plants, and trees versus the striking lack of anything other than the brown dust in the hot, arid world in which Fausta lives


There is nothing to cry about in this film. It is too serious, too depressing for tears. Maybe that is why it didn't win the 2009 Oscar award for best film or best foreign language film It was too real, it's message too clear. The obvious conclusion being that Socialism, where the class distinctions are less severe is the only real solution for a better world.

Winner:
2009 Berlin Film Festival Top Award ; The Golden Bear

Opens August 27th
New York City
Village Cinema

Altiplano: A Black Madonna revealed! 2009

Directors:
Peter Brosens
Jessica Hope Woodworth

Writers:
Jessica Hope Woodworth
Peter Brosens

Cast: (Credited cast)
Magaly Solier ... Saturnina
Jasmin Tabatabai ... Grace
Olivier Gourmet ... Max

The icon of Western culture is very tangible in this intense reality drama,Altiplano, set in rural Peru. The scenery, the depiction of the terrain, the intimate understanding of Peru's native people: the clothes they wear, and their holiday and wedding and funeral services, give understanding of unique groups of people. This is the focus of the film's narrative. The antagonist is the threat to their existence by the on-slought of corporate forces robbing the resources of their land and compromsing the peoples health.

The story is all the more compelling because of the music. It brought goose bumps to my skin, as it rose up to fill my ears, my senses with its power, its beauty.

Altiplano will bring a new world experience into your cultural life and bring out the fighter within you. Save the past. Save the native Peruvian life style, embrace the forces of the young soon to be married girl as she becomes a modern day Joan of Arc, a symbolic Virgin Mary, a hero for millions world wide who cherish the world they live in and don't want to give it up for the sake of the almighty dollar.

Altiplano is an interesting film for those who love films. It tells an unusual story punctuated with beautiful scenery and wonderful music. What else can you ask for?


Opens this Friday at New York’s Village East Cinema.

CATFISH: A love story about you, me and the Internet

Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman

Five years ago, before Facebook and Twitter, and before cell phones came into the hands of ordinary people who want to be “connected”, Catfish could not have been made. Before animation was reintroduced into the tent-pole films of today, Catfish would have been something less than it is.

The plot is a simple take on man meets girl/woman:
Megan, Abby’s older sister, and Nev, age 24, meet on the internet. Abby is an eight year old girl who does drawings of Nev’s photographs. Megan and Nev talk intimately on their cell phones and form a strong emotional bond without ever actually meeting.

When they go face to face the film turns from the ordinary to the extraordinary. It is when the inner life of an emotionally repressed woman, Abby's mother Angela, comes to the fore despite the lack of imaginative strivings of her seemingly practical-minded husband who hasn’t a clue about his wife - how she thinks, feels, nor how she spends her time when she is not tending to his needs and the special needs of their children.

The image of Angela sitting in a chair looking at Nev, the film’s hero - her smile, her love, the very fiber of her emotional wealth, so tangible - is heart wrenching.

Oh..............

when the beauty within is perceived........that is what makes this documentary so compelling, so beautiful, so extraordinary.


For me Angela is a hero extraordinaire!

Catfish opens this fall. Watch for it!


Linda Zises
WBAI Radio

Boxing Helena DVD 1993: Sex/longing/love

Boxing Helena 1993
Written and directed by
Jennifer Chambers Lynch


Plot:

A surgeon becomes obsessed with the seductive woman he once had an affair with. Refusing to accept that she has moved on, he amputates her limbs and holds her captive in his mansion. Is he crazy, or is this his fantasy based on a strong love and an inability to express it?

My Opinion:

Only a woman would be so brutally honest in the presentation of the basic sexual/self-worth fantasies and fears experienced by men and woman.

For a man it is his sexual performance that plagues his self-concept, and premature ejeculation is a potent hindrence to his self-concept. If not remedied it is certain to become a strong basis for bizarre fantasies and constant concern.

For a woman her basic fear is that she is only a sexual object rather than appreciated for being a woman with self-worth stronger than her appearance.

In Boxing Helena both of these fears get brought into prominence with a heavy dose of fantasy, nightmare and, ultimately, love that binds both of these fears together. In the end, mature love triumphs over all else.

I can’t imagine this film as it played on public television, denuded of its explicit sexually/sensually rich scenes. For me, watching an uncut version, the experience was funny at times, beautiful often and rewarding in its imaginative unfolding.

I strongly recommend the uncut version. If cut for a general television viewing audience, the film would be just so-so.

Linda Zises
WBAI RAdio
Ladisfilmclub

Angels and Innocents: By Sikivu Hutchinson

I have a vivid memory of the first time I became aware that children could die. It was early evening in the leisurely dusk of summer, and after eating with my mother at a local coffee shop, we passed by a newspaper vending machine outside. A child victim, kidnapped, murdered and disposed of like garbage, stared ominously out at me from the front page of the paper in grainy black and white. I remember my sense of horror when my mother told me that the child, who was approximately my age, would never see his parents again. Associating death with old people, I was stupefied by this seeming contradiction. Although raised heretically in a secular household, I had been corrupted by the prayer-saturated social universe of waxen blue-eyed Jesus’ plastered on my friends’ living room walls. Alone in my bed that night, I wondered how “God” could have countenanced such unspeakable evil.

Decades later there is an aching space where this child’s life would have been, his personhood “frozen” at abduction. Violent death by homicide at an early age is a grim reality for many youth of color. Gangsta rap romanticizes it and dishes it up for the voyeurism of white suburbia. Mainstream media ignores it or relegates it to social pathology. Every semester when I ask my students if they’ve had a young friend or relative die violently at least half will raise their hands. Their tattoos, notebooks and Sidekick phones are filled with vibrant mementoes for the dead. It is not necessary to go to Iraq, Afghanistan or some other theatre of American imperialism to experience the devastation that the killing fields of disposable youth inflicts. Yet, God takes care of children and fools, or so the shopworn saying goes. In the midst of sudden death there is refuge in the belief that the Cecil B. De Mille epic doomsayer of the Old Testament must have a special place in his heart for this tender constituency. Pied Piper religionists pat children on the head and whisper into their dewy ears that the murder of an innocent child is part of some grand design. They dish up the concept of divine providence like hard candy. They lure sweet-toothed youth with a ready “antidote” to the quandary of trying to make sense out of the senselessness and randomness of evil. The Wynken, Blynken and Nod bedtime story of grand design is chased down with the simple carrot of eternal reward for slain innocents. The inexplicable is assimilated. Senseless evil, evil that befalls the good and stalks the innocent, is legitimized as part of the divine’s hardscrabble boot camp for the living.

If it can be understood, it isn’t God, said Augustine. In ambiguity then, prayer is the great equalizer and potential redeemer. As American children we grow up with recurring images of kneeling girls and boys, hands clasped solemnly in prayer. These images propagandize faith as a normal, natural phenomenon. The magic bullet of prayer is trotted out as an escape hatch from the small indignity to the unspeakably cruel act of wild-oats-sewing youth. Bad kids pray obsessively for forgiveness. Good kids pray strategically in crisp starched pajamas for family members, friends, and Fido to be delivered to the top of God’s check list. Sinful thoughts can be defused by requesting a special audience with God. Good thoughts can be “deposited” into one’s virtual piggy bank of moral worth.. CONT. http://blackfemlens.blogspot.com/2010/08/angels-and-innocents.html