Sikivu Hutchinson's blog

by Sikivu Hutchinson

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.

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.”

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.”

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.”

by Sikivu Hutchinson

The Black student “push-out” phenomenon is directly related to Black mass incarceration. Studies show that “African Americans go to the dean’s office for less serious offenses than do Latinos and whites.” Disruptive behavior is in the subjective perception of the beholding teachers, some of whom “go off about ‘these black kids’ and what are you going to do with these black kids ‘cause I can’t teach in my classroom with these black kids going out of control.” Predominantly Black schools and faculty are often no better. “South L.A. schools with significant or majority black faculty and administrators are just as culpable.”

by Sikivu Hutchinson

The Casey Anthony trial caused such consternation in white America because it “underscores how deeply the ideal of white womanhood is steeped in reverence for white motherhood” – as opposed to “the dark uncivilized Other of Africa, Asia and Latin America.” Yet the “violent moral policing” of non-white women is a central chapter in the American story. Women of color face “racist drug enforcement and sentencing policies, coupled with mainstream assumptions of bad black motherhood.”

by Nathalie Woods

Frequent BAR contribuor Dr. Sikivu Hutchinson’s new book confronts the web of patrimony and religiosity that often binds Black America to its historical tormentors. “Despite longstanding traditions of secular humanism, skepticism, and Freethought espoused by such thinkers as Frederick Douglass, Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen and Richard Wright, Atheism remains a taboo belief system in black communities.”

by Sikivu Hutchinson

A gun goes off in a Los Angeles public school, and children are wounded. Mass gun violence by students is an overwhelmingly white affair in the U.S., but “any time violence erupts in a black or Latino context it’s a racial indictment, an indictment of a community, not a nation.”