Dr. Sikivu Hutchinson

Sikivu Hutchinson, Ph.D. is a Los Angeles-based educator, author, playwright, director and musician.  She is a recipient of the 2020 Harvard Humanist of the Year award and received her doctorate from New York University. Her books include Humanists in the Hood: Unapologetically Black, Feminist, and Heretical (2020), Imagining Transit: Race, Gender, and Transportation Politics in Los Angeles (2003), Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars (2011), and the novel White Nights, Black Paradise (2015), on Peoples Temple and the 1978 Jonestown massacre. Since 2022, she has taught an annual spring semester course on African American Humanism at Pitzer College.

She also wrote, directed and produced a short film and play of White Nights, Black Paradise and was awarded a “Humanities For All” grant from the California Humanities Foundation in 2019. Her short plays Grinning Skull and the speculative fiction piece Narcolepsy, Inc were featured in the Robey Theatre’s 2017 Paul Robeson Festival and the 2018 Hollywood Fringe Festival.

Her articles have been published in the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, Religion Dispatches, The Humanist Magazine and the L.A. Times. She is also the founder of Black Skeptics Los Angeles and the Women’s Leadership Project, a Black feminist mentoring program for girls of color in South L.A. Her novel, Rock ‘n’ Roll Heretic: The Life and Times of Rory Tharpe, was published in March 2021. Rock ‘n’ Roll Heretic was also a finalist for the Lambda Literary Foundation’s 2023 drama awards and her speculative fiction short story collection, The Roar of Distant Engines  was published in 2023. Sikivu has also produced five original folk/rock/country genre singles as a guitarist-singer-songwriter. 

Areas of Expertise:

Social and gender justice politics, African American Humanism, culturally responsive humanism, Black feminism/womanism, LGBTQ+ youth and community leadership, public policy and educational justice 

Dr. Sikivu Hutchinson

Dr. Sikivu Hutchinson

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Read the full article here.

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 social justice change in a polarized climate where Black women’s political power has become a galvanizing national force. You can purchase the book here.

Dr. Hutchinson explores the tensions emerging from the schism between mainstream American atheism and humanism, the former of which is associated with a predominantly White, male public face and platform, divorced from the concerns of communities of color. Read the full article here.

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. 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.

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