Reading Time: 3 minutes This week, California Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi, the head of the Assembly’s Education Committee, refused to schedule a hearing for AB1314, a bill that would have required school officials to notify parents when a child identified as a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth. Muratsuchi slammed the bill for being “bad policy” […]
Sikivu Hutchinson
Sikivu Hutchinson is an American feminist, novelist, playwright, and director. She is the author of The Rock ‘n’ Roll Heretic (2021), Humanists in the Hood: Unapologetically Black, Feminist, and Heretical (2020), White Nights, Black Paradise (2015), and Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars.
Posted inThe Color of Disbelief
The Black Girls’ Guide to Humanism: On mental health and social justice
Reading Time: 5 minutes Late last year, I surveyed Black youth between the ages of 15-24 about their views on Black humanism, media representations of Black and women of color atheists, respectability politics, and the connection between religion, misogynoir, and homophobia. The majority of them were from South Los Angeles. I followed up with a podcast featuring four of […]
Posted inReproductive rights
Abortion is not a luxury: Reproductive freedom and the midterms
Reading Time: 3 minutes This morning, I listened to an abortion procedure on NPR, and it was a powerful thing. A patient at a Michigan clinic consented to having her procedure recorded. She wanted to underscore its life-or-death importance in a climate where Michigan citizens will vote next week for an amendment that would enshrine abortion rights into the […]
Posted inArts
Rock ‘n’ Roll Heretic on stage: Black women and liberation
Reading Time: 4 minutes It’s “Black Music Month,” and, in a parallel Juneteenth universe, Black folks would be given reparations for the looted labor of all the Black artists whose musical innovation powered the multi-billion-dollar empires of white rock icons like Elvis Presley, Janis Joplin, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones. From blues to rock, R&B, and beyond, early […]
Posted inLGBTQ
How South LA BIPOC youth are shutting down ‘Don’t Say Gay’
Reading Time: 3 minutes Nationwide, escalating homophobic and transphobic right-wing attacks are threatening the mental health and wellness of queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming youth. This spring, Women’s Leadership Project 9th and 10th graders led presentations on LGBTQI+ school climate, identity, and allyship in South L.A. classrooms and during WLP’s annual LGBTQI+ Youth of Color Institute. Utilizing GLSEN’s (Gay and […]
Posted inReproductive rights
Black women and abortion on demand without apology
Reading Time: 4 minutes In her 1974 essay In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens, Alice Walker wrote: Did you have a genius of a great-grandmother who died under some ignorant and depraved overseer’s lash? Or was she required to bake biscuits for a lazy backwater tramp, when she cried out in her soul to paint watercolors of sunsets…or was […]
Posted inEducation
Supporting Black teachers under siege
Reading Time: 4 minutes Generations after Black secularist historian and scholar Carter G. Woodson founded what was initially dubbed “Negro History Week,” the continued struggle for Black self-determination in education is an indictment of American democracy. In his new book Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching, Harvard professor Jarvis Givens argues that “teaching and […]
Posted inNonreligious News
What’s faith got to do with it? Culturally relevant humanism and Black Gen Z
Reading Time: 4 minutes I came across the concept of agnosticism at the age of 12. The existence of the Christian God is an idea I stray farther away from, both because of the way people who identify under it constantly spread hate and lies, and because examples have been presented to me about the illegitimacy of the so […]
Posted inFiction
Little surfer boy
Reading Time: 15 minutes They look over their shoulders before they take to their boards. Watch for the girls huddled in Juicyfruit gum popping reverie; the kids beating sandcastles into corn mush, the butt-cheek flashing old-timers settling down for a flame-broiled snooze under big yellow umbrellas. They steady themselves then take flight, working the waves into submission, salt clogging […]
Posted inSecular Symphony
What does it mean to be secular?
Reading Time: 7 minutes Three prominent nonreligious voices share their thoughts on what it means to be secular today.