By Sikivu Hutchinson

Melanie Andrews is the director of the internationally acclaimed Washington Prep High School theatre program in South Los Angeles.  A native of Compton, California, she received her MFA in theatre from the University of Southern California and has worked as a director in China, Germany, Canada, and Mexico, as well as at regional theatres in the U.S.  A documentary on the Washington Prep theatre program’s Shakespeare in Watts (a rendition of Romeo and Juliet) production is screening on Sunday, February 17^th at Los Angeles’ Pan African Film Festival.  Dr. Andrews is also a teacher-partner for the L.A. County Human Relations Commission’s Washington Involving Neighborhoods program and Black Skeptics Los Angeles’ 2013 scholarship fund.

What is your background in theatre?

I got into theatre by accident.  I was a state champion debater for Compton Unified.  As part of a work study program in high school I got a job at the Ebony Showcase theatre (now the Nate Holden Company) in South L.A.  I started with the production Norman is That You (with Redd Foxx and John Amos).  The girl that was playing a prostitute had an accident and I decided I would fill in for the part.  I got the laughs and fit the suit and that is how I got the part.  I was also encouraged by Ethel Waters when I performed at the Pasadena Playhouse.  I taught at CSULB, Compton College, and Emory University in Atlanta.  I am also involved in using the arts for the peace movement and human rights, especially as it pertains to human/sexual trafficking and violence against women.  For the past several years I’ve been engaged with helping girls and women understand the impact of prostitution and sexual trafficking in local communities of color from a black feminist perspective.

What is the climate of local youth theatre in South L.A.?  Washington Prep is the little school that could.  We have won over forty awards in theatre competition.  I found kids that were hungry to do theatre.  I’m classically trained and have brought that training to this school.  It’s not necessarily in line with the norm of high school drama.  Some of our acclaimed productions have been Zoot Suit and Positive Secrets, a drama on HIV/AIDS based on the voices and experiences of youth of color.  We also mounted ‘Stop” a production on the sex trafficking of girls.  We won five awards at the California State festival.  Our other claim to fame is that 90% of the students involved in this program go to four year universities like Fordham, NYU, UCLA, etc.  This program has boosted their academic success and college matriculation prospects.

What other productions are in the works?  Unfortunately, none of our productions are being funded.  We don’t necessarily have the support of the administration.  We’ve been told that our stuff is “nice” but that it doesn’t make money.  The school has decided to go in a more “hip hop” direction.  We got zero funding for Black History month.  Like many teachers I’ve had to go into my own pocket to fund these productions.  However, I believe these productions are necessary for students to know the Eurocentric canon in order to survive, navigate higher education and be culturally literate.  Our students will be able to perform in different contexts and know their craft.  Several years ago, I realized we had an excess of talent and a dearth of funding and that’s why I partnered with the British Academy program.  I’ve had the pleasure of working at numerous Shakespeare festivals (in fact, I’m one of the few African Americans that has worked as a stage manager, dramaturge, actor and director for virtually every Shakespeare play in the Folio).  The cast of Romeo and Juliet was mentored by members of the BA program.  The students were able to learn the language of Shakespeare from actors that were immersed in it.  They also received training from actors in the Royal Shakespeare Company.  These professionals saw them as being important and the students lived up to those expectations.  Now we have over one-hundred mentors. 

What is the most rewarding part of working with youth at Washington Prep and how can the community help with this work?  Having them in class you get to see that everything that exists in the microcosm of the community exists here too.  Everyone has a “heart light”—you just need someone to turn it on.  In theatre we activate it with high academic expectations and the students rise to the challenge.  They start going to class, they become community activists, they learn that they have power, and they demand things.  Most of our kids are now in the top ten of their classes.  They are focused on college, realizing that they not only have a future, but that they have a gift.  So I welcome community members who can come and be mentors.  We have costumes to design and sets to build.  We need fundraisers, we need sets painted, and most of all we need the kids to be supported.  We have kids in foster care, kids who are homeless and surfing on couches, and we have kids that are dealing with the random death of loved ones.  Sometimes in rehearsals we’ll deal with death, rape, and other hard issues and they are able to connect their life experience with that.  Romeo and Juliet is so real to them because they are living through it.  I grew up in Compton.  My father was murdered when I was young, and because of your mother, Yvonne Divans Hutchinson, and others guiding me I made it through that.  Teachers like her told me what a difference I could make.  I could have become suicidal or a drug addict.  I’ve had multiple careers, but I come back to teaching because we are needed more now than ever.  My students have gone on to be professionals in theatre, film, business, and politics and that is one of my greatest rewards.

“Perhaps adults believe if they just don’t talk about gender or racism, then they won’t exist in our lives. The truth is that we see the effects of racism and gender bias everyday on television, on the Internet, in the beliefs of teachers, friends, and ourselves.”

–Ariana Mercado, 12th grade scholar, Gardena High School

“As an African American teacher it is important for me to constantly address and affirm all of my students as scholars, activists, intellectuals and visionaries.  Black and Latino children are never viewed this way in mainstream American classrooms — to many teachers, and the world, they are potential drop-outs, they are f–ups, they are discipline problems.”  –Markham Middle School teacher, Watts

Over the past week, members of the secular community have stepped up mightily and helped Black Skeptics Los Angeles exceed its fundraising goal for the First in the Family Humanist scholarship fund. Because of the generous sponsorship of individuals and organizations like Foundation Beyond Belief, the American Humanist Association, Black Non-Believers of Chicago, Debbie Goddard of African Americans for Humanism and Ian Cromwell of the Crommunist Manifesto, BSLA will be able to offer four $1000 scholarships to college-bound South Los Angeles students. We at BSLA also appreciate the tremendous boost given to the effort by blogs from Skepchick, PZ Myers, Crommunist and others.  For our recruitment outreach we are proud to partner with exemplary teacher-resource providers like Dr. Melanie Andrews, Angela Rodriguez and Shirley Van der Plas of Washington Prep High School; Debbie Wallace and Diane Schweitzer of Gardena High School; Tabitha Thigpen of King-Drew Medical Magnet and Marlene Carter of Dorsey High School.  It is largely because of the efforts of these unsung teachers, mentors, health providers, and scores like them, that homeless, foster care, undocumented and LGBTQ seniors make it to college.

Recently, the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) issued annual “report cards” for all schools. Washington Prep has a 44% graduation rate and Gardena has a 52% graduation rate; far lower than that of the district average. With the exception of King Drew Medical Magnet, and a few other outstanding high schools, the four year college-going rate at most South Los Angeles schools is abysmal. These scholarships will reinforce the work of first-in-the-family student activists like Jamion Allen, Destiny Davis, Ariana Mercado and Leticia Patton (pictured above). As youth leaders in the Women’s Leadership Project and Gay/Straight Alliance, these young women are engaged in critical humanist work that addresses homophobia and sexism on their school campuses—despite the fact that gender and sexual orientation issues are deemed “less important” than those that involve racial conflict.

The support of secular allies is an important step toward making secular, atheist and humanist social justice organizing visible in communities of color where there is little to no history of an activist non-believer presence. We are immensely grateful to everyone who stepped up to move this groundbreaking effort forward and will be compiling a list of individual donors for public appreciation.

Scholarship awards will be awarded and celebrated in June in Los Angeles.

Black Skeptics Los Angeles,
Sikivu Hutchinson

Elizabeth Ross

D. Frederick Sparks

Nicome Taylor

Young scholars from South L.A.

Some atheists are constantly bashing faith-based organizations AND believers of color for being backwards, ignorant and discriminatory.  But at the end of the day, what are mainstream secular, humanist, atheist and freethought “human rights” organizations doing to actively fight for social and racial justice in American communities of color?  How many know or care about the following human and civil rights crises in a nation that poses as the most civilized ”democracy” on the planet:

FACT: The school-to-prison pipeline disproportionately locks up African American and Latino youth, leaving many with criminal records and no possibility of “re-entry” to employment, housing or higher education

FACT: African American youth are severely over-represented in foster care, homeless populations, and juvenile jails

FACT: Foster care and homeless youth of color have some of the lowest rates of college transfer and graduation amongst college youth populations

FACT: LGBTQ youth of color have disproportionately high suspension/expulsion and push-out rates in U.S. public schools

FACT: Black females are consistently suspended at greater rates than ALL OTHER groups besides black males

FACT: So-called inner city schools have fewer Advanced Placement, college prep and honors courses and highly qualified STEM teachers than their white suburban counterparts

FACT: Due to Congress’ failure to pass the federal Dream Act undocumented youth are ineligible for most forms of financial aid–feeding the school-to-prison pipeline

Because we live, work, and teach in communities that are under siege by these and other human rights issues, Black Skeptics Los Angeles is pleased to announce its first annual “First in the Family Humanist Scholarship.”  Four $500 scholarships will be awarded to college-bound Los Angeles Unified School District students in South Los Angeles.  Preference will be given to students who are in foster care, homeless, undocumented and/or LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or questioning).  Students must have a record of service and participation in school and/or community-based organizations.  Scholarships will be awarded in June 2013.

Black Skeptics Los Angeles (BSLA) is a 501c3 nonprofit organization dedicated to providing Humanist public education, media representation, and cultural resources for African American non-believers and their allies.  BSLA’s programming and initiatives seek to promote greater awareness and understanding of African American secular humanist, freethought, and atheist traditions, beliefs and practices in Los Angeles communities of color and beyond.  Since 2010, BSLA has hosted roundtables on secular social justice, sponsored interfaith dialogues, conducted Humanist professional development trainings, and published articles on a broad range of issues pertaining to gender equity, racial justice, economic justice, and progressive education.

We are currently soliciting matching fund contributions for these scholarships, which will help support under-represented first generation college students with room, board, transportation, books, and other living expenses.  Your valuable tax deductible donation can be made to our Paypal address ([email protected]), mailing address or online at the following site:

http://blackskepticsscholarshipfund.chipin.com/black-skeptics-scholarship-fund.

By Sikivu Hutchinson

(Excerpt from Godless Americana: Race and Religious Rebels, March 2013)

For the past several months, Crenshaw Boulevard in predominantly black South Los Angeles has featured a series of striking billboards condemning homophobia and its role in the HIV/AIDS epidemic.  The billboards are the work of the black gay activist group In the Meantime Men, headed by Jeffrey King.  Sounding a “code red alarm” on the raging HIV/AIDS epidemic amongst African Americans King said, “The staggering rates of increased teen suicides in the last five years, and the uncontrollable increase of teen homelessness in America have awakened our senses to the damaging effects of homophobia in the Black community.  Every year, thousands of Black LGBT people are displaced from their homes, families, churches, and communities due to their sexuality, gender, gender identity, and gender expression. This has resulted in a mass influx of homeless youth on the streets of Los Angeles and other cities throughout the nation.”  [King will be a panelist at the upcoming “Confronting Homophobia in the Black Church” roundtable hosted by Black Skeptics Los Angeles at Zion Hill Baptist Church on February 27^th]  With African Americans comprising the majority of new HIV cases in the U.S., the epidemic has devastated black communities nationwide.  Yet the refusal of mainstream black America to seriously confront how homophobia and black religiosity drive homelessness and HIV only deepens the killing fields.

In her book Invisible Families Mignon Moore notes that “some in the Black gay community use religion to validate their identities as same-gender loving people.”[i]  Rejecting the Bible’s condemnation of homosexuality, gay African American Christians focus instead on what they believe to be the loving, compassionate, universalist message of Jesus.  As one respondent in Mignon’s book says, “I do believe God loves me and even though they may not agree with what I am I think that this is between me and God.”[ii]  For many African American LGBT folk, faith is intimately tied to cultural identity and is not easily shorn even in light of the social conservatism and heterosexism of mainstream black America.  Indeed, according to a study by UCLA’s Williams Institute, when compared with their white counterparts, African American LGBT folk are more likely “to attend religious services, to engage in prayer, and to self-identify with a religious affiliation.”[iii]  Straight, gay, bi and trans African Americans live together in segregated communities where racism, white supremacy, and criminalization shape their shared lived experiences.  Save for the drumbeat of white normalcy portrayed in TV, film, and advertising, our worlds are overwhelmingly black and brown.  Thus, it is not surprising that gay African Americans are invested in the same religious cultural traditions that prop up straight normalcy yet may afford them with a sense of community.  Despite the overall increase in secular Americans, people of color have not embraced secularism in significant numbers.

Yet, countering the homophobic dogma of organized religion is only one aspect of LGBTQ enfranchisement.  And it is for this reason that existing Humanist organizations are inadequate for queer youth of color.  The needs of LGBTQ youth of color can’t be adequately addressed by culturally homogeneous or colorblind approaches that don’t acknowledge the intersection of heterosexism, white supremacy, and racism.  For example, queer youth of color are especially vulnerable to becoming homeless.  Family economic instability, sexual abuse, religious dogma, discrimination at school and in local neighborhoods often precipitate homelessness amongst African American queer youth.  The nexus of foster care and mass incarceration has also dramatically increased homelessness amongst youth of color.  Youth who age out of foster care have few resources to fall back on, putting them at risk of becoming homeless.[iv]  Youth who come out of the juvenile or adult prison systems may be unable to find jobs or housing due to employment applications that require criminal felony disclosures.

With its illusion of glamour and accessibility, the city of Hollywood is a popular magnet for runaways and homeless youth.  The majority of Hollywood’s homeless youth are African American.  Forty percent of all homeless youth in the community identify as LGBTQ.[v]  Floating spectrally in the hills above the workaday traffic, the old Hollywood Read the rest of this entry »

By Sikivu Hutchinson

When I was five years old I was sexually assaulted by neighbors.  Ours was a tranquil post-white flight neighborhood of beautiful single family homes, obsessively tended lawns and keeping-up-with-the-Joneses home improvement.  It was the mid-seventies; before black women’s experiences with rape had come into broader public consciousness through works like The Color Purple and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.  The term sexual assault was largely unknown.  The language that rape prevention activists now use to validate the everyday terrorism girls and women deal with was not a part of our vocabulary or classroom curriculum.  In my critically conscious upbringing I was raised to clearly understand the racist police who abused and murdered us, the racist criminal justice system that jailed us, and the racist cultural history that rendered us invisible.  I was taught to revere the black warriors who crusaded against the holocaust of slavery and its aftermath.  But I was not taught to know, understand or identify the casual predators that moved in and out of our lives without detection or censure; the parasites who posed as strong upstanding black men in the light of day and terrorized with impunity behind closed doors buttressed by violent silence.

Last month’s barbaric gang rape and murder of a 23-year old female student on a bus in Delhi, India was a stark reminder of this violent silence and the global expendability of poor women of color in so-called democratic societies.  The suspects—who were recently charged with rape and murder—allegedly attacked the young woman in order “to teach her a lesson” for being out with a man.  Commenting on the international outrage that the crime has elicited against the backdrop of India’s economic ascent, writer Kishwar Desai reflected that “a certain class of men is deeply uncomfortable with women displaying their independence, receiving education and joining the work force.  The gang rape becomes a form of subduing the women, collectively, and establishing their male superiority.”  India is dead last on Trust Law’s 2012 list of 19 best and worst countries for women’s rights.  Muslim fundamentalist Saudi Arabia is number 18.  The U.S. is number six.  But like South Africa (number 16) and Brazil (number 11), institutional racism, sexism, and heterosexism determine access to health care, reproductive rights, and economic opportunity in the U.S.  In her article “Black Women, Sexual Assault, and the Art of Resistance,” Brooke Axtell writes that “the Department of Justice estimates that for every white woman that reports her rape, at least 5 white women do not report theirs; and yet, for every African-American woman that reports her rape, at least 15 African-American women do not report theirs.”  Between 40-60% of African American women have experienced sexual assault by the age of 18.

Decades after “Denim Day,” “Take Back the Night” and other global rape awareness movements were popularized my students are still living the reality of violent silence.  Nearly every girl in my Women’s Leadership Project (WLP) feminist mentoring program has been the victim of sexual assault or abuse.  Initially, most have no language to articulate their anger, much less their post-traumatic stress experience.  The repressed rage that girls of color carry with them about rape and sexual harassment comes out in shame, blame, and self-hatred.  It’s spit out in the casual misogyny of their embrace of epithets like “bitch” and “ho.”  It’s displayed in the yards of Rapunzel-esque hair that they swath themselves in to obliterate their “ugliness.” And it is manifest in the increasing number of “very young girls” that are sucked into prostitution; brutalized by gang rape and “pimped out” by men they view as father figures.  During a recent day of dialogue moderated by WLP students at Washington Prep High School many girls were loath to identify sexual violence as a significant factor on campus.  There were numerous anecdotes about girls being threatened with gang rape as well as adult male campus security guards sexually harassing girls.  Nonetheless, it was female behavior, and not male behavior and the culture of the school, which was criticized.  In the grand scheme of the community the experiences of girls of color don’t matter.  Far too often in mainstream discourse, rape is only politically significant when it is framed as a phenomenon that happens “over there”, in the backward “third world,” or “here” to a young white female victim in the civilized U.S.

In the aftermath of the young Indian student’s death, the outcry against the country’s misogynist culture of rape, murder, and dehumanization will hopefully be a watershed for legislation protecting women from sexual assault and intimate partner violence.  But the patriarchal nationalist resentment that writer Desai portrays as India’s affliction also drives the savage anti-feminist backlash in the United States and its culture of violent silence.

by Frederick Sparks

“A Winchester Rifle should have a place of honor in every black home.” – Ida B. Wells Barnett

Grabbing a group lunch after our latest Los Angeles Black Skeptics meeting, the conversation inevitably turned to the massacre in Newtown and the related issue of gun laws and gun control.  One new member expressed his opposition to more restrictive gun laws, primarily because he felt that any new restrictions would inevitably result in African-Americans having disproportionate lack of access to legal fireams, limiting blacks abilities to defend themselves against racist acts.

My immediate response was to argue the far greater harm from the prevalence of firearms in our society.  But hours later I remembered the quote above from Wells-Barnett, the anti-lynching advocate, journalist, and women’s suffrage advocate. Barnett offered this observation in her pamphlet titled Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, which documented her research on lynching.  Barnett felt black families needed to be so armed

…for that protection which the law refuses to give. When the white man who is always the aggressor knows he runs as great a risk of biting the dust every time his Afro-American victim does, he will have greater respect for Afro-American life. The more the Afro-American yields and cringes and begs, the more he has to do so, the more he is insulted, outraged and lynched.

Barnett’s call for lethal black self-defense rested against a back drop of discriminatory laws that deprived black citizens of the cherished 2nd Amendment right to bear arms.  Many colonies (and later states) passed laws prohibiting both slaves and freemen from owning firearms, particularly after the failed slave revolt led by Nat Turner.   Gun ownership was seen by racist whites as a privilege that would elevate “Negroes” to the status of free whites and as a dangerous threat to white rule.

The National Rifle association supposedly opposed gun laws that restricted African-American gun ownership and  in some instances offered support to Black Americans seeking to defend themselves with firearms.  In 1958, retired Marine Robert Williams opened a chapter of the NAACP in Monroe, North Carolina. Monroe was also Klan country, and the KKK mounted several vicious assaults agains African-Americans in Monroe.   In 1960, Williams applied for and was granted a charter to establish an NRA chapter in Monroe; the association also provided firearms training materials. Mr. Williams and other black NRA members in Monroe subsequently successfully defended themselves with firearms against an attack coordinated between the KKK and the local police.

This history prompted erstwhile civil rights icon Ann Coulter to opine that all blacks should be supporters of the NRA; Coulter also recounted the story of Martin Luther King, Jr being denied a concealed weapons permit.  Coulter instructed us that, as with slavery, it was the Republican Party and the NRA that were on the side of black people, not the libs and Dems.

This analysis is of course anachronistic.  Whatever the NRA and the Republican Party represented then, their coordinated efforts in the current political arena have hardly served the advancement of black American well being.  And the type of white racist violence that poses the greatest threat to black lives today is hardly addressed by the 2nd Amendment.  Would the fortunes of Trayvon Martin or Jordan Davis have been better served by more liberal gun laws? If anything, their deaths were facilitated by a gun obsessed, shoot first culture.

Not to mention the fear of all firearms needed to defend hearth and home being taken away is a red herring.  For one, guns in the home are almost never used for self-defense, and in fact, a gun in the home increases the chances that one will be shot by an assailant.  Also, feckless politicians are barely getting around to proposing laws that would limit the accessibility of assault rifle and high magazine capacity firearms; even if these laws are passed there would still be plenty weaponry available for self-defense.

For better or worse, that Winchester rifle isn’t going anywhere soon.

By Sikivu Hutchinson

Standing in line at the California Science Center the day of the mass murder at Sandy Hook Elementary school, my students wondered aloud about the race of the shooter.  “More than likely he was white,” they agreed. As the only people of color waiting to be admitted to the exhibit, their open question about race elicited visible unease from a group of elderly white women across the line from us.

According to a Mother Jones timeline of mass shootings from the 1980s to the present, the majority of American mass murderers have been white males.  The most infamous young killers—the Columbine High shooters, Jared Loughner, James Holmes, and now Adam Lanza—share a common cultural theme and national narrative. “Deranged” loners who came from lower to upper middle class nuclear families, their murder sprees forever shattered white suburbia’s veneer of normalcy.  Over the past decade, the post-mass murder mantra has been grindingly familiar—“this couldn’t/shouldn’t/wouldn’t happen HERE, in our idyllic (white) suburban community.”  Catastrophic violence is implicitly marked as the province of the other, the inner city, the cesspit jungle where poor children (of color), according to GOP sage Newt Gingrich, have no work ethic and thus no “habit of I do this and you give me cash, unless it is illegal.”

And yet, methodically plotted acts of epic violence committed by young white males with mini arsenals aping video game assassins are increasingly the hallmark of “HERE”.  So no doubt the elderly white women’s unease came from a sense of deep existential displacement.  When you’ve been suckled on Ozzie and Harriet, its “hard” to have your whiteness referenced as a source of violence; especially by people of color.

As the unraced universal subject, white people are simply unaccustomed to being explicitly identified as white.  For many, the tired colorblind party line of white privilege means that just talking about race is racist.  Universal means normal, and even the most heinous white criminals (Gacy, Bundy, Dahmer, and the list goes on) are humanized by a back story of psychoanalysis, cable TV biopics, books, and pop culture reportage.  The wages of whiteness means not having to know the classic people of color ritual—i.e., that when big crime news breaks its pro forma for many African Americans and Latinos to find out the race of the perpetrator and then those of the victims.  If the perpetrator is white there is a collective sigh of relief that Middle America won’t have another dark savage, immigrant or Muslim community to demonize.  If the victims are of color, there is a short window before the media’s attention fades (ala the August massacre of six at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin) and shifts to more important matters like Lindsey Lohan or missing white girls.

Black and brown children learn very early on that perceptions of race and criminality are intimately connected.  In high school when my friends and I found ourselves at the business end of Inglewood PD officers’ rifles because someone in our car “looked” like a burglary suspect, it was a rite of passage initiation.  The killing of African American teenager Trayvon Martin was a lightening rod because American youth of color saw the failure to bring his killer to justice as symptomatic of the devaluation of their lives.  Guilty until proven innocent, youth of color never have the privilege of being universally perceived as the “nice” boy (as Lanza has been described) or girl next door that wouldn’t hurt a fly.

According to a 2010 Blair-Rockefeller survey, many whites in post-racial America believe that blacks and Latinos are more lazy, unintelligent, and untrustworthy than either whites or Asians. If white Middle America views people of color as not having “white” values and “white” aptitude levels, then it’s no mystery why mainstream media pathologize people of color as naturally criminal and violent.  Black criminality can be boiled down to a rancid stew of shiftlessness, absentee fatherhood, and irresponsible motherhood.  Latino criminality stems from too much babymaking and gangbanging.  But like the moribund immigrant urban jungle of 19^th  social reformer Jacob Riis’ nightmares, it’s the “inner city” that’s the guilty co-defendant.

Nonetheless, mass murder in an urban context is rare and mass shootings in schools of color are virtually unheard of.  Homicide is a leading cause of death for young African American men.  But contrary to the rap stereotype of Glock-toting men of color, an overwhelming majority of people of color are pro-gun control, while the majority of the white electorate is not.  The high school assailants in the Littleton, Colorado, the Jonesboro, Arkansas; and Santee, California shootings were steeped in a NRA besotted gun culture that fetishizes readily available firearms as the ultimate medium for violent white masculinity.

However, these youth were instantly transformed into symbols of troubled, tragically “misunderstood” teens.  National conversations about the perils of bullying dominated the airwaves.  It was accepted that these tragic figures were “our boys,” our recklessly wasted youth.  It was conventional wisdom that preventive mental health resources could have minimized their inner turmoil.  As the bloggers Three Sonorans note in their piece, “White Privilege and Mass Murder in America,” “whenever white men commit mass murders it is just a freak isolated incident, but when we look at other crime statistics for minorities the reason given is that it is something innate to their culture, to their family.  It is those people.”

With Columbine there was tacit understanding that these boys’ acts were symptomatic of a potentially imperiled national heritage.  Conversely, any time violence erupts in a black or Latino context it’s a racial indictment, an indictment of a community, not a reflection on the rogue acts of lost boys from salt of the earth homes.

As my students and I left the Science center, bracing for more news about the scope of the attack, it was clear that the tragedy would dominate the news for weeks to come.  The senseless slaughter of children from the “perfect” town may finally prompt serious bipartisan legislation to curb the barbaric gun lobby. But it will not prompt analysis of the violent masculinity at the heart of whiteness.  And if any of these nice white boy shooters had been black the national sentiment would have echoed the biting comment made by my student Jamion: “Send those niggers back to Africa.”

By Frederick Sparks

Jimmy Carter’s grandson, James Carter IV, who brought us the infamous “47%” Mitt Romney video, has uncovered the audio recording of an interview of the famed political consultant Atwater by late political science professor Alexander Lamis.  Lamis published the interview without using Atwater’s name in his 1984 book  The Two Party South, and later used the quotes again, fully attributed, after Atwater’s death.  But conservatives long questioned the validity of Lamis’ article and bashed Lamis’ integrity and objectivity, which upset Lamis’  widow who made the tapes available to Carter.

The recording puts the words previously cited in a larger context, in which Atwater on the one hand argues that the new strategy rests on the assumption of a post-racial South whose electorate (including African Americans) would respond more to the superior neo conservative economic message than to racial politics, yet at the same time Atwater delineates how subtle language couched in economic terms could still blow racial dog whistles tuned to the anti-black sentiment of southern whites:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

The GOP message has hardly strayed from this formulation, though demographic changes and the phnomenon of Barack Obama has rendered it less effective in the last 2 presidential elections, in terms of ultimate victory.  Yet the coded message  still resonates with the majority of voters in southern states, at a time when the Supreme Court is prepared to review the constitutionality of provisions of the Voting Rights Act; a review that is justified because presumably the South is beyond all that racial stuff.