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 […]
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 inLGBTQ
How South LA BIPOC youth are shutting down ‘Don’t Say Gay’
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 inRacial justice, Reproductive rights
Black women and abortion on demand without apology
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, Racial justice
Supporting Black teachers under siege
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, Racial justice
What’s faith got to do with it? Culturally relevant humanism and Black Gen Z
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 inArts, Fiction
Little surfer boy
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?
Three prominent nonreligious voices share their thoughts on what it means to be secular today.