Sunsara Taylor: Sikivu Hutchinson is an author, a novelist, a playwright, and among other things, this is one of her books: Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics and the Values Wars. I'm very happy to welcome her onto The RNL—Revolution, Nothing Less!—Show. She was, among other things… recently participated in the mass protests on International Women's Day, around sounding the alarm and standing up against the abortion rights emergency. So, Sikivu, welcome.

Sikivu Hutchinson: Good to be here.

ST: Listen, I wanted to start by just giving you the chance to talk about why you participated in the protests on International Women's Day with Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights, how you see the abortion rights emergency and why it's so important that people are in the streets standing up against this.

SH: I participated because I have long been committed to pushing the envelope and speaking out and resisting the incredibly Christian fascistic authoritarian stentorian state violence that's being imposed upon the bodies of women and the bodies of people who are attempting to exercise basic human rights and bodily autonomy, as well as economic and reproductive justice. So I felt that it was really critical to come out in this moment where we see an almost cataclysmic convergence of this crackdown on abortion rights, on reproductive justice, on voting rights, on LGBTQ plus and queer human rights, on anti-racist education. All of these convergences are deeply—not just discriminatory, but they're almost apocalyptic for communities of color, particularly working class communities of color. And it's important to lift our voices, given the fact that there are so many young people, Gen-Z and millennial youth, that are unaware of this legacy of mass resistance to these forces of Christian fascist, basically, apartheid.

ST: Well, I think it's really important that you use that term Christian fascist, which describes a very virulent, very fundamentalist woman-hating—and in this country, always laced with white supremacy—brand of religious fundamentalism. And you use the word almost “apocalyptic” in terms of the impact of this assault on communities of color. And I know you put a special emphasis on the effect of abortion bans and reproductive restrictions on Black women and young Black women. And I thought it'd be important for you to bring that alive a little bit more precisely because, as you say, most people don't understand this assault or know what its full ravages will bring.

SH: Certainly with the imposition of these abortion bans, communities of color in general and Black women in particular, have been the most negatively and catastrophically impacted. We've seen scores of Black women who are unable to gain access to abortion, who are unable to acquire the childcare that they need if they have to travel out of state—and the southern states that impose these draconian abortion bans. And this harkens back to decades ago—pre-Roe, when you had the majority of folks that were dying from botched abortions, from illegal abortions, from back alley abortions—being Black women and LatinX women and indigenous women. So the impact coming into the 21st century is going to be devastating, not just in terms of family planning and the typical mainstream liberal tropes that are articulated with regard to choice, but in terms of economic justice, in terms of multi-generational wealth, in terms of African-American, indigenous and LatinX women and people with uteruses having access to affordable housing, to equitable education, to jobs that pay a living wage. All of these are under the reproductive justice umbrella that was developed and forged and cultivated by Black, LatinX and indigenous women over the past few decades. So these are all major strands that we need to keep in mind as we're out on the streets raising our voices against this incredibly devastating regime of racial capitalism, of white supremacy, of Christian nationalism, of misogynoir—which is anti-Black misogyny.

These are things that we not only need to amplify in terms of trying to disrupt and dismantle the devastating effects of these laws, but also in terms of the critical consciousness of the younger generation that is not aware, perhaps, in quite the same way of this heritage of extreme apartheid and disruption in the lives of women of color and communities of color in general.

ST: I want to ask you to link this as well to the religious and the Christian fascism again. In the book, Away With All Gods!: Unchaining the Mind and Radically Changing the World, Bob Avakian has a whole chapter dedicated to—the title of it is “The Bible Belt Is the Lynching Belt.” And there's a deep history to this, and there is a reason why today, as Christian fascism reasserts and actually has captured the dominant position in the Supreme Court, in many statehouses, in the Republican Party as a whole, this comes imbued with both the patriarchy and the misogyny, but also the white supremacy. And there are deep roots to this that I know you've done a lot of work on, and I just want to give you the chance to share some of your thinking on that question.

SH: Yeah. I mean, certainly the Trump movement has been a major catalyst for the resurgence of this. We can look at it going all the way back to the Tea Party movement and the assault on human rights, on civil rights, on LGBTQI and women's rights, and the way in which that has been imbued with this Christian Dominionist rhetoric and propaganda around a reclaiming space for white folks, essentially; and that being intimately tied to breaking down the barriers between church and state, you know, intimately tied to trying to basically impose theocracy in American government. And that always has a white fundamentalist Christian base. And we look at what's going on, for example, in Florida, in Texas, and this premise that they are trying to with these LGBTQI educational bans, to protect youth—they're protecting youth in the name of imposing this extremely homophobic and transphobic and cisnormative rhetoric that is going to have extremely deleterious and insidious implications for Black, queer, LatinX and indigenous youth, non-binary youth, gender-nonconforming youth. There's always the cultural propaganda of abnormality, of dysfunction, of attempting to reclaim, you know, God and country and motherhood under a patriarchal umbrella. So I think it's important to be aware of all of these interlocking discourses when it comes to the limitation of our fundamental human rights that activists have been attempting to claim for so many generations. And now we're back at this point of medievalism.

ST: The very final words in the speech that you gave at International Women's Day in Los Angeles—I'm not going to quote it directly but you said something about how we have to shut down, we have to defeat this terrorist assault, this fascist assault and this lie. This is what I want to ask you about—this lie of American exceptionalism, which I think is a particularly important insight that you brought to the stage—of so much of what we're up against is the notion that's popular in this country that, oh, fascism can't happen here.

This… you know, the enslavement of women, of forced motherhood—that can't happen here. And it is American exceptionalism—that there's something special about this country that's so democratic and so free that it could never happen here. And you called it a lie, and I think that's important. I'd just like you to say a little bit more about that.

SH: Yeah, I was thinking about that in terms of what's happening in Colombia, what has happened in Mexico, what has happened in Argentina and in scores of other “third world” countries that are decriminalizing abortion. And yet here we are supposedly—and I hate to use that pronoun “we,” it's just shorthand—here the U.S. is this font of supposedly democracy and egalitarianism and individual liberty and rights. And we're at the precipice of apocalypse when it comes to unrestricted, on-demand and without-apology abortion for women and people with uteruses. So I just wanted to underscore that irony. And another thing that I cited in the speech was what Alice Walker said in her landmark anthology In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens where she talked about the fact that our great grandmothers did not have this right as enslaved women, that there were so many other things that our great-great-great grandmothers could have been doing with their agency other than being forced to be incubators to pop out baby after baby in service of the slave regime, in service of plantocracy, in service of racial capitalism and building brick-by-brick, body-by-body white wealth, white supremacist wealth. So, again, it's important to connect all of these dots when it comes to these gross and violent and terroristic paradoxes of the way in which the U.S. is perceived globally.

ST: My final question is, if you have any words that you want to share to people who are watching who maybe didn't know about this emergency or what they need to be doing. And also for those who say, well, the best we can do is prepare for a post-Roe America and help as many women as we can. What’s… if you have any parting words that you want to add.

SH: I say get the fuck out into the streets. Get out into the streets. Talk to other folks of color, particularly young women of color across sexuality. Agitate, resist, disrupt, write editorials, give talks again in public venues, and try and vote out these fascists, in addition to supporting abortion funds. There are a number of really important abortion funds that specifically help Black, LatinX and indigenous working class, and Asian working class and low income women.

ST: All right, Sikivu Hutchinson, I want to thank you so much for making the time and talking with us today here on The Revolution Nothing Less Show.

SH: Thank you. Appreciate it.