Congratulations to Our 2025 BSLA First in the Family Humanist Forward Freethought Scholarship Awardees!
By Reese Rutherford
This class on African American Humanism taught me a lot about myself and my experiences through a Black Humanist lens. As a young Black girl growing up in rural Minnesota, my experiences differed from most of my classmates; but the policing and attempted control of my body was the most obvious thing. I started being dress coded at my public school at the age of 7 and continued to be written up and punished for it until I graduated. Because I was so young when it first happened, I did not understand why it happened, but by looking around at my white and skinny classmates, I quickly recognized why I was seen as a ‘problem student’ and the others were not. When I came into the class, I had some knowledge of the institutional practices that were/are used to incapacitate and exploit Black bodies in America. However, I had no clue about the practice of humanism and the numerous and notable Black humanists who set the groundwork for humanism and recognized harmful and exploitative institutionalized colonial practices that actively work against Black people in America. The first piece that resonated with me was in the book, Humanists in the Hood. This text illuminated the feelings I had experienced while being dress coded as a girl but could not articulate. “Girls who violated the dress code were shamed and forced to put on skirts provided by the male dean (a double standard that was not imposed on boys).” Rules of what femininity was and how that interacted with my Blackness drastically influenced my life growing up and to this day.
The second work that stuck with me was Baby Suggs oratory, specifically the lines, “And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off, and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face ’cause they don’t love that either.” This line specifically resonates with me because it highlights the active work Black people have to do every day to resist oppression. Loving your body and self is an idea widely detested and challenged by the colonial white supremacist ideology that is common in the US. Suggs’ calls attention to the importance of loving oneself outside of the expected binary of what is “acceptable” in society. In these lines, Suggs’ also states that loving oneself is a valid and powerful act of resistance. Loving yourself as an act of resistance is something that also really resonates with me as it is a practice I have inserted into my daily routine that has helped me stay true and confident to myself while attending a PWI and interacting with racist, misogynist, and homophobic people on campus and in life. Before the class, I understood that it was necessary to love myself. However, leaving the class, I understand that it is imperative to survive in a white, Christian, and colonial supremacist society.
I believe everything African American Humanism is and should be relevant to Gen Z folk. Because all modern social justice problems harm Black people, specifically Black, low-income, and queer people, AA Humanism is the only ideology that centers their experiences instead of erasing or white-washing them. Social justice movements like the #MeToo movement have been co-opted by white feminism and skewed by conservative media, effectively disregarding the unique experiences of Black femmes who have been harmed and focusing on strictly white women.
The third work that stuck with me the most was Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.’ Jacobs acknowledges the vast difference between Christianity and religiosity. This class helped me see the differences between Christianity, religiosity, and spirituality and how each has played a role in my spiritual development. I was raised Christian, then detested anything religious or spiritually adjacent in middle and high school. Understanding the differences between religiosity and Christianity has helped me come to terms with my own spirituality.
Reese Rutherford is a freshman at Pitzer College and a former student in Sikivu Hutchinson’s spring AA Humanism class.
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