Our Mission

Black Skeptics Los Angeles (BSLA) is a South Los Angeles-based nonprofit dedicated to promoting and supporting Black and BIPOC secular communities and individuals, with an emphasis on providing educational programming, arts education, leadership development, and career readiness resources for Black girls, Black LGBTQ+ youth, and Black women. Since 2013, BSLA has provided First in the Family college scholarships, paid internships, and prevention education and support resources for BIPOC secular, undocumented, LGBTQ+, foster care, disabled, and system-involved youth from across the nation.

Secular Humanism is a belief system based on the view that humanity defines morals, ethics and notions of justice, as opposed to religious texts, dogma and tradition. Scientific inquiry and reason are the best vehicles for explaining the emergence of the universe and all life forms, rather than recourse to supernatural causes and explanations. Rather than privilege redemption or eternal reward in an afterlife, Humanism reveres human potential, ingenuity, and creativity in the here and now. Radical Humanism holds that religious hierarchies of race, gender, sexuality, and class are harmful to universal human rights and the self-determination of oppressed peoples. Radical Humanism in communities of color seeks to allow non-believers of color cultural legitimacy, visibility, and validity in the midst of an often hostile world view that perpetuates a narrow view of Black or Latino identity, and that women and the LGBTQ community are marginal or aberrant. Radical Humanism recognizes the inalienable human rights of all people to an equitable education, shelter, food, affordable health care, a clean, violence-free environment and a living wage job. It recognizes women’s inalienable right to self-determination vis-à-vis reproductive choice and family planning free of state intervention, authority and control. It recognizes the inherent morality of love between two consenting adults of all sexual orientations and genders as well as the value of LGBTQ identities.

Prominent historical African American freethinkers and humanists include Frederick Douglass, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, W.E.B. DuBois, Nella Larsen, Langston Hughes, Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin, Louise Thompson Patterson, James Forman, A. Philip Randolph, and Hubert Harrison.

Our Team

Dr. Sikivu Hutchinson

Author, educator, playwright and founder of Black Skeptics Group and Black Skeptics Los Angeles.  She is the founder of the Women’s Leadership Project (WLP), a high school black feminist of color mentoring program in South Los Angeles. Sikivu is the author of Imagining Transit: Race, Gender, and Transportation Politics in Los Angeles, Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars, Godless Americana: Race and Religious Rebels and Humanists in the Hood: Unapologetically Black, Feminist, and Heretical. Sikivu was also a contributing editor for The Feminist Wire.  Her novel, White Nights, Black Paradise, on Black women, Peoples Temple and the Jonestown massacre was published in 2015 and the play adaptation was mounted in 2018 and 2020 at the Hudson Theatre and San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora through Third Rail Alive Productions.

Imani Moses

I am Imani Moses and I attended Gardena High School and transitioned to my dream school… California State University Long Beach. I graduated with a BS in Community Health Education and a minor in Child Development. I have and continue to work with children, WLP, and give back to all of my communities. My interest are volunteering, mental health, and using my personal life experience to educate, uplift, and plant seeds of love and healing to each person I meet. My intention is to make this world a better place by first becoming an authentic, evolved, and healthier version of myself and in return showing someone else that they too can become an evolved version of themselves.

Genethia Hudley Hayes

Genethia Hudley Hayes has served as an LAUSD school board member, director of L.A.’s Southern Christian Leadership Council and a policy deputy for former L.A. County Board Supervisor Sheila Kuehl.

Ashantee Polk

Ashantee Polk is 20 years old and a third year college/ first time student Antioch University. She is a Class of 2020 graduate of King/Drew Magnet High School and an alum of the Women’s Leadership Project. After receiving her Bachelor’s in Psychology, she plans to obtain her Master’s and Doctorate in Psychology as well. Ashantee is heavily involved in social justice, youth advocacy, and mentoring in her local community.

Our Work

In a global climate in which the criminalization and economic disenfranchisement of people of color of all genders and sexualities has become more acute, what role can Secular Humanism play in communities of color in the U.S.?

Black Skeptics Group (BSG) and Black Skeptics Los Angeles (BSLA) currently focuses on the following initiatives:

According to The Education Trust’s publication entitled, “At a Crossroads: A Comprehensive Picture of How African-American Youth Fare in Los Angeles County Schools”¹, if current prison pipelining trends persist, only one out of every twenty African-American kindergartners in California will graduate from a four-year university in the state over the next decade. These trends are especially relevant for foster care youth, who are more likely to become incarcerated or homeless by young adulthood and have some of the lowest college completion rates among youth groups. The tragic reality is that an estimated 70 percent of the California prison population is comprised of foster youth.

In 2013, BSLA spearheaded its First In The Family Scholarship Fund which provides resources to undocumented, foster care, homeless, and LGBTQ youth of color who will be the first in their families to go to college. Responding directly to the impact of the school-to-prison pipeline in communities of color, BSLA is the first atheist organization to address college pipelining for youth of color with an explicitly anti-racist multicultural emphasis. Our annual Awards ceremony takes place in August in Los Angeles, CA. Major sponsors have included Atheists United, Freedom from Religion Foundation, Foundation Beyond Belief and the American Humanist Association.

BSLA provides two types of scholarships:

Lorraine Hansberry Humanist Scholarship Award: Awardees receive up to $1,000 in scholarships to assist with their tuition, room and board, books, and other academic resources. This award is available to Women’s Leadership Project and Young Male Scholars’ graduating seniors and alumni (multi-year awards are provided to alumni to aid their graduation). BSLA funds outstanding South Los Angeles students who are challenging racism, sexism, homophobia, and injustice in their schools and communities. This award is made possible, thanks to the generous support of several organizations and individuals from humanist and atheist communities.

First In The Family Humanist Scholarship – Freedom From Religion Foundation Forward Freethought Awards: Up to six awardees receive $5000 scholarships to assist with their tuition, room and board, books, and other academic resources. This award is available to graduating high school BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, people of color) and AAPI seniors who live in the U.S. who identify as atheist, agnostic, humanist and/or secular, and are accepted into two or four-year colleges. Limited funding is also available for awardees who are continuing into their second, third and fourth years of college. For more information, please click here to go to our Scholarship Application page. This award is made possible, thanks to the generous support of the Bredvold Fund through Freedom From Religion Foundation.

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1. The Education Trust-West, “At a Crossroads: A Comprehensive Picture of How African-American Youth Fare in Los Angeles County Schools”, published on October 8, 2014.

Since 2013, BSLA has provided fiscal sponsorship of and guidance to community-based educational programs such as the Women’s Leadership Project feminist humanist mentoring program and the Young Male Scholars’ program for boys of color. Both initiatives are based at South Los Angeles high schools and serve 9-12 grade students. Students are provided with leadership development, college preparation resources, public speaking opportunities and multiracial collaboration skills. Since 2014, BSLA has also been a member of the Dignity in Schools Campaign against the school-to-prison pipeline, school push-out policies and youth of color criminalization.

Held in 2014, our first annual Secular Social Justice conference was dedicated to addressing the lived experiences, cultural context, shared struggle and anti-racist social history of secular humanist people of color and their allies. The conference featured an incredible array of activists, organizers and educators from the secular and social justice communities.  This was a multiethnic, multi-regional, intergenerational gathering of atheists and religious allies of color who live, work in and/or identify with people of color legacies of resistance struggle.

Building on that momentum, the 2016 Secular Social Justice Conference was held January 30 and 31^st at Rice University in Houston, Texas.  The conference addressed the lived experiences, cultural context, shared struggle and social history of secular humanist people of color and their allies.  It focused on topics such as economic justice, women of color beyond faith, LGBTQ atheists of color, African American Humanist traditions in hip-hop, racial politics and the New Atheism and more. BSG collaborated with Houston Black Non-Believers, the American Humanist Association and African Americans for Humanism on the SSJ conference.

BSLA also takes part in local speaker and panel discussion events at universities and organizations including University of Southern California, Models of Pride LGBTQ Youth Conference, Center for Inquiry Los Angeles and local religious institutions that are our allies. BSLA has also co-sponsored and provided funding for the lGBTQI+ Youth of Color conference and Black Queer virtual camp for 7-12^th grade youth, and acted as a fiscal sponsor for local theater productions.

Please see our Facebook page for more information.

Continuing our model of fusing social justice with secular humanism, BSLA members volunteer at local non-profit organizations, such as shelters for women and children, as our gesture of community support. Our volunteer events are organized for BSLA members and guests.

BSLA offers limited micro-grant funding (up to $250) aid to BIPOC secular community members for housing, food, child care, medical expenses, abortion care, and transportation. Contact blackskeptics@gmail.com for more info.