The Revived Assault on Abortion Further Exposes White Supremacy's Tug of War Over Black Bodies5/17/2019 Growing up my entire life in Iowa, it wasn’t until I got to college that I realized there was the widely held misconception that the process of racial formation somehow skipped over the rural-dominated Midwestern states.
“There’s Black people in Iowa?”, my friends from Chicago, New York or St. Louis would ask, almost jokingly. The short answer, of course, is yes. More than that, I’ve never had to look outside my hometown of Des Moines to understand the concepts I’d learn in sociology and African-American studies lectures. In Des Moines the most significant Black enclave is in the historic Drake University neighborhood on the city’s west side. Perhaps because of the small, condensed nature of Des Moines it was always easy to notice the stark contrast between the “Drake hood” and adjacent downtown districts just east of it. For the watchful observer it only takes five minutes or so to watch the buildings go from abundant and state-of-the-art to scattered and run down; for the streets to go from clean and well-paved to littered and full of cracks and potholes; for the people to go from white to Black. It always amazed me, given the well known poverty existing in this area, that there were no job training or rehab centers in the capital city of a state with the worst racial incarceration disparities in America. More than that there were no daycare centers, no grocery stores, no homeless shelters, no medical clinics: not even a public school. One summer I spent every Monday evening performing at a live music venue on MLK and University; the heart of the Drake area. I remember looking out the window and only seeing a few restaurants (the highfalutin kind catering to college students), a barber shop, a police station, and across the street a Planned Parenthood office. It was clear to me by then that this Planned Parenthood (PP), the only local resource for soon to be mothers (and fathers), was symbolic of a larger phenomenon at play. In a historically red state, PP and the Black, poor and disabled women who overwhelmingly find themselves gracing its halls are contentious points of political bartering over the issue of abortion; an issue which has silently become a discussion about minoritized classes in America. Ironically, it is the voices and experiences of Black women and other disadvantaged groups which are largely absent from this debate, leaving them in a “damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t” political hotbox which ultimately serves to entrap them in a slow burning holocaust. The abortion debate would be a much simpler conversation for radical Black voices if the proliferation of such institutions as PP weren’t mired in a racist and classist history. Nevertheless PP suffers from a trend that the entire history of American medical science has yet to escape. Medicine in Black life has historically been a tool of colonization, with white doctors and institutions supplanting themselves in Black communities with the primary goal of using their bodies for research and profit, effectively draining the population of its literal life force. One only need google “Tuskegee syphilis experiment” or “James Marion Sims,” the father of gynecology who exclusively experimented on the bodies of enslaved African women and infants, mutilating every subjected he ever tested on. And then there is the well hidden and sanitized eugenic legacy of Margaret Sanger, the proclaimed hero of women’s reproductive rights; the founder and primary crusader for the corporation now known as Planned Parenthood (PP). One of the great American crimes against humanity is the revision of racist and classist histories for the sole purpose of making it more comfortable for us to live with the results: and no other single legacy epitomizes this practice than the legacy of Margaret Sanger and the role she played in progressing genocidal beliefs and practices. Eugenics is a philosophical and political movement sponsored by elite whites which focuses on eradicating unwanted populations such as Blacks, the poor and the disabled. Fueled by the belief that these groups burden society, eugenicists believe that eliminating these populations would improve the gene pool and thus society as a whole. Margaret Sanger was a proud and vociferous advocate for eugenics, not only speaking on behalf of the ideals but organizing resources and power to make eugenics a reality. In Sanger’s 1919 article Birth Control and Racial Betterment (yes, that’s the ACTUAL title) she links the goals of eugenics to the goals of her own goal of promoting birth control; “Eugenics without birth control seems to us a house builded upon the sands. It [eugenics] is at the mercy of the rising stream of the unfit…” Who are these “unfit” Sanger speaks of? Well, in a 1950 letter Sanger advocates “a simple, cheap, safe contraceptive to be used in poverty stricken slums, jungles and among the most ignorant people.” Sanger understood that adapting legislation to meet these goals would take extensive organization and fundraising as she writes in a 1932 Birth Control Review article, where she also advocated segregation as a means of controlling Black and other undesired populations and expressed her desires to keep “immigration closed to the interests of certain aliens whose condition is known to be detrimental to the stamina of the race.” Donald trump would be proud. In 1950 Sanger wrote “There should be national sterilization for certain dysgenic types of our populations who are being encouraged to breed, and would die out were the government not feeding them.” She then put her money where her mouth was and made Clarence Gamble of Proctor and Gamble - a leading organizer in the cause of eugenics - the national director of her organization the American Birth Control League, which later became known as Planned Parenthood (I guess the name tested better with focus groups?). She failed in an attempt to merge her organization with the American Eugenics Society. However, Gamble helped make Sanger’s vision material, leading a successful national lobbying effort to get sterilization programs adopted into 31 state legislators. Across America, Black, poor and disabled women were involuntarily sterilized in the tens of thousands; Black males castrated in the thousands. The State of North Carolina recently paid out reparations for this program. This is not to mention Sanger’s political scheming to involve unwitting Black clergy into the plan, suggesting that they were the perfect tool to pacify “rebellious masses” of rightfully angry Black citizens. When Sanger speaks on the right to choose, she is inevitably speaking on behalf of white women. It is clear she did not intend for Black populations to exist in the future. Even today the legacy of this movement can be seen in empirical data. As recent as 2012 in New York City more Black children were aborted (31,328) than born (24,758). In addition Planned Parenthood was recently investigated when it was found that their affiliates were bartering and possibly profiting from the sale of fetal organs and body parts… Even so, the so-called “pro-life” Republicans are engaged in a classic example of weaponizing their white Christianity in an effort to criminalize blackness. Without any meaningful attempts to alleviate the conditions of poverty which are clearly correlated to abortion rates, new prohibitions on women’s reproductive rights in states with large Black populations and histories of chattel enslavement, jim crow and mass incarceration are blatant attempts to punish Black and other vulnerable communities for prevailing social conditions. One must also take into account that Black women are nearly three times as likely to attempt aborting a pregnancy than white counterparts. Black women are also 247% more likely to have fatal birth experiences. This current maneuver is a blatant criminalization of poverty: another addition onto the list of southern “Black Codes” which will ultimately end up in the destruction of more human life and the disenfranchisement of Black womanhood. The result is the deepening of a depressing double-bind which took 400+ years of white supremacy to create. Were legislators truly “pro-life” they’d concern themselves with the conditions that create impoverished realities. They’d be concerned with the outrageous circumstances of rural poverty and urban Black male unemployment. They’d begin by solving the problems of disease and incarceration as well as police, urban and sexual violence. Instead they hide behind theatrical performances of phony faith. We must be clear that what Republicans are doing around state legislators are not acts of faith: they are acts of white supremacist state control. This is hardly different from the days on slave plantations when Black women had no control over when and where they would reproduce. Now they are once again being forced to produce victims for the machine like system of white supremacy. As a proud Muslim man it frustrates me to see God’s likeness use to justify abuse. Yes, the Quran warns against the slaughter of future generations for fear of poverty, which in my theological reading can be understood as a prediction and direct condemnation of eugenic politics (see the Gospel’s comments on believers warring against principalities of evil and spiritual wickedness in high places). However, the Quran also urges that there be no compulsion in religion. The reason being that faith - true faith - and adherence to it must be a choice; the result of one's heart being compelled to follow scripture. Without choice one person’s “faith” becomes another’s oppression. -Matthew X
2 Comments
Brandon
6/30/2020 01:13:42 pm
You’re nuts! You blame Republicans but fail to acknowledge that Democrats own every ghetto in America.
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Jeff
8/20/2020 06:34:42 pm
It's people like YOU, that keep racism alive in this country. An unarmed black man is more likely to get hit by lightning that shot by a police officer. Don't believe me, look it up in the FBI crime statistics. Cops kill more white people than black people by the way. Kinda blows that whole BLM narrative now doesn't it?
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