Anthony Bradley sent this YouTube video to me, which purports to expose inherent racism at Planned Parenthood. In it, a white male calls to donate to the organization and specifically requests that his cash donation be earmarked for the termination of an African American woman’s pregnancy. He states that he wants to target a “Black baby” because his son is going to college, and he then implies that Affirmative Action and competition with Black students would diminish his son’s opportunity to earn a degree. The understanding is clear: eliminating one more Black baby would improve his son’s future life chances.
The caller’s language expresses white anxiety and a eugenics-genocide solution to social problems. Neither of the Planned Parenthood representatives handle this racism well. Both reps accept the money.
As Earl Dunovant has suggested in his blog, there is a level of insensitivity with regard to Black female life that the Planned Parenthood reps express, a level seemingly inconsistent with an organization established to advocate for the rights of all women. The reps’ tacit approval of this staged caller’s explicit racism is troubling. However, it would be foolhardy to attack Planned Parenthood on the basis of this YouTube posting.
Planned Parenthood is clearly guilty of poor training and must undergo a vigorous review of the language employed by all employees, especially when they find themselves in conversation with eugenics advocates and racists. More importantly, the organization must decide whether Planned Parenthood will accept donations from individuals and organizations that are explicitly racist. Indeed, the organization might look to its own founder, Margaret Sanger, who has recently been identified as a racist in certain corners of the blogosphere, for guidance on this issue.
According to Charles Valenza’s January-February 1985 Family Planning Perspectives article, “Was Margaret Sanger a Racist?”:
“In late 1939, when the Birth Control Federation of America (soon to be renamed the Planned Parenthood Federation of America) was preparing a fundraising pamphlet, Sanger was livid about a paragraph calling for more babies from the fit. By way of explanation, Kenneth Rose of the Federation wrote to Sanger, ‘You may be somewhat troubled by the emphasis given [to] more babies by those who should have them, but from a fundraising point of view, this is to us important, and everybody has been willing to have this included…’
Responding by letter from her retirement home in Tucson, Sanger expressed her opinion of such eugenic rhetoric:
‘I do not think that the … birth control movement will gain one financial supporter thru that paragraph, certainly not any supporter who thinks beyond his nose. For us to start that kind of sentiment is just going to put the weapons in the hands of our opponents, and soon the whole birth control movement will be sliding backward or into the Hitler and Stalin and Mussolini phobia.'”
Clearly, Valenza’s peer-reviewed scholarly article suggests that there has been an internal debate at Planned Parenthood over capitulation to racism and eugenics since its earliest years. Sadly, it seems Sanger was unable to resolve this dispute adequately enough to insure current Planned Parenthood employees know how they should respond to White Supremacy. Planned Parenthood would do well to distribute the full Family Planning Perspectives article to employees, rethink, and then retrain those who answer the phones, the voices of Planned Parenthood that speak directly to ordinary folk.
As for ongoing public discourse over Sanger’s personal beliefs, one quote often attributed to Sanger to support the assertion that she was a racist is:
“The mass of significant Negroes, particularly of the South, still breed carelessly and disastrously, with the result that the increase among Negroes, even more than among whites, is in that portion of the population least intelligent and fit, and least able to rear children properly.”
According to Valenza, however, Sanger was quoting WEB DuBois in a 1932 Birth Control Review article he wrote. The Planned Parenthood “Negro Project,” which Sanger first proposed in 1938 and began in the early 1940s, financed the campaign of a Black minister and Black doctor, who traveled through the South and addressed fears and misgivings about birth control among African Americans. Valenza also cites Robert G. Weisbord, who states that the Negro Project was aligned with Mary McCleod Bethune, Walter White, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., E. Franklin Frazier, A. Philip Randolph, and the National Medical Association.
This fine list does not mean that Planned Parenthood did not struggle with internal racism. In fact, the correspondence between Sanger and Rose over fundraising suggests that, in fact, it did. It should continue to do so, with complete transparency, with the aim of resolving this problem now. Otherwise, anxiety and fear of genocidal practices and forced sterilization among people of color may increase. We should not, however, be duped by anti-abortion activists that exploit fear on both sides of the racial divide in order to advance their cause.
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Good piece, Eisa.
Sad to say, I wouldn’t trust planned parenthod as far as I can throw them.
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Concomittantly, this type of stuff is used all the time by wacko right-to-lifers when they bribe our typically bribable black preachers each year around the anniversary of Roe v Wade. I’m not defending Planned Parenthood is there’re some “shennanigans” as Juno put it, afoot. But this is no reason to stem any support, in my opinion, of a woman’s right to choose.
Indeed, if you want to talk eugenics, I think that’s a reasonable debate topic in our community. It goes on all the time in OB-GYN offices, in community clinics, in fertility practices…just not in the news. Plus, given the bane of poverty, irresponsibility, crime and too many generations bringing new hopeless generations into this world (hell ay my age I’d be a great granddad in some circles!)…then yeah, let’s talk eugenics. As we fear to discuss real solutions to real problems–spawned by institutional and structure racism, history…or plain crazy, ill behavior–then a little Norplant might go a long, long way. Think I’m wearing a swastika on my arm? Think again. ‘hood clinics and public health service stations all over this country can pop those things in and you’d never know it, frankly, I know a lot of middle class black folks who see no problem with it whatsoever when you get them behind closed doors or at the dinner table…