Thanks for reading and I appreciate your perspective but there is no denying that Margaret Sanger was a stone cold racist. She spoke to the Klan on the regular basis and the entire concepts of Eugenics is about believing some people are genetically superior. It's not about a self-fulfilling prophesy because that would indicate that she believed in the nurture part of the nature/nurture argument, when a Eugenics advocate inherently believes that our genetics are the most determining factor.
" In promoting birth control, she advanced a controversial "Negro Project," wrote in her autobiography about speaking to a Ku Klux Klan group and advocated for a eugenics approach to breeding for “the gradual suppression, elimination and eventual extinction, of defective stocks — those human weeds which threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of American civilization." USA Today
" Sanger urged Dr. Gamble to enlist the help of spiritual leaders to justify their deadly work, writing, “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.” USA Today
To say she is not racist is to say Hitler is not an antisemite because talking about "extermination" in terms of social order is unethical, demonstrable, and undeniably racist.
I make the nuanced argument throughout the article that while Black men are right to be concerned with the racist past, their concern does not supersede a woman's right to choose.
The good that Sanger did doesn't make up for her bad, in my opinion. Although, I am an advocate for choice and access to Planned Parenthood, I think white women would make a more effective case in the Black community if they addressed the concerns that Black men and some women have.
Currently, the Black anti-abortion movement centers around the argument that abortion is genocide. Regardless to how ridiculous their assertions are, to defeat their rhetoric, we have to face it head on.
Sorry fo the long respond and thanks for encouraging me to think deeply about these issues.
