Read on Twitter
I've been sitting with the awful comments that Kanye has been saying about abortion and honestly I'm so tired of his hotepery and misogynoir. White supremacists and Trump have been capitalizing off of him for years, and now the anti-abortion movement will too. https://twitter.com/RBraceySherman/status/1280905429862637568
What Kanye said isn't new—it's the same offensive disrespectful messaging that the anti-abortion movement has been pushing for years to denigrate Black people who have abortions. They do it to hide the racist history of their movement, which rose to protest de-segregation.
Once schools were no longer allowed to segregate, right-wing Christians wanted to be able to push a political agenda around race, while maintaining tax-exemption. Schools and organizations that discriminated based on race would lose their status. So they looked for a new issue.
“The new political philosophy must be defined by us [conservatives] in moral terms, packaged in non-religious language, and propagated throughout the country by our new coalition." — Paul Weyrich, a Christian conservative political activist. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-origins-107133
After abortion was legalized, the country wasn't very divided on it, but extreme conservative white Christians were against it, so they started indoctrinating more and more against it. They showed graphic anti-abortion propaganda films and gave out plastic fetuses to people.
They riled up white Christians to be anti-abortion and make it the marker of which candidates to support—coincidentally, ones who also supported segregation and racially oppressive policies. That's why you don't see the anti-abortion politicians supporting Black Lives Matter.
This Politico piece really outlines the history, as does the Netflix documentary Reversing Roe. The anti-abortion movement is working hard to ensure our nation forgets their origins. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-origins-107133
The racist movement became known as the Moral Majority and the Religious Right, and they rallied around abortion, which gave them the political ability to push all sorts of other racist policies under the guise of being "moral" and "religious freedom." https://www.npr.org/2019/06/20/734303135/throughline-traces-evangelicals-history-on-the-abortion-issue
This allowed them to pretend to care about the lives of Black fetuses, while not supporting any policies that would ensure Black children can thrive in this country, turn their backs on them when shot dead by police, and demonize their Black mothers with Welfare Queen tropes.
It's all manufactured to push a hatred of Black women and Black children. Now, they often say "how can they be racist if they want Black children born?" They don't necessarily want them born—they don't do anything to ensure Black folks have prenatal care or healthy births.
It's just like how all racist people using racist language and doing racist things say, "I don't have a racist bone in my body." It's a lie.
Stop eating up the lie.
They know all of these policies—especially abortion bans—impact us hardest and they don't care.
Stop eating up the lie.
They know all of these policies—especially abortion bans—impact us hardest and they don't care.
Now, let's get back to Margaret Sanger—yes, she was an overzealous birth control advocate who would talk to anyone that would listen and fund her work. Unfortunately some of those people were eugenicists. Here's the unfortunate truth: most white people then were racists.
Eugenics was the cutting edge science or whatever. Obviously most of us know it's bullshit now, but then a lot of people believed it—many still do. It's racist rhetoric. (Fun fact: A whole bunch of people running government still believe it!)
Our country was built on racism.
Our country was built on racism.
Does that excuse her behavior? Absolutely not. But we should talk about how some prominent Black activists held similar respectability politics about poor folks and their reproduction. People still hold those views today.
Again, an unfortunate truth. https://rewire.news/article/2015/08/20/false-narratives-margaret-sanger-used-shame-black-women/
Again, an unfortunate truth. https://rewire.news/article/2015/08/20/false-narratives-margaret-sanger-used-shame-black-women/
“Du Bois [was] not immune from the elitist thinking of their time. As reflected in Du Bois’s statement borrowed by Sanger to promote the Negro Project, they sometimes advocated birth control for poorer segments of their own race in terms painfully similar to eugenic rhetoric.”
That's a quote from @DorothyERoberts on W.E.B Du Bois on a quote that Sanger borrowed.
https://rewire.news/article/2015/08/20/false-narratives-margaret-sanger-used-shame-black-women/
https://rewire.news/article/2015/08/20/false-narratives-margaret-sanger-used-shame-black-women/
Also, a lot of Sanger's quotes were taken out of context. The anti-abortion movement photoshops her quotes and image with Nazis all the time so you can't tell the difference between what's real and what's fake.
https://rewire.news/article/2015/08/20/false-narratives-margaret-sanger-used-shame-black-women/
https://rewire.news/article/2015/08/20/false-narratives-margaret-sanger-used-shame-black-women/
Again, a lot of people's historic faves were racist. Aside from all of the 'founding fathers' who owned and raped Black people, there's "pro-life" Susan B. Anthony & Elizabeth Cady Stanton who were slavery abolitionists, but turned on Black women when it came time for suffrage.
Read @freeblackgirl's book Lifting As We Climb which details how Anthony and Stanton were upset that Black men got the right to vote before them and welcomed white supremacist women into the fold to achieve the right to vote for themselves, leaving Black women out.
“I will cut off this right arm of mine before I will ever work or demand the ballot for the Negro and not the woman.”— Anthony in a meeting with F Douglass.
How Susan B Anthony List can proudly name their org after her and call others racist is beyond me. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/hundreds-voted-stickers-left-susan-b-anthonys-grave
How Susan B Anthony List can proudly name their org after her and call others racist is beyond me. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/hundreds-voted-stickers-left-susan-b-anthonys-grave
Anyway, that's a lot of history. Where are we today? Well, it's actually pretty settled: people of color overwhelmingly support abortion access and the people who support anti-abortion politicians and laws are damn near all white.
Abortion bans are racist.
Abortion bans are racist.
Abortion bans keep us from being able to access the care we need. They're used to push racist xenophobic tropes like Asians can't assimilate and prefer girls so they shouldn't have access to abortion or Black women duped by providers so they shouldn't have access to abortion.
Then they elevate a handful of Black and Brown people to push this message that isn't true about abortion. They did it with Jane Roe—there's a whole documentary about how they paid her to lie. They're doing it with the other talking heads. It's all a lie. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2020-05-19/roe-v-wade-jane-roe-norma-mccorvey-hulu-doc-abortion
Our nation is built on racism and misogyny, so of course those lies designed to harm us from caring for ourselves travel faster than the truth does. They're designed to play into the racist way our society thinks about Black and Brown people and our pregnancies. Don't buy it.
This is all a lot, and there's so much to read on it. But in the end, as the good sis @AlenciaJohnson said, it would be easier if we would just Trust Black Women.
Don't buy into Kanye's hotep message.
Just trust us. Trust Black women and trans people. https://twitter.com/AlenciaJohnson/status/1281193633216159744?s=20
Don't buy into Kanye's hotep message.
Just trust us. Trust Black women and trans people. https://twitter.com/AlenciaJohnson/status/1281193633216159744?s=20
