"This week, Planned Parenthood of Greater New York announced
that it would remove Margaret Sanger’s name from its Manhattan Health Center.
The grounds were Sanger’s eugenic ideas and alliances, which for years have
been highlighted by anti-abortion advocates and minimized by her admirers.
Under the pressures of the current moment, apparently, that minimization isn’t
sustainable any more.
"This is an interesting shift from just a year ago, when
Clarence Thomas faced a wave of media scorn when he took note of Sanger’s
eugenic sympathies. But Thomas was citing Sanger’s writings to suggest that
abortion in America today reflects a kind of structural racism — an inherited
tendency, which persists even without racist intent, for pro-abortion policies
to reduce minority births more than white births. Whereas the removal of
Sanger’s name, presumably, was intended to drive home the opposite point — to
establish a clear separation between past and present, between racism then and
abortion rights today.
"But the difficulty is that according to current thinking on
how structural racism lingers and what anti-racism requires, Thomas still seems
to have a reasonable case....."
And Douthat shows how. This is an argument that anyone who has ever read a biography of Sanger can hardly deny. It has now been cast in the BLM/structural racism mode of analysis and will perhaps get more attention.
Eugenicism along with racism was pretty much common currency among all political orientations back then. Are there any "statues" of leaders of that time immune from toppling? I guess not. Biden's latest BS statement was that Trumpy was the first racist president. How many were NOT racist at some level? Wilson was certainly rabidly racist. So let's tear down ALL the statues and unname all the institutions so we can get some rest.
ReplyDeleteWell, no argument from me about un-canonizing Margaret Sanger.
ReplyDeleteAnd Trump of course isn't the first racist president. Just the latest and most blatant.
However with all the hoopla about wokeness and white sensitivity I wish one idea that would catch on is that you don't have to be perfectly aligned with the PC stars to do the right thing. Two presidents, Lincoln and Lyndon Johnson, were definitely not what we would call anti-racist today. But they arguably did the most of any presidents to help bring about racial justice, with the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Civil Rights Act.
I heard some speechifier say that it was a racist president who signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
ReplyDeleteFor all his many faults, I honestly can't think of a president who, in the end, dismantled more structural racism than Lyndon Johnson.
Re eugenics--H.L. Mencken wrote an essay against it during Sanger's day, saying that whatever defects it attempted to erase were nothing compared to greed, cruelty, and callousness.
That's the amazing thing. When we do good things in spite of ourselves. And LBJ was too astute to not know the Dems would take a hit in the South. Although we still could do it, I wonder why we didn't nuke ourselves during the Cold War. I can't figure why it didn't happen. If somebody tells me "Act of God", I won't argue.
DeleteWe had a racist president when the 19th Amendment went into effect, too, although presidents don't have anything to do officially about congressional amendments. Come to think of it, we've had a lot of racist presidents.
DeleteI hate to say this, but that was a very good column by young Douthat. It got me thinking about how the things white folk do for (and to) themselves almost always tend toward making things worse for black folk.
ReplyDelete