Reparations Daily (ish) Vol. 79
Reproductive Freedom Starts with Black Women
Happy Thursday!
Although, like many of you, I am not feeling particularly happy in light of the leaked Supreme Court opinion draft that threatens to overturn Roe V Wade, as detailed in a Politico article that rocked the nation on Monday night.
I am admittedly nowhere near an expert on this issue, but I have been researching different stereotypes Black women in the United States face for another project that I am working on, which led me to the fantastic book Killing The Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty by Dorothy Roberts.
This particular piece in the Politico article stood out to me, “Alit’s draft opinion ventures even further into this racially sensitive territory by observing in a footnote that some early proponents of abortion rights also had unsavory views in favor of eugenics.” In his opinion, Justice Alito directly mentions the Black community citing that supporters of abortion “have been motivated by a desire to suppress the size of the African American population.”
For today’s Hot Takes section, I’ll do my best to briefly walk through what exactly Alito is referencing, why it matters, and how it fits into the larger conversation of reproductive oppression and anti-Blackness — pulling mostly from Killing the Black Body.
Some reparations-related news you might be interested in:
On Monday, an Oklahoma judge ruled that a lawsuit that would set the stage for reparations for the Tulsa Race Massacre could proceed.
Reporting continues on Harvard’s detailed report on its legacy’s ties to slavery.
Asheville’s reparations commission had its first-ever meeting last week.
A recent study found that Black farmers lost about $326 billion worth of land in the U.S. due to discrimination during the 20th century, according to Bloomberg.
According to the New York Times, a teacher in Rochester, NY, told students to pick cotton and call him “massah,” during a lesson on slavery. He was only suspended.
The heat toward the “Royal Family” to have serious conversations around reparations is turning up.
Here are some of the best pieces I’ve read/skimmed/listened to around the leaked SCOTUS opinion (both new and old):
The Daily: Is This How Roe Ends?
Slate: Why Clarence Thomas Is Trying to Bring Eugenics Into the Abortion Debate
New York Times: What an America Without Roe Would Look Like
Word in Black: What Ending Roe v. Wade Means for Black Women
New York Civil Liberties Union: NYCLU ON REPORTING OF LEAKED SCOTUS OPINION OVERTURNING ROE
Center for American Progress: Women of Color Will Lose the Most if Roe v. Wade Is Overturned
With radical love,
Trevor
National News
Washington Post: Slavery reckoning requires confronting sexual exploitation of Black women
Washington Post: Racial justice coalition demands that Biden order study of reparations
Washington Post: The GOP is no longer a party. It’s a movement to impWhite Christian nationalism.
TIME: What Actually Changes After a University Like Harvard Investigates Its Ties to Slavery
Washington Post: Did Jesse James Bury Confederate Gold? These Treasure Hunters Think
Jacobin: W. E. B. Du Bois Was the Father of Pan-African Socialism
CNN: A 'birthright to capital': An economist makes a case for 'baby bonds'
Nonprofit Quarterly: How Do We Build Black Wealth? Understanding the Limits of Black Capitalism
Bloomberg: U.S. Black Farmers Lost Billions in Land Value, Study Shows
New York Times: What to Know About Tucker Carlson’s Rise
Mother Jones: The Ivy League’s Reckoning With Slavery Is Long Overdue
CBS: U.S. Soldier Who Was Born into Slavery Promoted to Brigadier
Washington Post: What Are Civil Rights Audits, and Why Are Companies Doing Them?
New York Post: Reparations aren’t about justice. They’re an act of revenge (tw: racism, and anti-Black rhetoric. I include articles like these from time to time to spread awareness on how the opposition discusses this topic. )
Regional News
NBC: Judge lets Tulsa race massacre reparations lawsuit proceed
Citizen-Times: Finally! 1st Asheville Reparations Commission meeting; neighborhoods to weigh in
New York Times: Teacher Suspended for Telling Students to Pick Cotton in Slavery Lesson
Washington Post: Grain elevator: Ruling lets slave descendants suit go ahead
Evanston Roundtable: Several programs working together to advance Burton’s home makeover
New York Times: Judge Allows Part of Lawsuit by Tulsa Massacre Survivors Seeking Reparations
Harvard Crimson: Where Harvard’s Legacy of Slavery Lives Today
Boston Globe: Cousins to discuss shared connection to slavery at Brookline event
The Hill: Civil rights activists protest Confederate Memorial Day at Georgia’s Stone Mountain
WDSU: Louisiana House votes to end days honoring Lee, Confederates
Boston Globe: How Harvard could spend that $100 million to unwind its legacies of slavery
New York Daily News: 65,000 NYC kindergarteners now have $100 college savings accounts
The Enquirer: Opinion: Critical race theory all about political strategy, not education
The Beacon: William Jewell has two groups doing slavery research. Some say that’s a problem
WABE: Amid talk of change, Stone Mountain Park allows Confederate commemoration to resume
Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Confederate heritage group, counterprotesters face off at Stone Mountain
VT Digger: Vermont Senate gives tentative OK to creating a state truth and reconciliation commission
International News
Euronews: Germany files case against Italy in UN court over war reparations
The Guardian: Royals, republicanism and reparations: Wessexes feel the heat in Caribbean
The Hill: Zelensky: ‘Russia will have to pay reparations’ for the war
The Independent: Kenya petitions Royal Family for reparations over colonial atrocities as government declines meeting
Hot Takes
Just a few days before the bombshell Politico article was published, a column was published in the Washington Post titled ‘Slavery Reckoning Requires Confronting Sexual Exploitation of Black Women.’
The columnist, Colbert King, wrote that “no probe into the corrosive effects of racial bondage can be complete without coming to grips with, besides slavery itself, the single heinous crime against humanity committed in the annals of U.S. history: the centuries-long sexual exploitation and subjugation of Black women and girls.”
This subjugation and sexual exploitation, according to Dr. Dorothy Roberts, author of Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty, is crucial to both reproductive and racial politics — setting the stage for the moment we find ourselves in today.
In the leaked opinion, Alito cites other amicus briefs that “present arguments about the motives of proponents of liberal access to abortion note that some such supporters have been motivated by a desire to suppress the size of the African American population.”
To understand this now popular right-wing anti-choice talking point, we must have a deep understanding of the history of birth control and the politics of Margaret Sanger, which Roberts walks us through in her second chapter, ‘The Dark Side of Birth Control.’
Margaret Sanger, according to a 2021 Planned Parenthood fact sheet, “helped begin the movement for reproductive rights, the invention of the birth control pill, and brought about the reversal of federal and state laws that prohibited publication and destruction of information about sex, sexuality, contraception, and human eugenics.”
Though this movement, according to Roberts, was marred by racism from its inception. Sanger was also a major proponent of the eugenics movement, choosing to “align herself with ideologies and organizations that were explicitly ableist and white supremacist,” according to Planned Parenthood. “In doing so, she undermined reproductive freedom and caused irreparable damage to health and lives of generations of Black people, Latino people, Indigenous people, immigrants, people with disabilities, people with low incomes, and many others,” the organization said.
As noted by Planned Parenthood, the eugenics movement is grounded in white supremacy and anti-Blackness. Threatened by Black political advancement and the intermingling of Black and white people, proponents of eugenics focused on decreasing the Black birth rate and interracial marriage. The alliance of the birth control movement and eugenics set the stage for our current struggle for reproductive freedom, as evidenced in the Alito opinion and previous remarks from Clarence Thomas.
Roberts points out the nuanced discussion this conversation deserves in the subchapter, Was Margaret Sanger A Racist? She poses two questions:
Was Margaret Sanger a racist or savvy political strategist?
Did she advocate birth control for the less fit because she believed they were inferior, or did she merely exploit the rhetoric of racial betterment in order to gain support for women’s reproductive freedom?
Roberts argues that Sanger was motivated by “a genuine concern to improve the health of the poor mothers she served rather than a desire to eliminate their stock.” Therefore, Roberts believes that Sanger’s views were “distinct from those of her eugenicist colleagues.” Nevertheless, while her motivations may have differed from those within the eugenics movement, eugenic policy has consistently shown that it “has a particular affinity for racial hatred,” according to Roberts, whether in the United States or places like Nazi Germany.
There is nuanced framing that Roberts emphasizes is needed in this conversation, stating that we “must acknowledge the justice of ensuring equal access to birth control for poor and minority women without denying the injustice of imposing birth control as a means of reducing their fertility.” Alito and Thomas lean heavily into the narrative of “birth control as racial genocide,” which has been a debate within the Black community since the 1920s, according to Roberts.
In an Ebony Magazine cover story, Dick Gregory, the comedian and civil rights leader, wrote:
“For years, they told us where to sit, where to eat, and where to live. Now they want to dictate our bedroom habits. First, the white man tells me to sit in the back of the bus. Now it looks like he wants me to sleep under the bed. Back in the days of slavery Black folks couldn’t grow kids fast enough for white folks to harvest. Now that we’ve got a little taste of power, white folks want us to call a moratorium on having children.”
Gregory is referencing the fact that after 1808 when the transatlantic slave trade had ended, and enslavers could no longer import people from Africa or the West Indies, they relied on producing new free labor through what historian Eric Foner calls “natural increased.” As a result, black women’s role transformed politically and economically, according to Marie Jenkins Schwartz, author of Birthing a Slave: Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum South. “If enslaved mothers did not bear sufficient numbers of children to take the place of aged and dying workers, the South could not continue as a slave society,” Schwartz noted.
Roberts describes that Gregory’s position, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, was not a particularly odd position to take at the time — highlighting how:
The 1967 Black Power Conference passed a resolution denouncing birth control
The NAACP and Urban League reversed their earlier support for family planning as a means for racial progress.
Fannie Lou Hamer, who had been sterilized without her consent, viewed abortion and birth control as a form of racial genocide
She also notes the notable number of organizations and individuals within the Black community that denounced the birth control as a racial genocide narrative, including:
National Council of Negro Women
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (mostly)
Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm
Dr. Dorothy Brown the first Black woman to serve as Surgeon General in the United States.
Chisholm wrote that “to label family planning and legal abortion programs genocide is male rhetoric, for male ears. It falls flat to female listeners and to thoughtful male ones. Women know, and so do many men, that two or three children who are wanted, prepared for, reared amid love and stability, and educated to the limit of their ability will mean more for the future of the Black and brown races from which they come than any number of neglected, hungry, ill-housed, and ill-clothed youngsters.”
Angela Davis expands on this in her chapter ‘Racism, Birth Control, and Reproductive Rights,’ stating that “birth control — individual choice, safe contraceptive methods, as well as abortions when necessary — is a fundamental prerequisite for the emancipation of women.”
Roberts agrees, closing out her chapter, noting that the danger of family planning policies is not “the physical annihilation of a race or social class” but rather the legitimization of an oppressive social structure. Focusing on procreation as the cause of Black people’s condition diverted attention away from the “political, social, and economic forces that maintain America’s racial order,” Roberts states.
The Alito’s and Thomas’s of the world ignore that Black people and other people of color have the most to lose if Roe is overturned. These women are the most likely not to have access to adequate health care and will most likely have the most challenging time securing safe abortions.
The narrative of race, eugenics, reproductive oppression, and reproductive rights that Alito alludes to, in his opinion, is selective and relies on the notion that Black women should not have a say over what choices they make about their bodies.
The history of birth control in the United States is complex and nuanced. Still, as Roberts outlines throughout her book, there is no denying that the history of reproductive oppression can be traced to the wombs of Black women. The notion that reproductive justice is not a racial justice issue is a fallacy.