This discussion has been fun (as well as disturbing at times). I hope readers of the posts on this thread have been inspired to do a little research of their own. I think a good starting place is watching Maafa 21. Whether one believes it is a fair presentation of the facts or whether it is poor history, it IS the place one should start, since it is being shown all over the country in churches, in private homes and at meetings of various organizations over and over again. Its message, I suppose, has reached hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people already. Its portrayal of massive injustice, if true, demands that those injustices be brought to an end — if false, they must be carefully and credibly refuted in order to restore shattered confidence in the institutions of society.

I, as many others do, think Maafa 21 contains overwhelming evidence of an ongoing, terrible injustice against non-whites. I encourage others to watch it and see what they think.

“What do you make of this? It doesn’t look good for PP”

It looks bad for Planned Parenthood. As I’ve said repeatedly, I don’t support either Planned Parenthood or abortion; I just want clarity in the record. The more I dig into Sanger the more I find that people in the pro-life movement have misrepresented her in order to make a bad thing look even worse. Nothing justifies the kind of distortion of the truth that I’m seeing. Abortion is evil, and Planned Parenthood has done much evil in the name of supporting women’s choice, but we are not therefore justified in distorting the record either of Planned Parenthood itself or of its founder.

I have two problems with you. First is that you seem to confuse explaining the truth about Sanger with defending her actions or Planned Parenthood. I am explaining not defending, but you continue to claim or insinuate that I am doing both.

Second is that you seem incapable of reading the historical record with any nuance. You are convinced that Sanger is guilty of everything the conspiracy theorists claim she is. I don’t have so much of a problem with that. People are convinced by the arguments that convince them. What I do have a problem with is that you can’t acknowledge any ambiguity in the record. You believe that an honest person could only interpret her words in one particular way rather than admitting that an honest observer could interpret her words in several plausible ways.

Good historians differ from one another not because some are honest and some are not but because they bring different knowledge and contexts to bear in their interpretations. I think the evidence for my understanding of Sanger is better and fuller than yours. I even think that David’s evidence is better than yours even though I agree with your politics than I don’t his. But you seem to think that you bring truth to the discussion and that I bring only deception or willful ignorance.

“William Bouie Haden, of United Negro for Progress, once said, “Anyone who votes for Planned Parenthood programs in black neighborhoods is an Uncle Tom.”

Simone Caron has an interesting article in a 1998 issue of the Journal of Social History about the charge of genocide that black power activists, including Haden, frequently brought in the 1960s. Here’s the context she sets:

“The Black Panther party considered contraception only one part of a larger government scheme of genocide. Drugs, venereal disease, prostitution, coercive sterilization bills, restrictive welfare legislation, inhuman living conditions, “police murders,” rat bites, malnutrition, lead poisoning, frequent fires and accidents in run-down houses, and black over-representation in Vietnam combat forces all contributed to the malicious plan to annihilate the black race… Malcolm X also suspected genocidal motives behind population-control advocacy… In the summer of 1967 the male-dominated Black Power Conference in
Newark, New Jersey, passed an anti-birth-control resolution that contained the key phrase, birth control equals “black genocide.”… Resistance ranged from a small California group called Efforts to Increase Our Size (EROS) to groups in Pittsburgh and Cleveland that protested Planned Parenthood programs to the ultramilitant group in New York known as the Five Percenters. These organizations asked two main questions: “Is birth control just
a ‘white man’s plot’ to ‘contain’ the black population?” and “Is it just another scheme to cut back on welfare aid or still another method of ‘keeping the black man down’?”

As I said earlier, some black communities are conspiracy minded. We need better evidence than words from Haden to prove that abortion is actually a plot against blacks.

“Studies from the CDC show that prior to the legalization of abortion approximately 80% of all illegal abortions were done on white women … but at the moment abortion became legal that began to reverse.”

In her article, Carone makes two arguments: first, that male black power activists fought contraception and abortion because they believed both were part of a white plot to kill off blacks; second, that black women fought for contraception and abortion because they wanted those choices. The black middle class, both male and female, also supported contraception and abortion, believing that they could rise faster by limiting the size of their families. Thus, the fight over contraception and birth control was not between innocent blacks and evil whites but between black power activists who didn’t want contraception and abortion and black women and the black middle class who did want them.

“Abortion has swept through the Black community like a scythe, cutting down every fourth member.”

The fact that abortion has devastated the black population is not evidence that there has been a plot against black Americans anymore than the fact that a quarter of black men have served prison time proves there is a plot. You can find blacks who claim that both facts are evidence of a genocidal plot but that doesn’t mean there is one.

What do you make of this? It doesn’t look good for PP:
http://www.childpredators.com/Tapes/intro.cfm

Below is an excerpt from:
http://www.physiciansforlife.org/content/view/1828/2/

William Bouie Haden, of United Negro for Progress, once said, “Anyone who votes for Planned Parenthood programs in black neighborhoods is an Uncle Tom.”

In 1971 he said, “Into the black community stepped Planned Parenthood; only when they come into the black community they’ve become Planned Black Genocide.”

His words proved to be prophetic, since with the legalization of abortion in 1973, Planned Parenthood and the abortion cartel began systematically marketing (targeting) abortion in the African American communities.

As Mark Crutcher, producer of the recently released DVD documentary Maafa 21 Black Genocide in 21st Century America (www.maafa21.com), pointed out in his documentary,

“Studies from the CDC show that prior to the legalization of abortion approximately 80% of all illegal abortions were done on white women … but at the moment abortion became legal that began to reverse. And that’s why the legalization of abortion was so crucial for the eugenics movement. Legalization created the ability to market abortion in the black community and from a eugenic standpoint that changed everything.”

The dramatic outcome of this abortion industry strategy is described by Michael Novak,

“Since the number of current living Blacks (in the U.S.) is 36 million, the missing 16 million represents an enormous loss, for without abortion, America’s Black community would now number 52 million persons. It would be 36 percent larger than it is. Abortion has swept through the Black community like a scythe, cutting down every fourth member.”

“Yeah. The Planned Parenthood way and the honest way”

Language is sometimes ambiguous and can be interpreted in more than one way. The way to deal with ambiguity is to find more context that will clarify the meaning of the disputed passage. Because you believe that Sanger is a racist, you believe that the sentence can only mean racism.

But I have provided more and better context than you have. Sanger didn’t promote genocide in any of her writings or her speeches. She didn’t promote ‘positive’ eugenics. The black leaders who supported her were the highest profile and most celebrated black leaders of their time. The sentence in question was written to Gamble who was so disturbed by the high rate of abortion that he rushed in to put an end to it. And he did so just after the war, when racist sentiment was still running high.

Against this context, you have a single sentence that could be taken another way, a way that becomes more plausible the more context is added.

“subjected to an assault by the social engineering of racist eugenicists”

You have provided no evidence that racist eugenicists still exist and are active in the black community.

You wrote:

“… there’s at least a couple of ways of understanding Sanger’s [blatantly racist] statement …”

Yeah. The Planned Parenthood way and the honest way.

You wrote:

“The tragic truth is that blacks are disproportionately represented in almost every negative social measure—poverty, imprisonment, addiction, crime, broken families, missing fathers, single mothers, unintended pregnancies, falling out of the middle even after entering it. Is Sanger somehow responsible for all of this, too?”

Blacks have been subjected to centuries of slavery. They were bred, bought and sold like animals, which is not exactly conducive to the creation of strong families. Then slavery was outlawed and they were no longer “assets” to their former owners. Their human dignity could no longer be so blatantly violated. What would the racists do with them now? They were judged to be inferior by Sanger and were (and still are) subjected to an assault by the social engineering of racist eugenicists. Until they are “exterminated,” as Sanger put it, the plan appears to be to keep as many Blacks as possible totally dependent upon the state, so they at least have some political value as a reliable voting block.

My point is this: It should not surprise us that a segment of humanity so used, abused and violated for centuries has more than their share of social difficulties. Without a doubt racist, sociopathic, eugenicists like Sanger and her patrons have a very large share of the responsibility for the current plight of the Black community. Black Americans will eventually work their way out of all of this in spite of the diabolical social engineering to which they have been and still are subjected. The way out is for them to figure out who their friends really are and reject the “help” of those who aren’t – like Planned Parenthood and their political action committee, the Democrat party. Thanks in part to truthful information now being made easily available, as in documentaries like Maafa 21, many Blacks are “free at last” and many others are on their way. May God bless them.

The article you quote provides no direct evidence that Sanger was racist but relies on innuendo instead. Here’s an example:

“That blacks endured extreme prejudice and discrimination, which contributed greatly to their plight, seemed to further justify restricting their numbers. Many believed the solution lay in reducing reproduction. Sanger suggested the answer to poverty and degradation lay in smaller numbers of blacks.”

The problem with this argument is that Sanger argued that the health of every group—wealthy and poor, immigrant and native, white and black—would be improved if they restricted their numbers. Sanger preached this message to every group, and when ‘positive’ eugenicists argued that healthy white Protestants should have more babies so that the white race would grow, Sanger vehemently disagreed. She did not support this racist argument. She wanted smaller families period, for everybody.

“The claim that the current disproportionate abortion rate among Blacks has nothing to do with Planned Parenthood’s racist founder’s clearly stated plans to “exterminate the Negro population” is ludicrous”

A more honest and measured response would admit that there’s at least a couple of ways of understanding Sanger’s statement and that the one I offer is at least plausible. Given the other evidence I’ve provided, it’s fair to say that my analysis is more likely than yours.

The tragic truth is that blacks are disproportionately represented in almost every negative social measure—poverty, imprisonment, addiction, crime, broken families, missing fathers, single mothers, unintended pregnancies, falling out of the middle even after entering it. Is Sanger somehow responsible for all of this, too?

You wrote:

I hope I can take your post to mean that you have given up your earlier claim that Sanger actively sought the genocide of blacks.

Sanger was a racist eugenicist who sought to “better” the human race by reducing the Black population. See:

The Negro Project: Margaret Sanger’s Eugenic Plan for Black Americans
http://www.cwfa.org/articledisplay.asp?id=1466

The claim that the current disproportionate abortion rate among Blacks has nothing to do with Planned Parenthood’s racist founder’s clearly stated plans to “exterminate the Negro population” is ludicrous.

I agree. We certainly wouldn’t want to blame Jesus for everything that has been done in the name of Christianity or the authors of the Bible for all the various (and often mutually exclusive) interpretations it has spawned.

I don’t assign any personal blame to Sanger if someone else carried her ideas to their logical conclusion. It’s not right to blame someone for someone else’s misdeeds. Besides, I don’t buy the logical conclusions argument wherever I find it. Ideas usually have several logical conclusions. Some people take an idea one way and some another.

There is a question in my mind as to how much responsibility you can assign to Person A when you believe that Person B has “carried Person A’s ideas to their logical conclusion.”