Dozens of employees for Planned Parenthood are saying they encountered continued instances of racism within the national wing of the organization.
The organization commissioned the Anti-Oppression Resource and Training Alliance group to conduct an internal audit, which was based on interviews with 64 current and 12 former black employees. The abortion provider’s president, who is black, warned that a “reckoning” over racism is headed toward Planned Parenthood when discussing the results of the audit last week.
“The urgency of this moment, the urgency of the reckoning that we’ve all known was coming … the deep urgency of what we need to do inside of [Planned Parenthood], stepping into leadership in this moment, I have never felt more urgent, and I’ve never actually felt more free,” Planned Parenthood President Alexis McGill Johnson said. “And I want that feeling of freedom to give us all the covers to do the work that we need to do.”
BuzzFeed News reported that dozens of black employees reported instances of racism and “anti-Blackness” when working with white coworkers. Planned Parenthood’s human resources department, however, delivered “no meaningful consequence or accountability for racial harm.”
“I imagine that little of it will be surprising to you that the collective experience of Black staff at Planned Parenthood is as heavy as it is,” Autumn Brown, an AORTA staff member who presented the findings, said. “What we were looking for was to understand … what is the collective experience of being Black at Planned Parenthood? Because regardless of the individual facts of the individual incidences, if we have enough incidences that look like X, we know that that means Y.”
Planned Parenthood said, following the audit, that it is steadfast in addressing the racism issues.
“Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s leadership is committed to confronting the organization’s legacy of white supremacy head on, and the cultural assessment conducted by [Anti-Oppression Resource and Training Alliance] is an important component of the comprehensive and meaningful work we are undertaking to create belonging and equity,” Melanie Newman, Planned Parenthood’s head of communications and culture said in a statement.
BuzzFeed News reported earlier this year on allegations of racism, including people of color reporting they are unable to move up the corporate ladder compared to white colleagues.
Planned Parenthood has been plagued with ties to racism since its founding. One of the organization’s New York affiliates removed the organization’s founder’s name, Margaret Sanger, from one of its buildings this summer for her connection to eugenics.
“The removal of Margaret Sanger’s name from our building is both a necessary and overdue step to reckon with our legacy and acknowledge Planned Parenthood’s contributions to historical reproductive harm within communities of color,” Karen Seltzer, the chairwoman of the New York affiliate’s board, said in a statement at the time.
Sanger founded Planned Parenthood in 1916 when she and two others established the country’s first birth control clinic in Brooklyn. Sanger was a noted supporter of eugenics, a movement based on improving human civilization through selective breeding, and published an article in 1919, titled “Birth Control and Racial Betterment,” among other published pieces and speeches.
