Protesters and counter-protesters from two extremist groups on the Left and Right collided this weekend in Charlottesville, Va. Now, one side is calling on the other to tear down all symbols of white supremacy. If we’re going to obliterate our nation’s controversial history, ridding it of the pockmarks and scars of its racist ways, shouldn’t we, you know, treat all white supremacy efforts with the same disdain?
I’d hate to obliterate historical Confederate symbols and gloss over Planned Parenthood, whose founder, Margaret Sanger, was an avid eugenicist and racist.
In The Pivot of Civilization, Sanger called African-Americans and immigrants “human weeds [and] reckless breeders, spawning… human beings who never should have been born.” In Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger, author David Kennedy wrote that in a 1923 speech, Sanger said couples who chose sterilization for the purpose of racial “purification” should be rewarded. One of Sanger’s more infamous quotes is her admittance that she wants to “exterminate the Negro population.”
Sanger literally founded Planned Parenthood on the basis of exterminating the unfit and the African-American, among others, via birth control — yet liberals claim she’s just a civil rights leader. Not so. Her racism took hold within Planned Parenthood’s walls and perpetuates still today.
Planned Parenthood performs more than 300,000 abortions per year, one-third of which are African-American babies. According to the CDC, the abortion rate is significantly higher among minority groups. Though African-American women only make up 6 percent of the U.S. population, they account for 35 percent of abortions reported. Almost 80 percent of Planned Parenthood’s clinics are located in communities dominated by minorities.
Still, liberals ignore Sanger’s racism and squash her white supremacist beliefs, heralding her a hero with their own symbolic gestures. She’s featured in an ongoing exhibit called “The Struggle for Justice” at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery because she’s a civil rights leader, obviously. Last year about two dozen House Republicans campaigned to remove the bust and failed. The year prior, several pastors banded together and petitioned the Smithsonian to remove it as well. In her response to the pastors, National Portrait Gallery Director Kim Sajet swept Sanger’s life goals under the rug and praised her “accomplishments.”
“[Sanger’s] association with the eugenics movement shadowed her achievements in sex education and contraception, making her a figure of controversy, one whose complexities and contradictions mirror her times. There is no ‘moral test’ for people to be accepted into the National Portrait Gallery.”
Sanger was a deeply disturbed woman who believed birth control would rid the country of the unfit and African-American race, and created an organization which went on to implement those beliefs in its most radical form: murder of the unborn. Few things scream “White Supremacy!” more than the 650-plus Planned Parenthood clinics where thousands of African-American babies are aborted per year.
If we’re going to rid our country of symbols associated with white supremacy, let’s start with those clinics.
Nicole Russell is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is a journalist in Washington, D.C., who previously worked in Republican politics in Minnesota. She was the 2010 recipient of the American Spectator’s Young Journalist Award.
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