Salamishah Tillet has a great post up at The Root about reproductive rights, African American women and how we need to push the frame of civil rights when we talk about womens' access to reproductive health care, along with pushing civil rights leaders to add it to their campaign agenda.
While abortion is rarely seen as a civil rights issue, the dismantling of Roe v. Wade would have dire consequences for African-American women. The roots of reproductive injustice for black women date back to the nation's founding, for enslaved women had no control of their reproductive rights and often were forced to bear children in order to replenish their slave master's labor force. Dorothy Roberts writes in her book, Killing the Black Body, that slave masters considered black women "objects whose decisions about reproduction should be subject to social regulation rather than to their own will."Today, reproductive injustice continues to adversely affect African-American women. Federal underfunding of adequate family-planning programs and lack of access to inexpensive, readily available contraceptives certainly play a role. And legislation, such as the Hyde Amendment, that denies women full access to safe and affordable abortions makes it more likely that African-American women and low-income women (who are disproportionately African-American) are adversely impacted. The reversal of Roe v. Wade would quite simply prevent African-American women from realizing full reproductive freedom.
While organizations such as Black Women's Health Imperative (BWHI), Black Women for Reproductive Justice (BWRJ) and the Third Wave Foundation are in the foreground of the fight for reproductive justice as a social justice, racially progressive mainstream organizations, such as the NAACP, have yet to incorporate black women's "right to choose" as a fundamental part of their civil rights agendas.
Given the racial history of reproductive rights, it is not just Planned Parenthood and the Feminist Majority that needs to push Obama on whether or not Sotomayor will uphold Roe v. Wade. Former Planned Parenthood president and African-American feminist Faye Wattleton once said, "Reproductive freedom should not be seen as a privilege or as a benefit, but a fundamental human right."
Go read the rest. This is a really powerful argument for why many black leaders should take a stance on reproductive rights because of the unique implications for black women. At a certain point we have to stop being scared and hold our community leaders accountable for the things they are saying and the impact that has on our communities. The agenda for women's rights and the agenda for civil rights has to overlap at a certain point. That said, I don't necessarily think of the NAACP as the center of progressive anti-racist activism, similar to how I don't really see many mainstream feminist groups as having a truly intersectional approach. But this is one way they both could move towards the direction of justice, as opposed to a solely identity politics based approach, playing to the common denominator.
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There’s a thread that this race and reproductive freedom riff could go off on, how there’s a long-standing controversy about whether or not reproductive health care overall has been used as a near-genocidal tool to keep the black population down. In the black community, to our knowledge, that thought has only been embraced by some separatists like some in the Nation of Islam (some columnists in the Final Call anyway) and other groups who saw their communities as being targeted by clinics that persuaded women to go on birth control and have abortions. It never though seemed to have mainstream support, not like a more popular generalized suspicion of the medical/scientific/government/elite/’expert’ community which dates back most prominently to the Tuskegee syphilis experiments.
The NAACP has taken pro-choice over the years, most notably in recent years in endorsing the 2004 March for Women’s Lives. Julian Bond, a leader in the NAACP and the civil rights community, was a prominent speaker at the march. The endorsing statement of the NAACP for the march can be seen at page 41 of the following PDF document off the NAACP website:
http://naacp.org/about/resources/brochures/health_resolutions-04.pdf
So one point that Salamishah Tillet made is not completely correct, that “the NAACP, have yet to incorporate black women’s “right to choose” as a fundamental part of their civil rights agendas.” They certainly have done so in the past, one might ask though why it might seem they are doing that less now, or recently.
But back for a moment to 2004…race and inclusiveness was a big issue in organizing the March for Women’s Lives, more after the fact of the original organizing beginning a year or more before the march, as organizers realized some special effort would be needed to ensure a diverse turnout. Part of the effort was reflected in changing the name of the march to the March for Women’s Lives, so the emphasis would not be some much on abortion or even contraception than if the event was called a “March for Choice”. They seemed to succeed, as the march turnout was huge (over a million) and no coverage seemed to suggest it was somehow biased or too white. If anything it might have been seen in some ways as too radical or alienating, as just after that we saw news begin to appear about presidential candidate John Kerry’s problems with support from religious constituencies which might have not really been so impressed by the march, as inclusive as it was in race, color, and sexual orientation.
We could go on in a laundry list of other endorsements and other, more meaningful collaboration between the NAACP and other civil rights groups and pro-choice groups, in particular around judicial related nominations and law and policy and such, but most of lessening of a sense of common cause – which might be a more accurate way to put it than a division or disagreement between civil rights and pro-choice groups came in the early 90s with President Clinton fulfilling his promise to “end welfare as we know it”. The lessening of a federal mandate for welfare programs in general naturally led to a lessening of a common cause between progressive organizations of all kinds, not just civil rights and pro-choice groups.
Seen that way, it should be expected to see fewer press releases or activities visible at the national level on reproductive choice coming from more mainstream organizations like the NAACP and proportionally more from pro-choice focused groups like the Black Women's Health Imperative, National Asian Pacifc American Womens Forum who did, for example, endorse and speak at the 2004 March for Women’s Lives.
We might more wonder what collaboration has been taking place between state and local chapters of more mainstream and multi-issue groups like the NAACP and pro-choice groups, though, with state-level law and policy on reproductive choice, as that’s been more where the battles have been fought and in many cases (to some extent) lost as anti-choice laws and policies have taken hold, especially in the deep South and midwest which have the stereotype at least of being more racist than the rest of the country, and also where civil rights groups have had a history of great progress and collaboration with other progressive groups.
But Salamishah is talking here less about that than – what – how the NAACP should have issued a strongly worded press release condemning the assassination of a doctor, an abortion provider, in a church? The killing of Dr. Tiller is so reprehensible it almost seems to stand on it’s own as something no one off the very far anti-choice or right wing fringe might sympathize with or -- in opposition, of course -- a group dedicated to the particular cause involved, like a group focused on reproductive choice would be sure needs to make statements condemning. The Sierra Club has taken very pro-choice stands in it’s history and was an endorser of the 2004 March for Choice. It hasn’t issued a press release to our knowledge condemning this tragedy. Should they do so? Perhaps, but would it in the context of a lack of recent history of extreme anti-abortion violence like murder just keep the opposition in the headlines longer, as groups from Operation Rescue to certifiable terrorists like supporters of the Army of God would take their condemnation as a chance to get some play in the media with their replies. The mainstream media and right-wing sources like Fox News commentators (Bill O’Reilly, obviously) might use that as a chance to give even more airtime to anti-choice (and perhaps other right-wing) extremists, and that would hardly help civil rights or pro-choice concerns.
There’s nothing to criticize though with Salamishah’s conclusion, that “We must push ourselves and our black organizations to be present and vocal in an interracial, intergenerational, cross-interest movement, that memorializes Tiller’s untimely death and assures all women, especially black women, unprecedented reproductive liberty.” Of course, reading that also makes us wish more of us were black women.
We just think it’s logical though that we’ll see that less around press releases and marches – at least until another march or public event like that gives groups like the NAACP the chance to take the stage – and more around judicial nominations like Sonia Sotomayor and what that means to asian and other ethnic constituencies and advocacy groups. We might more expect to see public discourse over ethnic diversity in religious appointments like Alexia Kelley’s appointment to be the Director of Faith-based and Community Partnerships at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). If her position and office is significant, one concern that hasn’t been explored yet by the progressive media or feminist blogs is if we should be more concerned that she’s going to adequately represent pro-choice (and moderate pro-life) concerns from ethnically diverse constituencies and advocacy groups. We'll expect to be reading about that at a blog like Feministing, for example, but where we're concerned for now we're kind of burning out on collaboration on this comment. :)