Namako Studios

wtfbyrne:

Link to part one - http://tiny.cc/6mb3ww

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May 12, 2013
From: Etsy Marketplace Integrity
To: me

Hello,

This is (representative’s name) from Etsy’s Marketplace Integrity Team. Thank you for your interest in selling on Etsy.

Unfortunately, some of the items listed in…

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Reason #567,893,221 that I don’t sell on Etsy anymore!  Holy crap!

“In 2009, a white Texas-based anti-abortion activist named Mark Crutcher released a film he wrote and directed, Maafa 21: Black Genocide in the 21st Century. Crutcher populated the film with African-American community activists and pastors who have close ties to radical Tea Party Republicans—familiar faces like Stephen Broden and Alveda King, a conservative niece of Martin Luther King, Jr. Over 138 dizzying minutes, Maafa 21 advances a familiar accusation: That Margaret Sanger, founder of the American Birth Control League and Planned Parenthood, was a eugenicist in cahoots with wealthy, Northeastern white supremacists who wanted to eliminate “the unfit,” including poor Blacks. The film presents Sanger’s work to legalize birth control as part of the plot.

The film builds its case with quick flashes of historical documents, mainstream news articles and what it presents as clippings from the Black Panther Party’s iconic newspaper. It is at its most compelling when it presents an interview with Elaine Riddick, a Black rape survivor who in 1968 was surreptitiously sterilized on orders from the North Carolina Eugenics Board, immediately after giving birth to the son conceived during the sexual assault. Riddick, who has unsuccessfully sued North Carolina for restitution, describes how she was cast as “feeble minded” and therefore unfit to reproduce. Maafa 21 is the closest the predominantly white, Christian right has come to successfully exploiting Black Nationalist themes and aesthetics.

At a Juneteenth congressional screening, Rep. Trent Franks, a white Tea Party Republican from Arizona who routinely compares voluntary abortion to chattel slavery, called the film a vital weapon against “racist abortion policy.” “I hope people will see this movie. … Especially [in] the African-American community [which] can give voice to the truth that it demonstrates so clearly.”

Care Net hopes so as well. A full-color pamphlet, which Edwards says her center will distribute at 46th and Paseo, tells readers that “the black community has been targeted by Planned Parenthood and others,” resulting in “over 15 million black lives eliminated,” a claim taken directly from Maafa 21.

“The first time I remember hearing that 43 percent of African-American pregnancies end in abortion might have been through Dean Nelson at Care Net,” Edwards says. Nelson, a black Washington, D.C.-area minister, is vice president of Care Net’s “underserved outreach.” “He also said that in New York, they’re as high as 60 percent. And not only that, but that African Americans only make up 13 percent of the population, so there’s a higher abortion rate and a lower population.”

“That’s very disproportionate,” Hanley chimes in.

Race-based abortion reporting is notoriously uneven. States can choose whether and to what extent they’re going to collect and share this information with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC’s most recent surveillance report (from 2009) didn’t include 23 states. It excludes most of the Northeast, as well as heavily white Midwestern states that would likely boost the abortion rate among whites. Also missing are California, Florida, and North Carolina, which are among the most densely populated states in the nation. It’s hard to draw real conclusions about race from this data.

Still, based on what we do know about the racial differences in abortion, the disparities are alarming. In 2009, Black women ages 15 to 44 had 477 abortions per 1,000 live births, according to the CDC. The ratio for Latinas was 195 per 1,000. For white women it was 140 to 1,000. Data from the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that race-concerned pro-lifers routinely dismiss because of its historical ties to Planned Parenthood, show that Black women are more than five times as likely to undergo the procedure than white women.

Guttmacher attributes the disparity to similarly dramatic inequities in birth control access. And according to a a 2006 survey by the institute, the most prominent reason that women have abortions is because they can’t afford a baby at the moment and they think an infant would hinder them from going to school, working, or caring for the kids they already have.

But anti-abortion leaders have severed the data on abortion rates from all of this context, and exploited a lack of more recent, comprehensive research to advance their talking points. Maafa 21 spells out the claim in a text slide it flashes:

Since 1973, legal abortion has killed more African-Americans than AIDS, cancer, diabetes, heart disease and violent crime combined. Every week more blacks die in American abortion clinics than were killed in the entire Vietnam war. And the largest chain of abortion clinics in the United States is operated by Planned Parenthood.

Care Net and its allies have used this kind of material to drive a massive marketing campaign in Black communities over the past three years. The campaign’s most prominent platform has been a series of billboards that label Black children as endangered species and declare Black women’s wombs “the most dangerous place” for their children. The first round appeared in Atlanta, to dovetail with Black History Month in 2010. It sparked just as much controversy as you’d expect.”

One thing I’ve observed about more “mainstream” feminism over the years is that because white feminists generally suffer from two symptoms, that of white privilege, where they don’t notice women of other races/ethnic groups, and that of white guilt, where they don’t want to hurt anyone’s little feelings or say the wrong things or trample into areas they don’t feel qualified to trample into, they’ve completely lost the ability to engage with women who are not, you know, white.

Whereas the conservative movement, who frankly hates women, and really hates women who are not white, don’t have any sense of white guilt, and trample around cherrypicking information, claiming the mantle of saving women from themselves, and generally hijacking carefully culled historical information/misinformation, because they don’t have any shame or awareness or basic human decency.  (Note:  they got the white privilege in spades, but they don’t notice it either, unless it suddenly comes under attack by someone having the temerity to mention it, and then oh, wow, the wailing and gnashing of teeth, oh, those poor persecuted white folk who never did no harm to anyone evah.)

Some of this same toxicity has spilled over onto Tumblr too, with people madly embracing the only partially true storyline about Margaret Sanger, apparently in an effort to defuse some of the difficult questions raised by, I guess, people being human beings and therefore never absolutely perfect.  Whenever I read the toxic shit about Margaret Sanger I contrast it to the vast numbers of posts on Tumblr extolling the aMAZing folks of, say, the Romanov Dynasty, or Theodore Roosevelt, or Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson.  And I doubt it’s a coinicidence that males are given the Full Human Being With Flaws pass, but women are not.

But I digress.  Read it and weep.