Crisis Pregnancy Centers Target Black Communities

Posted on May 2, 2013 by Akiba Solomon

This is an excerpt of an article originally published at Colorlines.

Last December, Care Net—the nation’s largest network of evangelical Christian crisis pregnancy centers—featured a birth announcement of sorts on the website of its 10-year-old Urban Initiative. Under the headline, “Plans Underway for Care Net’s Newest Center in Kansas City, Mo.!” a block of upbeat text described how a predominantly white, suburban nonprofit called Rachel House had “made contact” with “various African American pastors and community leaders,” who helped them “plant” a “pregnancy resource center” in a predominantly black, poor section of downtown Kansas City.

Evangelicals have long approached their anti-abortion work with missionary zeal. But over the past four years, national anti-abortion strategists have designated “urban” and “underserved” women and babies as a priority for saving. In practice, these terms tend to be euphemisms for “black” and, to a lesser extent, “Latina.”

Because crisis pregnancy centers are independently run and unregulated, it’s hard to say for sure how many there are in the United States. In a frequently cited 2010 report, the Family Research Council, a Christian right organizer and think tank, says there are more than 1,900 centers in the country affiliated with three major networks: Care Net, Heartbeat International and the National Institute of Family and Life Advocates. An entire section of the report is devoted to the “urban” work of pregnancy centers. “The concentration of abortion facilities in urban, minority and poorer areas of the U.S. is well-known,” the report declares.

The “concentration” claim has already been thoroughly debunked, but many anti-abortion activists still believe deeply in it. It’s that belief, in part, that’s stirred outrage over the gruesome story of Kermit Gosnell’s Philadelphia clinic in recent weeks. Gosnell is being prosecuted for conducting illegal, dangerous late-term abortions, and rightwing pundits have argued that mainstream media ignored the story because it drew unflattering attention to abortion providers in poor, black neighborhoods. The implication is that anti-abortion activists care more about poor women of color than do the Planned Parenthoods of the world.

In its 2011 federal tax filing, Care Net reported spending nearly $1 million trying to “educate inner-city communities” and develop centers in “underserved areas.” In talking about this work, Care Net typically promotes North Philadelphia’s black-owned Hope Center as a model. But Rachel House offers a window into a different story, one that has unfolded in a series of headline-grabbing controversies over the past three years.

Fueled by a race-baiting, national marketing campaign and the missionary-like evangelism of its affiliates, Care Net has turned the complex reality behind black abortion rates into a single, fictional story. In that story, poor black women who have abortions are the unwitting victims of feminists and morally deficient reproductive healthcare providers, embodied in sadists such as Gosnell. Crisis pregnancy centers, in this fable, are the best place those women can go to be saved. Read More →

Eradicating Hate Violence Needs Community Engagement
A Response to “Reconsidering Hate”

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Pat Clark

U.S. President Barack Obama applauds the sisters of James Byrd, Jr., Betty Byrd Boatner (2nd R) and Louvon Harris (2nd L), and the parents of Matthew Shepard, Judy Shepard (C) and Dennis Shepard (L) after Obama spoke in honor of the enactment of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr., Hate Crimes Prevention Act during a reception in the East Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., October 28, 2009. Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images.

The outrageous killings of James Byrd, Jr. and Matthew Shepard shine a light on the power of hatred fueled by racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of intolerance that are used to separate and divide us as human beings. Proponents of hate crime legislation and enhanced penalties for hate crimes want to make sure that killings and acts of violence like these provide an opportunity not only to hold accountable those responsible, but to expose and eradicate all violence based on bias, bigotry and prejudice. The goals underpinning this legislation deserve our defense: The lives of those who are often dehumanized, demonized, and marginalized should be valued. Everyone should be afforded protection by our system of justice. Those whose safety has been violated should be free of fear, and confident of redress. Most important, we should seize every opportunity to ensure that these crimes never happen again.

Dipping into the Undercurrent
A Response to “Reconsidering Hate”

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Rahsaan D. Hall

At the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Economic Justice, our mission is to eliminate race and national-origin discrimination through litigation, and community and legislative advocacy. Despite our narrowly focused mission we are always working collaboratively with community partners to advance an agenda that supports and affirms expansive hate crimes legislation.

After reading Kay Whitlock’s discussion paper I was moved by the manner in which she touched on the consistent acts of violence and aggression towards the “Other,” whoever that might be, throughout the history of this country. I think she did a good job of documenting that history, similar to Isabel Wilkerson’s book The Warmth of Other Suns, which tells the story of the Great Migration of African Americans leaving the oppression of the South only to be meet by the oppression in Northern cities, where groups of White people sought to protect their “entitlements” through threats and acts of violence.

Look Beyond Police for Solutions
A Response to “Reconsidering Hate”

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Rinku Sen

The dominant story about race in the United States goes like this: in the past, we had troubling racial patterns, including genocide, slavery, and segregation. Then heroic individuals took spontaneous action and showed America the error of its ways. We changed all of our racist laws and became colorblind, evidenced by the election of President Barack Obama. When race is evoked today, it is only by people of color aiming to avoid responsibility and gain “special rights.” If some people still act on extremist notions of White supremacy, then punishing hate crimes is the best we can do about such behavior which seems to be innate to human beings.

In this narrative, racism is defined as individual, intentional, and overt, causing an enormous problem for those of us working on the institutional and structural causes of inequity. If there isn’t a noose hanging, too many Americans think, then there isn’t a racial problem. A similar gap between dominant thinking and the reality of systemic oppression affects LGBT people, immigrants, and people of certain faiths. The issue of hate violence is particularly tricky because it offers both expansions and limits in the fight for justice. Hate crimes are a form–sometimes the only form–of racism, homophobia, xenophobia, or religious intolerance that most Americans will recognize. It has emotional impact that generates action because hate crime violence is indeed taking so many lives. In addition, we can see the need for structural solutions in the criminalizing policies that have been adopted to address it. On the surface, hate crimes legislation appears to join the individual and the structural in ways that few other issues do.

In her insightful discussion paper, Kay Whitlock points out some severe limits of the hate frame, which ultimately amount to the fact that the problem isn’t actually being solved. The criminal justice system on which we’ve pinned our hopes is itself responsible for generating and reinforcing deep bias against the people who are most frequently victimized: queers, people of color and especially queer people of color.

On Race, Redistribution of Resources Still Divides Liberals, Radicals
Commentary

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Howard Winant

“Race” as an idea barely existed before the Enlightenment and the onset of modernity in the West. Today, many dismiss the race-concept as an illusion, arguing that “there is no such thing as race;” or in more universalist terms, “there is only one race: the human race.” Yet race continues to demarcate and stratify all the world’s peoples in striking ways. Race remains a peculiar and unstable concept; racism has been upgraded, but it is still violent, coercive, and omnipresent.

The United States is undergoing a significant racial shift. Massive migration and a demographic transition to a “majority-minority” nation are shifting the meaning of race once again. Is race an illusion or an objective reality? Is American and worldwide structural racism a holdover from an earlier epoch of conquest, empire, capitalism, and slavery–all of which are still racially ordered–or is it a more-or-less permanent means of organizing inequality and domination on both a local and global scale? Why is the race-concept so implacably situated at the crossroads of identity and social structure? How permanent is the “color line”? Read More →

Reconsidering Hate
A Forum on the “Hate” Frame in Policy, Politics and Organizing

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Kay Whitlock

Demonstrators stand and listen to speakers during a rally to protest the death of Trayvon Martin in Miami. Lucas Jackson / Reuters

This article excerpted from a Political Research Associates discussion paper, available online.

In 1998, three White men in Jasper, Texas murdered James W. Byrd, Jr., an African-American man, dragging him for two miles along an asphalt road. Several months later, two men met 21-year-old Matthew Shepard, a White, gay student at the University of Wyoming, in a bar in Laramie, gave him a ride, pistol-whipped him and tied him to a fence. Shepard died from his injuries several days later.

These horrific incidents, labeled “hate crimes,” galvanized the nation. They intensified public support for laws that would add enhanced provisions to certain violations already subject to criminal penalties. These provisions include law enforcement reporting requirements, mandated training for law enforcement personnel, and civil legal remedies (permitting victims to sue for damages). Penalty enhancements could only be applied in cases where the crimes could be proved to be linked by bias and attempts to terrorize entire groups of people based on their actual or perceived race, color, religion, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity or expression, or physical/mental disability.1

The Long Hurricane
The New Orleans Catastrophe Predates Katrina

Posted on November 1, 2010 by Darwin BondGraham

Members of Survivors Village, an organization of displaced New Orleans public-housing tenants, and their supporters occupy the Columbia Parc rental office in June 2010.

Five years after Hurricane Katrina and the “federal flood,” as locals call the disaster, the new New Orleans is as much the product of decades of antiwelfare ideology in local and national governments as it is of the unique circumstances of the disaster. Since the storm, a resurgent racist business elite has gained power in the city and region, and instituted a new era of urban renewal—or, as community activists termed it the first time around, in the 1960s, “Negro removal.” Privatization of New Orleans’ public sector has proceeded to a degree that real estate, banking, and industry leaders in other regions only dream of. Federal disaster subsidies have enabled reinvestment in the state’s major economic sectors—oil and gas, shipping, military, and tourism. Characterized by low wages and ecocidal byproducts, these industries dominate state and city politics. Yet New Orleans is held up as a model of redevelopment, its innovations made possible by an unfortunate storm called Katrina.

Concurrent with this neoliberal economic project is a neoconservative cultural project, the goal of which is to remold impoverished Blacks and other underclass people—who are portrayed by the redevelopers as living in a pathological state of dependency, turned into irresponsible burdens on society by decades of failed big government—into “productive citizens.” Foundations both liberal and conservative have converged on New Orleans to experiment with housing, schools, parks, and economic development.

Beyond Green Jobs

Posted on November 1, 2010 by Julie Quiroz-Martinez

A volunteer from Youthbuild/Service Nation at the September 27, 2008, Green Jobs Now National Day of Action, sponsored by Green for All.

Everyone wants to be green. Fossil fuel companies tout their commitments to the environment, with BP sporting its green and yellow flower logo and Chevron scooping up a Green Apple award for promoting public-school energy efficiency [1]. In 2009 Exxon-Mobil got itself named Forbes magazine’s Green Company of the Year for stepping up its natural gas production [2].

Mix “green” with “jobs,” and everyone ought to love you. In fact, a 2010 Harris Interactive survey found that 72 percent of respondents believed that expansion of green jobs would help preserve a higher quality environment, and 61 percent agreed that expansion of green jobs would have a positive outcome for the U.S. economy. [3] As a candidate, Barack Obama promised to create five million green jobs, arguing that “green jobs are the jobs of the future,” and that they would “help reduce our dependence on foreign oil and save this planet for our children.” As president, Obama has directed $500 million toward green jobs training as part of the federal stimulus funding authorized in the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. (ARRA)

But organized opposition to green jobs does exist; in fact it thrives among conservative thought leaders and business groups, who view any push for an environmentally sustainable economy as simply an excuse to further regulate business. The influential Heritage Foundation, for one, claims that a green economy is a contradiction in terms, an approach that will eliminate more jobs than it would create. [4] Heritage also argues that green jobs are anti-free enterprise, propped up by government subsidies. It even pokes fun at green jobs, asking, as Peter Brookes and J. D. Foster do on the Heritage website, “What could be greener than a rickshaw?” [5]

From Schoolhouse to Statehouse
Curriculum from a Christian Nationalist Worldview

Posted on July 1, 2010 by Rachel Tabachnick

Students rally at a State Board of Education meeting, Austin, Texas,March 10, 2010

On May 21, Texas School Board member Cynthia Dunbar opened the board’s meeting with an invocation: “Whether we look to the first charter of Virginia, or the charter of New England, or the charter of Massachusetts Bay, or the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, the same objective is present—a Christian land governed by Christian principles.”¹ The board then voted nine to five, along party lines, to adopt new standards that will be used to teach the state’s 4.8 million students—resisting the pleas of educators, historians, and even Rod Paige, a former U.S. secretary of education under President George W. Bush. The new standards emphasize the role of Christianity in U.S. history and promote conservative values. A New York Times editorial pointed out that the Texas board did back down on a few of its “most outrageous efforts”—such as renaming the slave trade, the “Atlantic triangular trade”—but it nevertheless managed “to justify injecting more religion into government.” According to the Times, the curriculum differentiates between the Founders’ protection of religious freedom and “separation of church and state,”² which it deplores.

Abortion as “Black Genocide”
An Old Scare Tactic Re-Emerges

Posted on April 29, 2010 by Kathryn Joyce

One of the Georgia anti-abortion billboards, “corrected.”

This February, a highly provocative series of 65 billboards went up around Atlanta, which featured an African American infant and the proclamation, “Black Children Are an Endangered Species.” The signs directed viewers to a website, TooManyAborted.com, created by the Radiance Foundation—a vaguely defined antiabortion and “personal transformation” nonprofit founded by biracial advertising executive Ryan Bomberger—with funding from Georgia Right to Life.[1]

At the unveiling of the billboards, Georgia Right to Life Minority Outreach Director Catherine Davis explained their justification: “Planned Parenthood’s Negro Project,” she said, “is succeeding.”[2] She was referring to a 1939 project begun by Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger that has inspired decades of claims that family planning is a racist plan to wipe out populations of color. It’s an old argument, with roots in the Black Power and Black Nationalist movements. But in recent years it has become the province of anti-abortion groups who are selectively co-opting civil rights rhetoric to present abortion and even contraception as eugenicist plots disguised as voluntary reproductive choices, which are leading to a slow “Black genocide.”