Maafa 21

creates a highly selective, distorted history of the reproductive rights movement and frames abortion as a tool of eugenics and genocide.

As propaganda, Maafa 21 is fairly ingenious, incorporating just enough truth to provide a surface plausibility. The word “Maafa” is a Swahili term to describe the period of black enslavement. In the film, narrator Markus Lloyd argues that the Maafa “did not end when the slaves were freed... a hidden racial agenda is keeping the Maafa alive into the 21st century.” That sounds true enough, though Lloyd isn’t talking about poverty, or educational disparities, or the legacy of Jim Crow—he’s talking about family planning and abortion rights.

Законы Джима Кроу (англ. Jim Crow laws) — неофициальное широко распространённое название законов о расовой сегрегации в некоторых штатах США в период 1890—1964 годов.

it’s an exceedingly dishonest propaganda exercise, one that aims to convince African Americans that both family planning and evolutionary theory are part of a massive conspiracy against them.

Debating Sanger, one Catholic bishop argued that “the races from northern Europe,” who he called “the finest type of people” needed to have at least four children per family to avoid “extinction.” Maafa 21 includes ugly quotes from the eugenicist Charles Davenport, but doesn’t mention that he opposed birth control. Later, we see an image of Hitler and the words “Natural Allies.” Naturally, the movie doesn’t mention that, upon gaining power, Hitler, eager for more German babies, moved quickly against legal abortion and birth control clinics.

Sanger believed that intelligence and ability varied among individuals rather than among ethnic groups. One of her ardent supporters was W.E.B. DuBois, who echoed her eugenic ideas. As Chesler wrote, DuBois “condemned what he called ‘the fallacy of numbers’ and deemed the ‘quality’ of the black race more important to its survival.” When Sanger opened a clinic in Harlem in 1930, it “was endorsed by the powerful local black newspaper, the Amsterdam News, and by established political and religious leaders in Harlem,” wrote Chesler. Sanger was even invited to address Harlem’s largest Baptist church.

There are, of course, very good reasons for minorities to be suspicious of population control. Black people have indeed been subject to involuntary sterilization and reproductive coercion. Maafa 21 recapitulates anti-contraception arguments made by male Black Power leaders in the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, African-American militants were behind some of the earliest instances of clinic violence. As Elaine Tyler May writes in her forthcoming book, America and the The Pill (Basic Books, April 27, 2010), one Cleveland family planning center was burned down after accusations of “black genocide,” while in Pittsburgh, the militant leader William “Bouie” Haden threatened to firebomb a clinic.

Martin Luther King Jr., it’s important to point out, was a champion of family planning. Indeed, in 1966, King won Planned Parenthood’s Margaret Sanger award. His wife, Coretta Scott King, delivered his acceptance speech on his behalf. “There is a striking kinship between our movement and Margaret Sanger's early efforts,” said King, adding:

She, like we, saw the horrifying conditions of ghetto life. Like we, she knew that all of society is poisoned by cancerous slums. Like we, she was a direct actionist—a nonviolent resister… At the turn of the century she went into the slums and set up a birth control clinic, and for this deed she went to jail because she was violating an unjust law. Yet the years have justified her actions. She launched a movement which is obeying a higher law to preserve human life under humane conditions… Our sure beginning in the struggle for equality by nonviolent direct action may not have been so resolute without the tradition established by Margaret Sanger and people like her.

Like others trying to turn abortion into a racial wedge issue, Crutcher, the director of Maafa 21, points out that black women have a far higher abortion rate than white women. He’s right that this is a result of discrimination, though not in the way he believes. Thanks in part to the anti-abortion movement, poor women have far inferior access to sex education and reproductive health services than middle class women do. According to the Guttmacher Institute, 69% of pregnancies among African-American women are unplanned, compared to 40% for white women. This is an injustice, because black women deserve the same control over their reproductive lives that white women enjoy.

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