It’s Time to Cancel Margaret Sanger

[Michie]

You’ve probably seen people on the news tear down statues and demand buildings be renamed that have any reference to past injustice. This includes not just notorious figures, but also people long considered heroes like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Fr. Junipero Serra.

However, the defenders of this “cancel culture” have forgotten to include one person in their purge: Margaret Sanger, who founded what would later become Planned Parenthood. Sanger is featured in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, has a square named after her in New York, and an award Planned Parenthood has given politicians and activists for nearly fifty years.

Sanger’s legacy includes truly horribletreatment of people of color. But before we make this case, we have to clear up some “fake news” about Sanger:

• The quote “Slavs, Latin and Hebrew immigrants are human weeds. Blacks, soldiers and Jews are a menace to the race.,” appears to be apocryphal as it cannot be located in Sanger’s writings (though, as we’ll see, she does call the poor and disabled “human weeds”).
• Another quote, “The mass of ignorant Negroes still breed carelessly and disastrously, so that the increase among Negroes, even more than the increase among whites, is from that portion of the population least intelligent and fit, and least able to rear their children properly,” is actually from black socialist W.E.B. Du Bois, who was a contributor to Sanger’s Birth Control Review. Like Sanger and other eugenicists, he believed that only the fittest should be encouraged to reproduce, though it shouldn’t be claimed that he harbored racist motives.
• There is a fake picture of Margaret Sanger speaking at a Ku Klux Klan rally circulating online. Sanger did address a women’s auxiliary meeting of the Klan in 1926, which she justified by saying “any aroused group is a good group.” However, in her autobiography she described the experience as being “weird” and doesn’t seem particularly enamored with the group.

So what is the authentic evidence for Sanger’s racism?

The most famous is an excerpt from a letter she wrote to Clarence Gamble about the “Negro Project,” which was an effort to promote access to contraception in black communities. She wrote, “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”

Continued below.
It’s Time to Cancel Margaret Sanger

 

[eleos1954]

You’ve probably seen people on the news tear down statues and demand buildings be renamed that have any reference to past injustice. This includes not just notorious figures, but also people long considered heroes like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Fr. Junipero Serra.

However, the defenders of this “cancel culture” have forgotten to include one person in their purge: Margaret Sanger, who founded what would later become Planned Parenthood. Sanger is featured in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, has a square named after her in New York, and an award Planned Parenthood has given politicians and activists for nearly fifty years.

Sanger’s legacy includes truly horribletreatment of people of color. But before we make this case, we have to clear up some “fake news” about Sanger:

• The quote “Slavs, Latin and Hebrew immigrants are human weeds. Blacks, soldiers and Jews are a menace to the race.,” appears to be apocryphal as it cannot be located in Sanger’s writings (though, as we’ll see, she does call the poor and disabled “human weeds”).
• Another quote, “The mass of ignorant Negroes still breed carelessly and disastrously, so that the increase among Negroes, even more than the increase among whites, is from that portion of the population least intelligent and fit, and least able to rear their children properly,” is actually from black socialist W.E.B. Du Bois, who was a contributor to Sanger’s Birth Control Review. Like Sanger and other eugenicists, he believed that only the fittest should be encouraged to reproduce, though it shouldn’t be claimed that he harbored racist motives.
• There is a fake picture of Margaret Sanger speaking at a Ku Klux Klan rally circulating online. Sanger did address a women’s auxiliary meeting of the Klan in 1926, which she justified by saying “any aroused group is a good group.” However, in her autobiography she described the experience as being “weird” and doesn’t seem particularly enamored with the group.

So what is the authentic evidence for Sanger’s racism?

The most famous is an excerpt from a letter she wrote to Clarence Gamble about the “Negro Project,” which was an effort to promote access to contraception in black communities. She wrote, “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”

Continued below.

It’s Time to Cancel Margaret Sanger

I agree .... include her in the "cancels" and abortions by planned parenthood along with it

Margaret Sanger in Her Own Words
Margaret Sanger, Founder of Planned Parenthood, In Her Own Words

 

[chevyontheriver]

Sanger’s legacy includes truly horribletreatment of people of color. But before we make this case, we have to clear up some “fake news” about Sanger:

• The quote “Slavs, Latin and Hebrew immigrants are human weeds. Blacks, soldiers and Jews are a menace to the race.,” appears to be apocryphal as it cannot be located in Sanger’s writings (though, as we’ll see, she does call the poor and disabled “human weeds”).
• Another quote, “The mass of ignorant Negroes still breed carelessly and disastrously, so that the increase among Negroes, even more than the increase among whites, is from that portion of the population least intelligent and fit, and least able to rear their children properly,” is actually from black socialist W.E.B. Du Bois, who was a contributor to Sanger’s Birth Control Review. Like Sanger and other eugenicists, he believed that only the fittest should be encouraged to reproduce, though it shouldn’t be claimed that he harbored racist motives.
• There is a fake picture of Margaret Sanger speaking at a Ku Klux Klan rally circulating online. Sanger did address a women’s auxiliary meeting of the Klan in 1926, which she justified by saying “any aroused group is a good group.” However, in her autobiography she described the experience as being “weird” and doesn’t seem particularly enamored with the group.

Continued below.
It’s Time to Cancel Margaret Sanger

I'm not an advocate of cancel culture. And yet if anyone's memory ought to be corrected it is that of Margaret Sanger. She was no friend of diversity nor inclusion, but a racist.

It is good that this article starts out with a correction, because it is important to get the historical record straight. When people don't get the historical record straight they do outlandish things.

Will THEY change their opinion about Margaret Sanger's life work, the eugenics of racial purity? She is far more notorious than so many who THEY are cancelling with such eagerness.

 

[Michie]

I'm not an advocate of cancel culture. And yet if anyone's memory ought to be corrected it is that of Margaret Sanger. She was no friend of diversity nor inclusion, but a racist.

It is good that this article starts out with a correction, because it is important to get the historical record straight. When people don't get the historical record straight they do outlandish things.

Will THEY change their opinion about Margaret Sanger's life work, the eugenics of racial purity? She is far more notorious than so many who THEY are cancelling with such eagerness.

Well cancel culture has cancelled here in a way the completely avoids the facts concerning Sanger. Hillary Clinton claims her as one of her heroes.

 

[chevyontheriver]

Well cancel culture has cancelled here in a way the completely avoids the facts concerning Sanger. Hillary Clinton claims her as one of her heroes.

I think Sanger being one of Hillary's heroes was an example of whitewash culture.