Planned Parenthood staff denounces 'racist' founder

Revolutions inevitably consume their own. Last week, more than 300 people signed an "Open Letter" calling for Laura McQuade's removal as CEO of Planned Parenthood of Greater New York.

Under pressure this week, the board of directors cashiered McQuade. It is hard to say which is more daft, the board's buckling to the demands of staff or the staff's willful blindness to the unholy business in which it engages

The letter would make even George Orwell's head spin. It is so steeped in doublethink, the reader does not know whether to laugh, cry, or grab his or her (or zher) pitchfork.

"After years of complaints from staff about issues of systemic racism, pay inequity, and lack of upward mobility for Black staff, highly-paid consultants were brought in three separate times to assess the situation," reads the letter. "Each time, employees of color were brutally honest about their experiences, but nothing changed."

The drafters of the letter lay much of the blame on McQuade, who is white, but they also acknowledged the previously unspeakable, namely that "Planned Parenthood was founded by a racist, white woman." Who knew?

The founder of Planned Parenthood, of course, was Margaret Sanger, a hard-core eugenicist, matter-of-fact racist and feminist heroine.

"We know that Planned Parenthood has a history and a present steeped in white supremacy," insist the drafters of the letter. These revelations did not exactly come as news to the right.

For years, pro-life activists have been trying to tell black Americans that Planned Parenthood was not their friend. They did not listen. Their leaders still don't.

The Planned Parenthood staffers are deaf to their own reality. Did the signers of the letter not ask themselves why they work for an organization founded, in Sanger's words, "to prevent the sexual and racial chaos into which the world has drifted."

"The most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective," wrote Sanger in her 1922 book, "Pivot of Civilization."

Sanger continued, "Possibly drastic and Spartan methods may be forced upon American society if it continues complacently to encourage the chance and chaotic breeding that has resulted from our stupid, cruel sentimentalism."

Planned Parenthood staff members are working there, they say, because they are "deeply committed to maintaining access to abortion and sexual and reproductive health care."

The fact that they and their colleagues nationwide take the lives of roughly 1,000 black babies every working day – Planned Parenthood being responsible for nearly half of those – does not factor into their protest at all.

Perversely, the drafters find "the lack of upward mobility for Black staff" more troubling than the disproportionate death toll of black babies, who are three times more likely to be killed in the womb than non-black babies.

Despite the staffers' moral confusion, this letter may mark the moment the intersectional chorus stops singing from the same twisted hymnal. In theory, "intersectionality" means that marginalized groups share common oppressors and thus have common political interests.

Schooled in street-level Critical Theory, activists from various fronts have been forging alliances with those in other fronts who also see themselves as oppressed.

These activists, whether they know it or not, are expected to subordinate their own interests to the larger progressive cause – seizing and sustaining national power.

In the era of intersectionality, African Americans have been expected to put asunder their own traditions and cleave to the most current orthodoxies, many of which work against their best interests; illegal immigration, for instance, or feminism or LGBT rights.

Although Antifa's exploitation of black America suggests otherwise, the days of black subordination to the progressive cause may be over. If African Americans understand how badly they have been played, the days of progressivism may be over.

@jackcashill's forthcoming book, Unmasking Obama, is available for pre-order at Amazon.