The abuse of language has got to stop. …We cannot condemn as bigotry everything that we don’t agree with. Words like bigotry have to go. …That’s what you do. You destroy meanings, you anesthetize people, and you turn people off. You turn the mind off. You kill the brain. We cannot have this. We cannot have this abuse of language going on.
Sarah Milstein knows a thing or two about abuse of language. Just check out her advice to fellow white women at the Huffington Post on how to confront their inner-racist:
2. If you feel defensive when talking about race with a woman of color or reading about race in a piece written by a woman of color, assume the other person is saying something especially true. That is: use your defensiveness as a Bat Signal, alerting you to your own biases. Sure, yes, of course, the other person may have said something insensitive or unreasonable. But if you want to change the dynamics of the world (reminder: you’re a feminist, so you do), assume your discomfort is telling you something about you, not about the other person.
3. Look for ways that you are racist, rather than ways to prove you’re not.
4. Listen to people of color, even if you don’t know many. …You can also do a ton of thoughtful listening on Twitter — a medium that gives you legitimate access to the thoughts and conversations of people you may not know.
No, Ms. Milstein doesn’t write for Saturday Night Live, although her advice does play like a really bad joke penned by a socially insulated upper middle class white woman. One who probably spends her weekends trolling Hell’s Kitchen with her yuppie boyfriend going, “Look, honey, The Other – aren’t we so racially cool?!” before heading back to Williamsburg for some sustainable vegan yoga.
For every liberal feminist who hates Paglia, there’s a moronic Milstein out there proving her right. There is real racism within feminism and every other -ism that values a human being in terms of minority/majority status. However, instead of focusing on this inherent ideological discrimination, the lingo fascists of feminism have grossly abused language to suit their own politically correct agenda. In doing so, they trivialize the historic connection between modern feminism and eugenic racism, replacing it with a pastiche of ignorant expressions of pseudo-guilt. If feminism truly sought to confront racism within its ranks, they’d start by confronting the racist reality of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger.
Margaret Sanger, avowed eugenicist and founder of Planned Parenthood, has been honored by the National Women’s History Museum with the following description:
More than any other single person, she originated the mindset that allowed for rational control of human population, after millions of others throughout the millennia of history chose to ignore fundamental issues of reproduction. …The growth of fascism …kept her busy separating her principle of women’s liberation through birth control from the Nazi search for a superior race through birth control.
This glowing impression of a woman warrior stands in stark contrast to the words of Sanger, who once wrote:
Even as birth control is the means by which woman attains basic freedom, so it is the means by which she must and will uproot the [eugenic] evil she has wrought.
She freely quoted eugenicist Havelock Ellis, who said,
If those persons who raise the cry of “race-suicide” in face of the decline of the birth-rate really had the knowledge and the intelligence to realize the manifold evils which they are invoking, they would deserve to be treated as criminals.
Sanger’s eugenic racism sounds a lot like NARAL Pro-Choice America co-founder Lawrence Lader’s statement:
It’s not that obvious to some black women that abortion is the right decision. It’s only later on that poor or black women realize they don’t want more children tying them down. They need more pressure to abort.
To be fair, Lader said that way before he could join Twitter and spy on the conversations of complete strangers just because they’re black. If only Margaret Sanger had social media, perhaps 75% of Planned Parenthood clinics wouldn’t be located in black neighborhoods today. Well, maybe they would, but at least they’d all have their own Facebook pages, which would be fine with the folks at the Feminist Majority Foundation who are joining with NARAL to “expose” crisis pregnancy centers that “target women of color” and have been “set up by anti-choice organizations with a mission to deceive and shame women to deter them considering abortion.”
I bet Margaret Sanger would have loved to tweet about that.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member