Dealing with Problematic Histories: Generally Progressive People Edition
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One thing we are now seeing is that as liberal institutions work to respect the anti-racist historical interpretations now gaining steam, they are purging association with their founders, who mostly were very good people who did very good things but also had some problematic positions. Perhaps the most obvious place where this was going to happen was Planned Parenthood distancing itself from Margaret Sanger:
Planned Parenthood of Greater New York will remove the name of Margaret Sanger, a founder of the national organization, from its Manhattan health clinic because of her “harmful connections to the eugenics movement,” the group said on Tuesday.
Ms. Sanger, a public health nurse who opened the first birth control clinic in the United States in Brooklyn in 1916, has long been lauded as a feminist icon and reproductive-rights pioneer.
But her legacy also includes supporting eugenics, a discredited belief in improving the human race through selective breeding, often targeted at poor people, those with disabilities, immigrants and people of color.
“The removal of Margaret Sanger’s name from our building is both a necessary and overdue step to reckon with our legacy and acknowledge Planned Parenthood’s contributions to historical reproductive harm within communities of color,” Karen Seltzer, the chair of the New York affiliate’s board, said in a statement.
This is frustrating but basically inevitable. In fact, eugenics was a far more complex movement than is publicly recognized.
Ellen Chesler, a senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, a think tank, and the author of a biography of Ms. Sanger and the birth control movement, said that while the country is undergoing vast social change and reconsidering prominent figures from the past, Ms. Sanger’s views have been misinterpreted.
The eugenics movement had wide support at the time in both conservative and liberal circles, Ms. Chesler said, and Ms. Sanger was squarely in the latter camp. She rejected some eugenicists’ belief that white middle-class families should have more children than others, Ms. Chesler said.
Instead, Ms. Sanger believed that the quality of all children’s lives could be improved if their parents had smaller families, Ms. Chesler said, adding that Ms. Sanger believed Black people and immigrants had a right to that better life.
“Her motives were the opposite of racism,” Ms. Chesler said, citing Ms. Sanger’s relationships with prominent Black leaders like W.E.B. Du Bois, a founder of the N.A.A.C.P.
It is also worth noting that there were black eugenicists. This movement was about breeding better families. It was a deeply misguided movement, of course, but it was more than just pre-Nazism. But this fight is simply lost in the public eye. There’s no benefit for Planned Parenthood to keep up the fight in favor of Singer. It has bigger fish to fry. Sanger was a pioneering socialist and feminist who made the world a far better place by her being in it. But yeah, she was also involved with mainstream ideas of the time that weren’t great.
The Sierra Club is doing the same with John Muir.
No one is more important to the history of environmental conservation than John Muir — the “wilderness prophet,” “patron saint of the American wilderness” and “father of the national parks” who founded the nation’s oldest conservation organization, the Sierra Club. But on Wednesday, citing the current racial reckoning, the group announced it will end its blind reverence to a figure who was also racist.
As Confederate statues fall across the country, Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune said in an early morning post on the group’s website, “it’s time to take down some of our own monuments, starting with some truth-telling about the Sierra Club’s early history.” Muir, who fought to preserve Yosemite Valley and Sequoia National Forest, once referred to African Americans as lazy “Sambos,” a racist pejorative that many black people consider to be as offensive as the n-word.
While recounting a legendary walk from the Midwest to the Gulf of Mexico, Muir described Native Americans he encountered as “dirty.”
Muir’s friendships in the early 1900s were equally troubling, the Sierra Club said. Henry Fairfield Osborn, a close associate, led the New York Zoological Society and the board of trustees of the American Museum of Natural History and, following Muir’s death, helped establish the American Eugenics Society, which labeled nonwhite people, including Jews at the time, as inferior.
I don’t really have a problem with this. But if this is where we are going–and I think it’s more good than bad–than we pretty soon need to have a real reckoning with Theodore Roosevelt, who was just as racist and acted on it in just as many horrible ways as Andrew Jackson or Andrew Johnson. He and Muir ran in the same circles and the whole early conservation movement was filled with open white supremacy. Redwood National Park has a grove of trees named for Madison Grant, Roosevelt’s good friend, a leading conservationist, and the author of The Passing of the Great Race, which influenced Hitler. The environmental movement has never really reckoned with the racism that has long remained a piece of it through its anti-population growth and anti-immigrant groups, an emphasis on wilderness over the lived experiences of inner-city residents, and a very poor record of hiring people of color.
In the end, coming to terms with American white supremacy is going to mean that a lot of liberal icons are going to be seen as unacceptable too. Even when it pains us–and it pains me more to decouple ourselves from Sanger than Muir–in the end, the medicine is necessary to purge us from the grotesque and ever continuing plague of white supremacy, very much including inside the hearts and souls of liberals.