I’ve had occasion to discuss Courtland Milloy, long-time Metro editor of the Washington Post and now Local Columnist, on several occasions — here in 2004, where he argued that for young black men it’s still 1931, and they’re still in Scottsboro; here in 2005, where he admitted to racial bias and even adduced test results proving it; and here in 2006, where he was bothered by the fact that the majority-black school board in majority-black (and upscale) Montgomery County, Maryland, sold out by hiring a white superintendent.
Milloy’s column today, “Unequal anger in abortion debate,” is par for his course, asserting that conservative opposition to abortion “is not just being waged on women’s reproductive rights, but on the black woman as a person.”
“Any day now,” he warns,
a billboard could appear on a busy city street in the Washington area featuring a large photograph of an adorable yet pensive looking black girl standing beneath these words:
“The most dangerous place for an African American is in the womb.”
Such billboards, part of a national antiabortion campaign, have already appeared in Atlanta and New York, and similar ones are expected to go up in other cities this year. The stated purpose is to bring attention to the disproportionately high rates of abortion among black women. But the real intent is to shame the black woman, single her out by race and cast her body as the personification of sin and death.
Bear with me now, and switch gears to consider the opposition to requirements that voters have government-issued or at least government-recognized photo identification. Consider any opponent you want; they all say about the same thing. Here’s an example from an editorial yesterday in the Philadelphia Inquirer agreeing with a NAACP lawsuit complaining that “voters without driver’s licenses are ‘disproportionately elderly, indigent, or members of a racial minority’” and adding that “So-called voter-ID rules would hit the old, young, poor, and minority voters the hardest — a slice of the electorate least likely to have government-issued identification of the type required under the measure approved Wednesday by the state Senate.”
If Courtland Milloy is right that opposition to abortion is racist because black women have a disproportionate number of abortions, then “the real intent” of Eric Holder and the editors of the Philadelphia Inquirer must be racist and age-ist because they “single out” minorities and both young and old people as incapable of securing the same sort of identification to vote that is required for a myriad other services and activities in which they presumably participate without their protectors screaming discrimination.
