The Black American Party advances the producer class of the Black American community — through ownership, enterprise, constitutional principle, and economic solidarity. What is good for Black Americans is good for all Americans.
The Black American Party is anti-abortion. No population has suffered more disproportionately from this Maafa than ours.
The Black American Party is anti-abortion. The Black American population has suffered most disproportionately from the Maafa of abortion, and a people intending to survive and grow cannot be indifferent to it.
We acknowledge, as the party's founding text does, that there are genuine medical justifications for the procedure. A position that pretends otherwise is not serious and would be rejected by the women it claims to protect.
Maafa is Swahili for great disaster, and it entered English usage through Marimba Ani to name what was done to African people through enslavement - used the way the word Holocaust is used, because the events it describes require a word of that weight.
Some scholars, Maulana Karenga among them, have objected that Maafa can also be read as accident, and prefer African Holocaust for that reason. This party uses the term in the stronger sense and says so directly: nothing about what is described in this chapter was accidental.
Applying the word to abortion is a deliberate claim, and it is the founder's claim. It says that the scale of Black American life ended by this procedure, and the origins of the movement that brought it into American society, belong in the same category of catastrophe as the other things that have been done to us - not in the category of private medical decisions about which a people has no collective interest.
Margaret Sanger founded the American Birth Control League in 1921, the organisation that became Planned Parenthood. She was a documented supporter of the eugenics movement - a programme concerned with which populations ought to reproduce and which ought not.
This is not a claim Black Americans have to argue for. In July 2020 Planned Parenthood of Greater New York removed Sanger's name from its Manhattan health center, stating her harmful connections to the eugenics movement as the reason. The organisation reached that conclusion about its own founder.
We do not need to settle the historians' argument about what Sanger personally intended. The institutional acknowledgment is enough, and it is the part nobody can wave away.
Abortion in the United States is performed on Black American women at rates far above their share of the population. Whatever one believes about the procedure in the abstract, that distribution is a fact about our community specifically, and it belongs in any honest account of Black American demographics.
A movement whose central purpose is the expansion and flourishing of the Black American producer class cannot treat the number of Black Americans being born as somebody else's subject.
That abortion is an acceptable method of birth control. It is a medical procedure, and a community with poor access to healthcare should be especially resistant to having one normalised as routine contraception.
And that the question reduces to women's rights alone. Black American women carry real burdens that this platform addresses at length - maternal mortality, single-headed households, thin childcare, and an economy that has made it hard for a young man to support a family. Naming those burdens is not the same as accepting that ending the pregnancy is the community's answer to them.
An anti-abortion position that stops at restriction is not a position; it is a prohibition with a slogan attached. If this party asks a woman to carry a pregnancy, it takes on the obligation to make that a survivable and supported decision.
That means confronting Black maternal mortality, which runs several times the rate for white women and is the single most damning fact about how this country treats Black mothers. A party that opposes abortion and is silent on that is not credible.
It means childcare a working mother can afford, and an economy in which a household can be supported - which is the entire argument of the economics chapters, arriving here.
It means adoption and kinship care infrastructure, so that a woman who cannot raise a child has a real alternative inside our own community rather than a system that keeps Black children waiting longest.
And it means paternal responsibility enforced, as Article VI sets out. A movement that demands a great deal of women on this question and nothing of men has not thought about it honestly.
This chapter states the party's moral position and its medical exception. It does not set a gestational limit, an enforcement model or a penalty regime, because those are legislative questions the party has not yet resolved and will not pretend to have resolved.
We will state those specifics when we have worked them through, in consultation with the Black American women who will live under them.
Black American women are not of one mind on this, and any party that pretends otherwise is talking to itself. You are not a lesser member of this movement for holding a different view, and this platform's economic, educational and family commitments belong to you regardless.
We would rather have this argument inside our own house, among people who share an interest in the survival and prosperity of Black America, than have it conducted for us by two parties that have never had our interests at the centre of it.
The party is anti-abortion, and holds that the Black American population has suffered most disproportionately from the Maafa of abortion, while acknowledging genuine medical justifications for the procedure.
Swahili for great disaster. It entered English usage through Marimba Ani to name what enslavement did to African people, used the way the word Holocaust is used.
Because the party's claim is that the scale of Black American life ended by the procedure, and the origins of the movement that brought it into American society, belong in the same category of catastrophe - and that none of it was accidental.
Sanger founded the organisation that became Planned Parenthood and was a documented supporter of eugenics. In July 2020 Planned Parenthood of Greater New York removed her name from its Manhattan health center, citing her harmful connections to that movement.
Confronting Black maternal mortality, affordable childcare, an economy that supports a household, adoption and kinship care infrastructure, and enforced paternal responsibility.
No. It has not set a gestational limit, an enforcement model or a penalty regime, and will state those in consultation with the Black American women who would live under them.
The two-axis map of American politics was not drawn with Black American interests in mind.
Black American political attention is confined to a narrow band of subjects, and the confinement is not accidental.
Not conservative. Not progressive. American - and specific about what that means.
Conserving Black America is not the same as joining the conservative movement.
Progress has to be measured in assets, not in acknowledgement.
Both parties tell a version of this history that flatters them. Neither version is a reason to hand over your vote.
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