Atomic diffusion
on the surface of a crystal. The shaking of the atoms is an example of
thermal fluctuations. Likewise, thermal fluctuations provide the energy
necessary for the atoms to occasionally hop from one site to a
neighboring one. For simplicity, the thermal fluctuations of the blue
atoms are not shown.
In statistical mechanics, thermal fluctuations are random deviations of an atomic system from its average state, that occur in a system at equilibrium.
All thermal fluctuations become larger and more frequent as the
temperature increases, and likewise they decrease as temperature
approaches absolute zero.
Thermal fluctuations are a basic manifestation of the temperature
of systems: A system at nonzero temperature does not stay in its
equilibrium microscopic state, but instead randomly samples all possible
states, with probabilities given by the Boltzmann distribution.
Thermal fluctuations generally affect all the degrees of freedom of a system: There can be random vibrations (phonons), random rotations (rotons), random electronic excitations, and so forth.
Thermodynamic variables, such as pressure, temperature, or entropy,
likewise undergo thermal fluctuations. For example, for a system that
has an equilibrium pressure, the system pressure fluctuates to some
extent about the equilibrium value.
Only the 'control variables' of statistical ensembles (such as the number of particules N, the volume V and the internal energy E in the microcanonical ensemble) do not fluctuate.
The volume of phase space , occupied by a system of degrees of freedom is the product of the configuration volume
and the momentum space volume. Since the energy is a quadratic form of
the momenta for a non-relativistic system, the radius of momentum space
will be so that the volume of a hypersphere will vary as giving a phase volume of
where is a constant depending upon the specific properties of the system and is the Gamma function. In the case that this hypersphere has a very high dimensionality, , which is the usual case in thermodynamics, essentially all the volume will lie near to the surface
where we used the recursion formula .
The surface area
has its legs in two worlds: (i) the macroscopic one in which it is
considered a function of the energy, and the other extensive variables,
like the volume, that have been held constant in the differentiation of
the phase volume, and (ii) the microscopic world where it represents the
number of complexions that is compatible with a given macroscopic
state. It is this quantity that Planck referred to as a 'thermodynamic'
probability. It differs from a classical probability inasmuch as it
cannot be normalized; that is, its integral over all energies
diverges—but it diverges as a power of the energy and not faster. Since
its integral over all energies is infinite, we might try to consider its
Laplace transform
which can be given a physical interpretation. The exponential decreasing factor, where
is a positive parameter, will overpower the rapidly increasing surface
area so that an enormously sharp peak will develop at a certain energy .
Most of the contribution to the integral will come from an immediate
neighborhood about this value of the energy. This enables the definition
of a proper probability density according to
whose integral over all energies is unity on the strength of the definition of ,
which is referred to as the partition function, or generating function.
The latter name is due to the fact that the derivatives of its
logarithm generate the central moments, namely,
and so on, where the first term is the mean energy and the second one is the dispersion in energy.
The fact that increases no faster than a power of the energy ensures that these moments will be finite. Therefore, we can expand the factor about the mean value , which will coincide with for Gaussian fluctuations (i.e. average and most probable values coincide), and retaining lowest order terms result in
This is the Gaussian, or normal, distribution, which is defined by
its first two moments. In general, one would need all the moments to
specify the probability density, , which is referred to as the canonical, or posterior, density in contrast to the prior density , which is referred to as the 'structure' function. This is the central limit theorem as it applies to thermodynamic systems.
If the phase volume increases as , its Laplace transform, the partition function, will vary as . Rearranging the normal distribution so that it becomes an expression for the structure function and evaluating it at give
It follows from the expression of the first moment that , while from the second central moment, .
Introducing these two expressions into the expression of the structure
function evaluated at the mean value of the energy leads to
.
The denominator is exactly Stirling's approximation for ,
and if the structure function retains the same functional dependency
for all values of the energy, the canonical probability density,
will belong to the family of exponential distributions known as gamma
densities. Consequently, the canonical probability density falls under
the jurisdiction of the local law of large numbers which asserts that a
sequence of independent and identically distributed random variables
tends to the normal law as the sequence increases without limit.
Distribution about equilibrium
The expressions given below are for systems that are close to equilibrium and have negligible quantum effects.
Single variable
Suppose is a thermodynamic variable. The probability distribution for is determined by the entropy :
The above expression has a straightforward generalization to the probability distribution :
where is the mean value of .
Fluctuations of the fundamental thermodynamic quantities
In the table below are given the mean square fluctuations of the thermodynamic variables and in any small part of a body. The small part must still be large enough, however, to have negligible quantum effects.
Averages of thermodynamic fluctuations. is the heat capacity at constant pressure; is the heat capacity at constant volume.
The black genocide analogy has historically been applied to the war on drugs, war on crime, and war on poverty for their detrimental effects on the black community. During the Vietnam War, the increasing use of black soldiers was criticized as an expression of black genocide. In recent decades, the disproportionately high black prison population has also been described as black genocide.
Critics of the black genocide framework describe it as a conspiracy theory, while its proponents argue it is a useful framework for analyzing systemic racism. Arguments against birth control, in particular, have been criticized as conspiratorial or exaggerated, although attempts at black population control and government-sponsored compulsory sterilization did occur as recently as the 20th century.
Canadian scholar Adam Jones characterizes the mass death of millions of Africans during the Atlantic slave trade as a genocide, calling it "one of the worst holocausts in human history"
due to the fact that it resulted in 15 to 20 million deaths according
to one estimate, and he has also stated that arguments to the contrary,
such as the argument that "it was in slave owners' interest to keep
slaves alive, not exterminate them", is "mostly sophistry"
since "the killing and destruction were intentional, whatever the
incentives to preserve survivors of the Atlantic passage for labor
exploitation. To revisit the issue of intent already touched on: If an
institution is deliberately maintained and expanded by discernible
agents, though all are aware of the hecatombs of casualties it is inflicting on a definable human group, then why should this not qualify as genocide?"
In his book, The Broken Heart of America, Harvard professor Walter Johnson
wrote that on many occasions throughout the history of the enslavement
of Africans in the US, many instances of genocide occurred, instances
which included the separation of men from their wives, effectively
reducing the size of the African-American population. For a black
American who lived during the era of U.S. slavery, no rights were
guaranteed, whether they were personally enslaved or not.
In the United States a slave's life expectancy was 21 to 22 years, and a
black child through the age of 1 to 14 had twice the risk of dying of a
white child of the same age.
This image demonstrates segregation laws in practice in the Jim Crow era.
The United Nations (UN) was formed in 1945. The UN debated and adopted a Genocide Convention in late 1948, holding that genocide was the "intent to destroy, in whole or in part", a racial group. Based on the "in part" definition, the Civil Rights Congress (CRC), a group composed of African Americans with Communist affiliations, presented to the UN in 1951 a petition called "We Charge Genocide." The petition listed 10,000 unjust deaths of African Americans in the nine decades since the American Civil War.
It described lynching, mistreatment, murder and oppression by whites
against blacks, concluding that the US government was refusing to
address "the persistent, widespread, institutionalized commission of the
crime of genocide". The petition was presented to the UN convention in Paris by CRC leader William L. Patterson, and in New York City by the singer and actor Paul Robeson who was a civil rights activist and a Communist member of CRC.
The Cold War
raised American concerns about Communist expansionism. The CRC petition
was viewed by the US government as being against America's best
interests with regard to fighting Communism. The petition was ignored by
the UN; many of the charter countries looked to the US for guidance and
were not willing to arm the enemies of the US with more propaganda
about its failures in domestic racial policy. American responses to the
petition were various: Radio journalist Drew Pearson spoke out against the supposed "Communist propaganda" before it was presented to the UN.
Professor Raphael Lemkin,
a Polish lawyer who had helped draft the UN Genocide Convention, said
that the CRC petition was a misguided effort which drew attention away
from the Soviet Union's genocide of Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP) issued a statement saying that there was no black genocide even
though serious matters of racial discrimination certainly did exist in
America. Walter Francis White,
leader of the NAACP, wrote that the CRC petition contained "authentic"
instances of discrimination, mostly taken from reliable sources. He said, "Whatever the sins of the nation against the Negro—and they are many and gruesome—genocide is not among them."[13] UN Delegate Eleanor Roosevelt said that it was "ridiculous" to characterize long term discrimination as genocide.[13]
The "We Charge Genocide" petition received more notice in
international news than in domestic US media. French and Czech media
carried the story prominently, as did newspapers in India. In 1952, African-American author J. Saunders Redding
traveling in India was repeatedly asked questions about specific
instances of civil rights abuse in the US, and the CRC petition was used
by Indians to rebut his assertions that US race relations were
improving. In the US, the petition faded from public awareness by the
late 1950s. In 1964, Malcolm X and his Organization of Afro-American Unity,
citing the same lynchings and oppression described in the CRC petition,
began to prepare their own petition to the UN asserting that the US
government was engaging in genocide against black people. The 1964 Malcolm X speech "The Ballot or the Bullet" also draws from "We Charge Genocide".
After World War II
and following many years of mistreatment of African Americans by white
Americans, the US government's official policies regarding this
mistreatment shifted significantly. The American Civil Liberties Union
(ACLU) said in 1946 that negative international opinion about US racial
policies helped to pressure the US into alleviating the mistreatment of
ethnic minorities. In 1948, President Harry S. Truman signed an order desegregating the military, and black citizens increasingly challenged other forms of racial discrimination.
In 1948, even if African Americans worked side by side with their white
counterparts, they were often segregated into separate neighborhoods
due to redlining.
Lynching and other racial killings
Walter Johnson has written that the first lynching to occur in the United States was that of Francis McIntosh, a free man of black and white ancestry. He argued that this lynching ignited a series of them, all with the goal of "ethnic cleansing"
and that Abraham Lincoln, who was not yet president, was more concerned
by the vigilantism of the lynching than the murder itself. Lincoln
referred to McIntosh as "obnoxious" in his 1838 speech later dubbed the Lyceum Address. According to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice 4,400 black people killed in lynchings and other racial killings between 1877 and 1950.
Brandy Marie Langley
argued, "The physical killing of black people in America, at this time
period, was consistent with Lemkin's original idea of genocide." Famous literary and social activist figures such as Mark Twain and Ida B. Wells were compelled to speak out about lynchings. Twain's essay about lynchings titled "The United States of Lyncherdom," a remark on widespread occurrence of lynchings in the US. According to Christopher Waldrep,
the media and racist whites, both inadvertently and not, exaggerated
the presence of black crime as a method of appeasing their own guilt
surrounding the lynchings African Americans.
Beginning in 1907, some US state legislatures passed laws allowing for the compulsory sterilization of criminals, mentally retarded people, and institutionalized mentally ill
patients. At first, African Americans and white Americans suffered
sterilization in roughly equal ratio. By 1945, some 70,000 Americans had
been sterilized in these programs. In the 1950s, the federal welfare program Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) was criticized by some whites who did not want to subsidize poor black families.
States such as North and South Carolina performed sterilization
procedures on low-income black mothers who were giving birth to their
second child. The mothers were told that they would have to agree to
have their tubes tied or their welfare benefits would be cancelled, along with the benefits of the families they were born into.
Because of such policies, especially prevalent in Southern states,
sterilization of African Americans in North Carolina increased from 23%
of the total in the 1930s and 1940s to 59% at the end of the 1950s, and
rose further to 64% in the mid-1960s.
In mid-1973 news stories revealed the forced sterilization of
poor black women and children, paid for by federal funds. Two girls of
the Relf family in Mississippi, deemed mentally incompetent at ages 12
and 14, and also 18-year-old welfare recipient Nial Ruth Cox of North
Carolina, were prominent cases of involuntary sterilization. Jet magazine presented the story under the headline "Genocide". Critics said these stories were publicized by activists against legal abortion.
According to Gregory Price, government policies led to higher rates of
sterilization amongst black Americans than white on the basis of racist
beliefs.
He writes that in the early 1900s, the goal of eugenicists was to
create a biologically fit population, but and that these standards of
biological fitness deliberately excluded black people, who were claimed
to not be capable of making legitimate contributions to the national
economy.
Systemic racism as genocide
We Charge Genocide
estimated 30,000 more black people died each year due to various racist
policies and that black people had an 8-year shorter life span than
white Americans.
In this vein, Historian Matthew White estimates that 3.3 million more
non-white people died from 1900 up to the 1960s than they would have if
they had died at the same rate as white people.
African Americans pushed for equal participation in US military
service in the first part of the 20th century and especially during
World War II. Finally, President Harry S. Truman signed legislation to integrate the US military in 1948. However, Selective Service System deferments, military assignments, and especially the recruits accepted through Project 100,000 resulted in a greater representation of blacks in combat in the Vietnam War in the second half of the 1960s. African Americans represented 11% of the US population but 12.6% of troops sent to Vietnam. Cleveland Sellers said that the drafting of poor black men into war was "a plan to commit calculated genocide". Former SNCC chairman Stokely Carmichael, black congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and SNCC member Rap Brown agreed.In October 1969, King's widow Coretta Scott King spoke at an anti-war protest held at the primarily black Morgan State College in Baltimore. Campus leaders published a statement against what they termed "black genocide" in Vietnam, blaming US President Richard Nixon as well as South Vietnamese leaders President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu and Vice President Nguyễn Cao Kỳ.
Author James Forman Jr. has called the War on Drugs "a misstep [that] is so damaging that future generations are left shaking their heads in disbelief."
According to Forman, the war on drugs has had widespread effects,
including an increased punitory criminal justice system that
disproportionately affected Black Americans, especially those in
low-income neighborhoods.
Forman further writes that one consequence is that, even though black
and white people have similar rates of drug use, black people are more
likely to be punished for it by the judicial system.
Elizabeth Hinton writes that two other "wars" that have had detrimental effects on the black community - the War on Poverty and War on Crime. According to Hinton black men are imprisoned at a rate of 1 in 11. This topic is also explored in Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow.
Alexander argues that, despite many Americans wanting to believe that
the election of President Obama ushered in a new age where race no
longer mattered, or at least not as much, America is still deeply
affected by its racial history.
Alexander writes that there has been a "systemic breakdown of black and
poor communities devastated by mass unemployment, social neglect,
economic abandonment, and intense police surveillance." President Lyndon B. Johnson, stated in a commencement speech delivered at Howard University that there is a stark contrast between black and white poverty. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
writes that the contrast is a result of systemic injustices carried out
over the course of centuries against the black community.
In 1969, H. Rap Brown wrote in his autobiography, Die Nigger Die!, that American courts "conspire to commit genocide" against blacks by putting a disproportionate number of them in prison.
Political scientist Joy A. James wrote that "antiblack genocide" is the
motivating force which explains the way that US prisons are filled
largely with black prisoners.
Author and former prisoner Mansfield B. Frazier contends that the rumor
in American ghettos "that whites are secretly engaged in a program of
genocide against the black race" is given "a measure of validity" by the
number of "black men of child-producing age who are imprisoned for
crimes for which men of other races are not.
The book New Directions for Youth Development describes the school-to-prison pipeline
along with ways to end it. It states that "The public school system in
the United States, like the country as a whole, is plagued by vast
inequalities—that all too frequently are defined along lines of race and
class."
Over time, as schools have become harsher in enforcing their policies
and disciplining students, the criminal justice system has also become
harsher in dealing with children.
The book states that "Since 1992, fortyfive states have passed laws
making it easier to try juveniles as adults, and thirty-one have
stiffened sanctions against youths for a variety of offenses".
The way in which certain drugs are criminalized also factors into
the large disparities in involvement in the prison system between black
and white communities. For instance "conviction for crack selling (more heavily sold and used by people of color) [results] in a sentence 100 times more severe than for selling the same amount of powder cocaine (more heavily sold and used by whites)."
Reproductive rights
Birth control
Although
black women had been practising forms of birth control since their
arrival in America, certain African-American leaders also taught that
political power came with greater population and so opposed
contraception. In 1934, Marcus Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association resolved that birth control would lead to the eradication of black people, terming it "race suicide" (Roosevelt had made the same comment about white people in 1905).
The combined oral contraceptive pill,
popularly known as "the Pill", was approved for sale as a medicine in
US markets in 1957, and in 1961, the use of it for birth control was
also approved. In 1962, civil rights activist Whitney Young told the National Urban League not to support birth control for blacks. Marvin Davies,
leader of the Florida chapter of the NAACP, said that black women
should reject birth control and produce more babies so that black
political influence would increase in the future.
Ideas of reproductive fitness were still at the center of American
family planning in the 1960s. Physicians preferred to prescribe the Pill
to white middle-class women and the IUD to poor women, especially poor
women of color, because the IUD granted them greater control over
"unfit" women's behavior. Guttmacher
viewed the IUD as an effective method of contraception for individuals
in "underdeveloped areas where two things are lacking: one, money and
the other sustained motivation."
Once the method was approved for use in the United States, the majority of Pill users were white and middle-class women. In part, this trend reflects doctors' preference to prescribe the Pill
to members of this population, and it also reflects the cost of the
drug. Until the late 1960s, the Pill was prohibitively expensive for
working-class and poor women.
After President Lyndon B. Johnson passed legislation for government funding of birth control as a part of his War on Poverty in 1964,
Black activists such as Dr. Charles Greenlee and William "Bouie" Haden
allied with social conservatives, such as Catholic priest Charles Owen Rice, to express concern about government-sponsored efforts to limit the Black population. Cecil B. Moore, head of the NAACP chapter in Philadelphia, spoke out against a Planned Parenthood
effort to establish a stronger presence in northern Philadelphia; the
population in the targeted neighborhoods was 70% black. Moore said that
it would be "race suicide" if blacks embraced birth control.
H. Rap Brown said that black genocide was based on four factors, including birth control.
From 1965 to 1970, Black men aligned with conservative and religious
groups—especially younger men from poverty-stricken areas—spoke out
against birth control by denouncing it as part of a plot to commit a
genocide against black people. The Black Panther Party and the Nation of Islam
were the strongest critics of birth control. The Black Panther Party
identified a number of injustices as factors which contributed to black
genocide, including social ills that were more serious in black
populations than they were in white populations, such as drug abuse, prostitution and sexually transmitted diseases.
Other injustices included unsafe housing, malnutrition and the
over-representation of young black men on the front lines of the Vietnam War. Influential black activists such as singer/author Julius Lester and comedian Dick Gregory said that blacks should increase the size of their population by avoiding genocidal family planning measures. H. Rap Brown of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) held the view that black genocide consisted of four elements: more blacks executed than whites, malnutrition
in impoverished areas affected blacks more than it affected whites, the
Vietnam War killed more blacks than whites, and birth control programs
in black neighborhoods were trying to end the black race. A birth
control clinic in Cleveland, Ohio, was torched by black militants who stated that it contributed to black genocide.
Black Muslims said that birth control was against the teachings of the Koran, because in Muslim societies, the primary role of women
is the production of children. In this context, the black Muslims
believed that birth control was part of a genocidal attack which was
being launched against them by whites. The Muslim weekly journal, Muhammad Speaks, contained many articles which demonized birth control.
In Newark, New Jersey, in July 1967, the Black power movement held its first convention: the National Conference on Black Power. The convention identified several means by which whites were attempting to annihilate blacks. Injustices in housing practices, reductions in welfare benefits, and government-subsidized family planning were all identified as elements of "black genocide". Ebony
magazine printed a story in March 1968 in which it was revealed that
poor blacks believed that a conspiracy to commit genocide against black
people was the impetus behind government-funded birth control.
Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.,
was a strong proponent of birth control for blacks. In 1966, he won the
Margaret Sanger Award in Human Rights, an award which honors the
tireless birth control activism of Margaret Sanger,
a co-founder of Planned Parenthood. King emphasized the fact that birth
control gave the black man better command of his personal economic
situation, keeping the number of his children within his monetary means. In April 1968, Martin Luther King Jr., was shot and killed. In 1971, Charles V. Willie
wrote that among African Americans, this event marked the beginning of
serious reflection "about the possibility of [black] genocide in
America. There were lynchings, murders, and manslaughters in the past.
But the assassination of Dr. King was too much. Many blacks believed
that Dr. King had represented their best... If America could not accept
Dr. King, then many felt that no black person in America was safe."
Angela Davis said that equating birth control with black genocide appeared to be "an exaggerated—even paranoiac—reaction."
Black women were generally critical of the Black Power Movement's
rejection of birth control. In 1968, a group of black radical feminists
in Mt. Vernon, New York
issued "The Sisters Reply"; a rebuttal which said that birth control
gave black women the "freedom to fight the genocide of black women and
children," referring to the greater death rate among children and
mothers in poor families. Frances M. Beal,
co-founder of the Black Women's Liberation Committee of the SNCC,
refused to believe that the black woman must be subservient to the black
man's wishes. Angela Davis and Linda LaRue
denounced the limitations which male Black Power activists imposed upon
female Black Power activists, limitations which directed them to serve
as mothers by producing "warriors for the revolution." Toni Cade
said that indiscriminate births would not bring the liberation of
blacks closer to realization; she advocated the use of the Pill as a
tool to help black women space out the births of black children, to make
it easier for families to raise them.
The Black Women's Liberation Group accused "poor black men" of failing
to support the babies which they helped produce, therefore supplying
young black women with a reason to use contraceptives. Dara Abubakari, a black separatist, wrote that "women should be free to decide if and when they want children".
A 1970 study found that 80% of black women in Chicago approved of birth
control, and it also found that 75% of women were using it during their
child-bearing years. A 1971 study found that a majority of black men
and women were in favor of government-subsidized birth control.
In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a community struggle both for and against the establishment of a birth control clinic in the Homewood
area of east Pittsburgh made national news. Women in Pittsburgh had
lobbied for the establishment of a birth control clinic in the 1920s and
they were relieved when the American Birth Control League (ABCL) established one in 1931. The ABCL changed its name to Planned Parenthood in 1942. The Pittsburgh clinic initiated an educational outreach program to poor families in the Lower Hill District
in 1956. This program was twinned into the poverty-stricken
Homewood-Brushton area in 1958. Planned Parenthood considered opening
another clinic there, and it conducted meetings with community leaders.
In 1963 a mobile clinic was moved around the area. In December 1965, the
Planned Parenthood Clinic of Pittsburgh (PPCP) applied for federal
funding based on the War on Poverty legislation which Johnson had
promoted. In May 1966, the application was approved, and the PPCP began
to establish clinics throughout Pittsburgh, a total of 18 clinics were
established throughout Pittsburgh by 1967, 11 of these clinics were
placed in poor districts and they were also subsidized by the federal
government. In mid-1966, the Pennsylvania state legislature held family
planning funds up in committee. Catholic bishops gained media exposure
for asserting that Pittsburgh's birth control efforts were a form of
covert black genocide. In November 1966, the bishops said that the
government was coercing poor people to have smaller families. Some black
leaders such as local NAACP member Dr. Charles Greenlee supported the bishops' assertion that birth control was black genocide. Greenlee said that Planned Parenthood was "an honorable and good organization" but he also said that the federal Office of Economic Opportunity was sponsoring genocidal programs.[52] Greenlee said that "the Negro's birth rate is the only weapon he has. When he reaches 21 he can vote."
Greenlee targeted the Homewood clinic for closure; in doing so, he
allied himself with black militant William "Bouie" Haden and Catholic
prelate Charles Owen Rice
in order to speak out against black genocide, and he also spoke out
against the PPCP's educational outreach program. Planned Parenthood's
Director of Community Relations Dr. Douglas Stewart said that the false
charge of black genocide was harming the national advancement of blacks.
In July 1968, Haden announced that he was willing to blow up the clinic
in order to prevent it from operating. The Catholic church paid him a
$10,000 salary, igniting an outcry in Pittsburgh's media. Bishop John Wright was called a "puppet of Bouie Haden".
The PPCP closed the Homewood clinic in July 1968 and it also ended its
educational program because it was concerned about violence. The black
congregation of the Bethesda United Presbyterian Church issued a
statement in which it said that accusations of black genocide were
"patently false". A meeting to discuss the issue was scheduled for March 1969. About 200 women, mostly black, appeared in support of the clinic, and it was reopened. This event was seen as a major defeat for the black militant notion that government-funded birth control was black genocide.
In the US in the 21st century, black women are most likely to be at risk for unintended pregnancies:
84% of black women of reproductive age use birth control, in contrast
to 91% of Caucasian and Hispanic women, and 92% of Asian American women.
This situation results in black women having the highest rate of
unintended pregnancies—in 2001, almost 10% of black women who gave birth
between the ages of 15 and 44 had unintended pregnancies, which was
more than twice the rate of unintended pregnancies among white women.
Poverty contributes to these statistics, because low-income women are
more likely to experience disruptions in their lives; disruptions which
affect the steady use of birth control. People who live in poor areas
are more suspicious of the health care system, and as a result, they may
reject medical treatment and advice, especially, they may reject
less-critical wellness treatments such as birth control.
Abortion
Slave
women brought with them from Africa the knowledge of traditional folk
birth control practices, and of abortion obtained through the use of
herbs, blunt trauma, and other methods of killing the fetus or producing
strong uterine cramps. Slave women were often expected to breed more
slave children to enrich their owners, but some quietly rebelled.
In 1856 a white doctor reported that a number of slave owners were
upset that their slaves appeared to hold a "secret by which they destroy
the foetus at an early age of gestation". However, this folk knowledge was suppressed in the new American culture, especially by the nascent American Medical Association, and its practice fell away.
After slavery ended, black women formed social groups and clubs in the 1890s to "uplift their race." The revolutionary idea that a black woman might enjoy a full life without ever being a mother was presented in Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin's magazine The Woman's Era.
Knowledge was secretly shared among clubwomen regarding how to find
practitioners offering illegal medical or traditional abortion services.
Working-class black women, who were more often forced into having sex
with white men, continued to have a need for birth control and
abortions. Black women who earned less than $10 per day paid $50 to $75
for an illegal and dangerous abortion. Throughout the 20th century,
"backstreet" abortion providers in black neighborhoods were also sought
out by poor white women who wanted to rid themselves of pregnancies.
Abortion providers who were black were prosecuted much more often than
white ones were.
During this time the Black Panthers printed pamphlets which
described abortion as black genocide, expanding on their earlier stance
with regard to family planning. However, most minority groups stood in favor of the decriminalization of abortion; The New York Times reported in 1970 that more non-white women than white women died as a result of "crude, illegal abortions". Legalized abortion was expected to produce fewer deaths of the mother. A poll in Buffalo, New York, conducted by the National Organization for Women (NOW), found that 75% of blacks supported the decriminalization of abortion.
In the 1970s, Jesse Jackson spoke out against abortion as a form of black genocide.
After the January 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision made abortion legal in the US, Jet magazine publisher Robert E. Johnson
authored an article titled "Legal Abortion: Is It Genocide Or Blessing
In Disguise?" Johnson cast the issue as one which polarized the black
community along gender lines: black women generally viewed abortion as a
"blessing in disguise" but black men such as Reverend Jesse Jackson viewed it as black genocide. Jackson said he was in favor of birth control but not abortion. The next year, Senator Mark Hatfield, an opponent of legal abortion, emphasized to Congress that Jackson "regards abortion as a form of genocide practiced against blacks."
In Jet, Johnson quoted Lu Palmer, a radio journalist in
Chicago, who said that there was inequity between the sexes: a young
black man who helped create an unwanted pregnancy could go his "merry
way" while the young woman who had been involved in it was stigmatized
by society and saddled with a financial and emotional burden, often
without a safety net of caregivers to sustain her. Civil rights lawyer Florynce Kennedy criticized the idea that black women were needed to populate the Black Power revolution. She said that black majorities in the Deep South
were not known to be hotbeds of revolution, and that limiting black
women to the role of mothers was "not too far removed from a cultural
past where black women were encouraged to be breeding machines for their
slave masters." In the Tennessee General Assembly in 1967, Dorothy Lavinia Brown, MD, the first African-American woman surgeon and a state assemblywoman, sponsored a proposed bill to fully legalize abortion.
Later Brown, would say black women "should dispense quickly the notion
that abortion is genocide." Rather, they should look to the earliest Atlantic slave traders as the root of genocide. Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm wrote in 1970 that the linking of abortion and genocide "is male rhetoric, for male ears."
However, a link between abortion and black genocide has been claimed by later observers. Mildred Fay Jefferson,
a surgeon and an activist against legal abortion, wrote about black
genocide in 1978, saying "abortionists have done more to get rid of
generations and cripple others than all of the years of slavery and
lynching." Jefferson's views were shared by Michigan state legislator and NAACP member Rosetta A. Ferguson, who led the effort to defeat a Michigan abortion liberalization bill in 1972. Ferguson described abortion as black genocide.
In 2009, American anti-abortion activists in Georgia revived the idea that a black genocide was in progress.
A strong response from this strategy was observed among blacks, and in
2010 more focus was placed on describing abortion as black genocide.
White anti-abortion activist Mark Crutcher produced a documentary called Maafa 21 which criticizes Planned Parenthood and its founder Margaret Sanger,
and describes various historic aspects of eugenics, birth control and
abortion with the aim of convincing the viewer that abortion is black
genocide. Anti-abortion activists showed the documentary to black audiences across the US. The film was criticized as propaganda and a false representation of Sanger's work. In March 2011, a series of abortion-as-genocide billboard advertisements were shown in South Chicago, an area with a large population of African Americans. From May to November 2011, presidential candidate Herman Cain criticized Planned Parenthood, calling abortion "planned genocide" and "black genocide".
After Stacey Abrams lost the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election, anti-abortion activist Arthur A. Goldberg
wrote that she lost in part because of her stance in favor of abortion
rights, which he said ignored "the staggering number of abortions in the
black community" which amounted to black genocide. In 2019, The New York Times
wrote that "the abortion debate is inextricably tied to race" in the
view of black American communities that are challenged with many other
racial disparities which together constitute black genocide.
A Pew Research Center
survey found that black Americans favour legalized abortion for "most
or all cases" at a rate of 68 percent, as opposed to 59 percent of white
Americans.
Reception
The Civil Rights Congress (CRC)'s We Charge Genocide
petition was popular almost everywhere in the world except in the
United States. In 1952, one American writer visiting India found that
many people had become familiar with the cases of the Martinsville Seven and Willie McGee through the document. The petition was particularly well received in Europe, where it received abundant press coverage.
The U.S. State Department
requested that the NAACP draft a press release repudiating the
petition, but the board decided against it. The NAACP felt the petition
reflected many of the NAACP's own views, and even drew on NAACP data
about lynchings other racist incidents. I. F. Stone was the only white American journalist to write favorably of the document. Raphael Lemkin,
who invented the term "genocide", said the African-American population
was increasing in size so could not be facing genocide. He also accused
the CRC of working for foreign agents and of distracting from alleged genocides in the Soviet Union.
The United Nations did not acknowledge receiving the petition, but the
CRC had not expected it to, given the strength of U.S. influence.
In 1976, sociologist Irving Louis Horowitz
published an analysis of black genocide in the United States. He says
that genocide requires "conscious choice and policy" on behalf of the
state, and that racist vigilantism and sporadic actions by individual
whites were to blame for the various statistics which showed higher
rates of death for black people than white people. Horowitz suggested
that the U.S. government had not intentionally conspired to cause black
genocide, and was only guilty of “benign neglect".
Critics of Horowitz, such as Seymour Drescher
and Brandy Marie Langley, suggest there are contradictions in his
analysis (e.g., he admits the KKK often had support from the police and
state), and that his thesis fails because he uses only the Holocaust as a benchmark for genocide, which may be inappropriate or one-sided. Langley says that because state actors were "purposefully neglecting to recognize the dignity and [federal, constitutional] civil rights" of emancipated black people, such neglect was neither benign nor unintentional.
Historian Patrick Wolfe, a fellow of Harvard and Stanford,
introduced the idea of "structural genocide", in which he suggests that
non-physical forms of elimination can result in genocide – such as
social, cultural and economic elimination – and that these can be
ongoing processes as well as time-limited acts. He initially applied
this model to explain Native American genocide, but extends it to cover other subjects of settler-colonial
societies, including African Americans. Wolfe states that "elimination
is an organizing principal of settler-colonial society rather than a
one-off (and superseded) occurrence". He suggests that, because it is
ongoing, the nature of this elimination can also change over time:
On emancipation, Blacks became
surplus to some requirements and, to that extent, more like Indians.
Thus it is highly significant that the barbarities of lynching and the
Jim Crow reign of terror should be a post-emancipation phenomenon. As
valuable commodities, slaves had only been destroyed in extremis.
Even after slavery, Black people continued to have value as a source of
super-cheap labour (providing an incitement to poor Whites), so their
dispensability was tempered. Today in the US, the blatant racial zoning
of large cities and the penal system suggests that, once colonized
people outlive their utility, settler societies can fall back on the
repertoire of strategies (in this case, spatial sequestration) whereby
they have also dealt with the native surplus.
In 2021, Alex Hinton, director of the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights at Rutgers University, says the original We Charge Genocide
petition was "very compelling" but ahead of its time. He said, "While
many may think that genocidal annihilation only looks like Nazi mass
murder, the U.N. Genocide Convention clearly incorporates more nuanced
forms of destruction than that." Like Wolfe, he suggests black genocide
should be considered a form of structural genocide. He states that,
despite Lemkin's objections, We Charge Genocide's claims were plausible according to Lemkin's own scholarship.