×

Lord willing, this is the third and final post in a series of posts regarding how we talk about abortion, particularly how to draw the comparison between abortion and slavery with various audiences.  In the post that started the series, I tried to point out that speaking cross-culturally about abortion using anecdotes from differing ethnic backgrounds triggers strong responses from your audience.  The speaker should beware of what his hearer’s are thinking.  The point was not to say “don’t make the comparison.”  The point of the post was to say, “To make the comparison effectively you must know your audience.”  That generated a few comments, one of which asked me to demonstrate how I would approach the task as a white person addressing African Americans.  So, yesterday I offered this post.

In this post, I want to offer a short stump speech I might deliver to a predominantly African American audience as an African-American speaker trying to win supporters for ending abortion.  In the sample I’m trying do a couple things:

1.  Use slavery as the historical backdrop for abortion without devaluing either slavery or abortion (this is different than simply making a comparison)

2.  Address the stereotypes that suggest to some that abortion is “their problem”

3.  Marshall the history of African American fights for life and dignity for the pro-life cause

4.  Leave people with the gospel

Those are among the objectives.  Let me know what you think.  We’re all still trying to get better at talking about things we care about.  So the comment thread is open again!

————————————————–

Brothers and sisters,

Thank you for coming out tonight.  I’m deeply grateful that you would invest time away from your family, your work, and other commitments to be with us for so important an issue.  I want to talk with you about what I believe is the most heinous, life-threatening tragedy in our lifetimes: abortion.

When I was a boy, I would hear my parents talking about abortion shortly after Roe v. Wade, which made abortion legal in this country.  My strongest memory of that time was what my parents as they watched the evening news?  “Abortion is white people’s problem.  Black people don’t kill their babies.”  Did you ever hear anything like that?

Now as a nappy head little boy, I didn’t know what was going on.  But I assumed my folks knew more black people than I did and that they had it right.  I didn’t know anyone who knew anyone who had had an abortion.  Most of the people I knew were raising lots of children, some their own, some from previous relationships, some raising the children of cousins or siblings, or grandmothers raising their grandchildren.  One thing we had in my neighborhood were children–more children than you could count.  So, it seemed to me my folks had it right.  “Killing babies was white people’s problems.  Black people don’t do it.”

So when you mention the word “abortion,” some of us quickly tune the conversation out.  We think of sign-carrying protesters (all of them white)… or people shooting doctors outside clinics (all of them white)… or graphic images of unborn children (we assume from white parents).  Abortion seems to us a problem created by and experienced by white people.

You see, African Americans have spent generations fighting for life.  We fought for life as we were kidnapped, packed in ships, then sold and brutalized in the Transatlantic slave trade.  We have no idea how many people were killed at sea during that demonic voyage.  We fought for life during slavery… when too many black people were beaten to death… lynched… castrated… or hobbled.  We fought for life during the daily demonic drudgery of picking cotton and hoeing rows for somebody else’s fields.  Our lives seemed to seep into the very soil we toiled.  African American women fought for life with screams and tears as slave owners snatched their children at the auction block or even at birth.  While black women suckled the children of slaveowners… their own children were sold like cattle.  Those women fought for life while being repeatedly raped, having children by men who denied their humanity by day but claimed their bed by night, having no control over their own body.

We are a people whose very existence may be defined as a fight for life. We fought to be counted as fully human life–not 3/5 human as some lawmakers defined.  Then we fought to have a fully free life–not segregated and second class.  If we’ve fought for anything we’ve fought for life.  If anyone knows the value of life–of being alive and living free–it’s African Americans.  And we’ve paid for life with the sacrifice of life itself.

In our short time tonight, we have not come to talk about slavery.  We’ve come to talk about its modern day step-child: abortion.  And I’ve come to tell you, beloved, my mama and daddy had a lot of things right.  But they were wrong when they told me that “abortion was a white person’s problem.”  It may have seemed that way to them watching the images on the TV in the 1970s.  It may seem that way to you and me when we see the images and protests on our TVs today.  But, beloved, you might be horrified to know the truth.

Since abortion became legal in 1973, over 13 million African American babies have been killed in the womb! Thirteen million!  That’s more than heart disease, cancer, accidents, violent crimes, and AIDS combined!  That’s more than some estimates of lives lost in 200 years of slavery!  In the 1980s, we labeled black males an “endangered species” because of the life-threatening effects of drugs, violence, and imprisonment.  But next to abortion, drugs, violent crime, and prison look like Spring break at Virginia Beach.  Write it down.  Make it plain.  The new slavery, the new force devastating black life, is abortion.

As quiet as it’s kept, as “white” a problem some of us might’ve thought, the killing of unborn children is very much a “black problem,” too.  Beloved, we need to resume the fight for life–the lives of 13 million of our very own children.

I’m well aware that the ones sailing the ships, leading the auctions, and holding the whip during slavery were white-skinned.  Some of them claimed to be Christians as they either actively participated in or justified this brutality.  Many others quietly looked the other way.  They were willfully ignorant.  But they didn’t act alone.  There were house Negroes and black overseers who also acted in ways that supported the slave system.  And there were those African Americans too afraid to rise up in arms and protest, or too heavy-laden with the burden of slavery to straighten their backs.

Their lives remind me of how easy it is for me to be ignorant, and how wrong it would be for you and me to cooperate with this genocide by turning a blind eye.  We fight for life!

For there were also those–black and white–who were liberators and defenders of black life.  They were the resistant, the militant, and the strident.  They spoke up and they spoke out.  They sometimes led protests and wrote abolitionist tracts.  They sometimes simply looked into themselves before looking into the eyes of the slave driver and saying, “I am a man.”  Or, “I am a woman.”  “I ain’t taking it no more.”  There were black Frederick Douglasses and white William Wilberforces, whose actions touched both sides of the Atlantic.  There were black David Walkers and white John Browns, who made a call to arms to protect black life.  And there were black Harriet Tubmans and nameless white women along the Underground Railroad getting their passengers to freedom by night.  They all knew that slavery was a human problem and they gave their lives to the cause of ending it.

The question is this: Do we know that abortion is a human problem affecting us all, and will we give our lives to ending this genocide?

Beloved, in a very real sense we should be ashamed to only see white faces marching and picketing as though abortion is “white people’s problem.”  We should be ashamed that we’re not on the front-lines with them picketing, marching, and calling for justice.

Because the reality is this: Our indifference and willful ignorance destroy black life by the thousands every day.  We cannot “look the other way.”  We know better and should be better. There are significant numbers of African Americans participating in, supporting, or playing blind bystander to the untold suffering of black babies.  These are the people living in our day who remain uninvolved in ending abortion the way some remained uninvolved in ending slavery.

Were a black man to remain uninvolved in ending slavery he would be called a “sell out.”  My brothers and sisters, if a black man or woman remains uninvolved in the ending of abortion when abortion destroys more black babies than any other thing since slavery… that black man or woman is a “sell out” to his children before they see the light of life!

Ignoring suffering wasn’t right in 1830, and it’s not right in 2010.  Black life should have been valued and protected in 1830 and 1950, and it should be valued and protected now!

I’m here as someone making a plea on behalf of those who can’t speak.  I’m here in a quest for a future where all life–black, white, Asian, Hispanic–all life–receives the honor, dignity, care, and preservation befitting the image of God.  For all people are made in God’s image.  All people are made by God to reveal His glory.  We dare not hide or tarnish the glory of God.  So we dare not murder those made in His image.

There will be an account to give before God on that Great Day of Judgment.  I want to be counted among those who fought for His glory and fought for life.  I want to be counted as one who was on the Lord’s side.  For the Son of God came into the world as a newborn babe.  He grew before men and before God.  He lived a perfect life before being crucified in a sinner’s death.  He gave His life as a ransom for the many who would repent of their sins and believe on Him, so that we who believe would be freed from the fear of death and enjoy eternal life with Him.  And He calls everyone to enter this new and everlasting life through faith in Him.

If that’s who the Lord God is and what He has done to grant life to those who believe, do you really think He is impartial about the destruction of life made in His image?

Of course not.  So, beloved, will you join with me in making sure  life is protected?  Will you join with me in making sure the suffering of bygone generations of African Americans isn’t for nothing when it comes to this generation of babies in their mother’s wombs?  Will you join with me in removing the scalpel from the doctors’ hands the way the whip should’ve been removed from the slave owners’ hands?  Will you join with me in putting an end to abortion in America?  Right now, a real baby in a real womb needs us to give our lives so that they may have one.

Thank you for your time.
———————————————————-

Again… because it’s one of the best moments in American movie history, here’s the closing argument in A Time to Kill.  He captures the spirit of what I’m trying to say about the rhetorical approach needed on this issue:

LOAD MORE
Loading