Texas-produced film links eugenics, abortion, and targeting of blacks

DENTON?The window dressing may be benign, but behind the curtain remains the dark elitism of the eugenics movement, which continues to flourish in the 21st century with a disproportionate focus on black Americans.

That’s the message of a relatively new video documentary, “Maafa21: Black Genocide in 21st Century America,” from Denton-based Life Dynamics Inc. The group’s president, Mark Crutcher, wrote and produced it and is featured numerous times in the film.

Maafa (pronounced Mah-off-ah) is a Swahili word for tragedy, in this case the continued repercussions of Western slavery that Crutcher argues led to the eugenics movement and specifically to the government’s role in funding family planning, birth control and abortion aimed at minority groups and especially blacks.

The end result: a disproportionate percentage of “family planning” clinics in black neighborhoods and an African-American abortion rate that has skyrocketed in the last 40 years.

The film begins with a scene in a slave cemetery in Denton County, then unwinds for viewers a chronological chain of events, from American slavery, the emergence of Charles Darwin’s survival of the fittest and the eugenics movement that was fueled by Darwin’s cousin, the father of eugenics, Francis Galton, and concurrent social developments.

The documentary proceeds through the years of Civil War Reconstruction, a period when some American industrialists turned to eugenics as a method of controlling wealth and maintaining civil order for fear that 4 million freed slaves would overwhelm the ruling American upper class.

The founder of the American Birth Control League (later known as Planned Parenthood), Margaret Sanger, became a tool of some wealthy industrialists, as one observer in the film states: “[T]hey needed a front man and she needed money.”

Sanger is quoted in the film, from 1922.

“We are paying for and ever submitting to the dictates of an ever-increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all,” said Sanger, lamenting that the resources of individuals and states were being diverted to care for them.

Hitler’s Nazi philosophy was largely influenced, the film states, by American eugenicist Madison Grant, whose book “The Passing of the Great Race” Hitler referred to as his Bible.

Throughout the film, narrated by an African American man and woman, several black pro-life activists are featured, including Alveda King, a niece of Martin Luther King.

The film shows the rise of the American government’s funding of family planning, most notably through abortion but also through sterilization and emerging birth control methods such as Norplant, and the correlation of rising abortion rates among black women since the early 1970s?an abrupt change from earlier periods when white women were getting most of the abortions.

The film’s criticism cuts across political lines, with elitist tendencies aimed at curbing the black population dating back to President Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat, and proliferating under Republican President Richard Nixon.

The film also includes several quotes from a much younger Jesse Jackson, who at one time was unabashedly pro-life, according to his comments.

“What happens to the mind of a person, and the moral fabric of a nation, that accepts the aborting of the life of a baby without a conscience?” Jackson is quoted as saying in the 1970s. “What kind of a person, and what kind of a society will we have 20 years hence if life can be taken so casually?”

Among the more interesting stori