Akiba Solomon: How Personhood Mississippi Perverts Black History to Fight Abortion

Akiba Solomon writes Colorlines' Gender Matters blog and is an NABJ-Award winning writer, freelance journalist, editor and essayist from West Philadelphia. A graduate of Howard University, the Brooklyn resident co-edited Naked: Black Women Bare All About Their Skin, Hair, Hips, Lips, and Other Parts (Perigee, 2005), an anthology of original essays and oral memoirs about Black women and body image.

One of the most sickening features of the radical anti-choice movement is how it uses the meat of racial and gender justice struggles to manufacture its rhetorical sausage.

So far in 2011, they’ve cast black and Latino wombs as genocidal time bombs; they’ve twisted structural analyses of female infanticide in Asia beyond recognition; and they’ve branded fetuses the most persecuted minority in the world.

Now a cell of this national movement called Personhood Mississippi is using the infamous Dred Scott decision of 1857 to convince Mississippi voters to outlaw abortion in the state via a November 9th ballot initiative called Amendment 26.

As we all (hopefully) know, Dred Scott was an enslaved African-American who sued his so-called master for his freedom. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled that Scott and every other black person in this country had no right to sue in federal court because his blackness made him a non-citizen.

The Dred Scott decision is one of the purest examples of structural racism in U.S. history: A person of color is “owned” by a white person. That person tries to use the high court to get free. The high court says, “You’re black and therefore not a citizen. Kick rocks.” Case closed until the post-Civil War 14th Amendment establishes birthright citizenship....