The pro-life niece of Martin Luther King, Jr. said that if Starbucks truly wanted to end racism, it would stop funding Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider.
Alveda King, who serves as director of Civil Rights for the Unborn at Priests for Life, noted in a column at the Washington Examiner the attempt by Starbucks Tuesday to recover from the appearance of engaging in racist business practices.
Starbucks made a point of publicizing it would be conducting a “racial-bias education” day for its employees in the wake of incidents last month in two of its stores that led to accusations of racism and a call on social media for a boycott of the coffee shop chain. In one situation, two black men who were sitting in a Philadelphia Starbucks without making a purchase were arrested for trespassing.
A letter sent to Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson, and signed by King and other pro-life leaders, said, “If you think this public relations fix means Starbucks is no longer complicit in racism, it’s time to wake up and smell your own coffee.”
“But Starbucks had racism in its corporate identity long before the April arrests,” King wrote in her Washington Examiner op-ed. “Through its corporate donations, Starbucks contributes to one of the most racist organizations in our nation’s history. Planned Parenthood, the largest single provider of abortions in the U.S., performs more than 300,000 terminations each year.”
In her column, King observed to Starbucks the racist roots of Planned Parenthood, beginning with its founder, eugenicist Margaret Sanger.
“More African-Americans have died from abortion than from AIDS, accidents, violent crimes, cancer, and heart disease — combined,” she explained. “In America today, a black child is three times more likely to be killed in the womb than a white child. And since 1973, abortion has reduced the black population by more than 25 percent.”
King pointed out that 80 percent of Planned Parenthood facilities are located in inner city neighborhoods, and that the abortion chain’s business model “was specifically engineered to target them.”
“About 13 percent of American women are black, but they have more than 35 percent of the abortions,” she wrote.
Yet, Planned Parenthood is not being boycotted for racist business practices. In fact, as King noted, a bust of Sanger – who was active with the Ku Klux Klan – sits in the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution.
Sanger, who began the Negro Project in 1939, worked to bring birth control to blacks in an effort to reduce their population. The Negro Project was sold as a solution to poverty and high birth rates among the black community.
At the same time that Sanger promoted her theory of “eliminating the unfit,” she also condemned charitable organizations that she believed were elevating the very population that needed to be weeded out.
“Through the founding of Planned Parenthood, Sanger was a pioneer of modern-day deceptive women’s health practices and the engineer of modern-day black eugenics,” King wrote. “Planned Parenthood has spent an entire century murdering children and eradicating African-Americans.”
King called out Starbucks and other companies “that claim to care about ‘racial bias’ to stop funding Planned Parenthood’s house of horrors, which has taken precious lives away from minority communities and from society at large.”
She concluded:
Starbucks, if you’re really serious about eliminating racism, you will acknowledge that black people, and indeed all human beings, are of one blood and one human race, born and unborn. Racism and abortion are crimes against humanity.
We’d be happy to sit down with you to discuss racial justice over a cup of coffee.
When Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson was asked by Fox Business Network host Maria Bartiromo for his response to King’s op-ed, Johnson responded he is “not aware that … we do fund Planned Parenthood.”
“What I do — am aware of and do believe is that we want to create a great customer experience for every customer that visits our stores,” he said.
As MRC NewsBusters reports, Starbucks is listed as a matching gift company at a Planned Parenthood site.
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