Wit & Attitude Quote by Alveda King

The line is engineered as a moral shortcut: collapse two of America’s most radioactive wrongs into one shared origin story, then let the emotional voltage of racism do the argumentative work on abortion. Calling them “evil twins” isn’t casual metaphor. It implies a single “lie” at the root, a quasi-theological framing that treats abortion not as policy or medicine but as a civilizational sin with a family tree. That matters coming from a clergyman: the claim is less about empirical linkage than about constructing a unified moral universe where opposition to abortion becomes the logical heir of the civil rights struggle.

The subtext is also tactical. “Where racism now hides its face in public” concedes that explicit racism has become socially unacceptable, then suggests abortion is racism’s updated instrument, a cleaner technology for the same outcome. It reframes reproductive choice as covert racial violence, effectively relocating agency away from Black women and toward “abortionists,” a word chosen to sound predatory and organized. The sentence “accomplishing the goals of which racism only once dreamed” isn’t just hyperbole; it’s a swap of villains. The historical oppressor becomes almost quaint, while the modern clinic becomes the new apparatus of elimination.

Contextually, this sits inside a long-running anti-abortion rhetorical strategy that recruits civil rights language (genocide, eugenics, targeted communities) to broaden a movement often perceived as white and conservative. It’s meant to shame neutrality, harden coalition lines, and make disagreement feel like complicity. The cost is precision: the quote blurs distinct histories into a single indictment, but that bluntness is the point. It’s not trying to win a seminar; it’s trying to win a conscience.