{"id":2729,"date":"2006-09-21T20:13:38","date_gmt":"2006-09-22T03:13:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2006\/09\/21\/racist-parents-kidnap-daughter-and-try-to-force-abortion\/"},"modified":"2006-09-21T20:13:38","modified_gmt":"2006-09-22T03:13:38","slug":"racist-parents-kidnap-daughter-and-try-to-force-abortion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=2729","title":{"rendered":"Racist Parents Kidnap Daughter and Try to Force Abortion"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few days ago I read a story<\/a> from Rueters about a couple from Maine, who kidnapped their 19 year old daughter. They forced her into a car, and tried taking her to New York so they could force her to have an abortion. The daughter escaped and called police while she hid in a store in New Hampshire. The parents have been arrested and held on $100,000 bail. After reading the first couple paragraphs of the story, my immediate reaction was, “I wonder if the potential father is black.” However, the initial article reveals very little about the motive. After my initial read, the only motive I could glean was that the parents were mad that the boyfriend was in jail. But, this story didn’t add up to me. So yesterday, one of my students mentioned the story and said that–the kidnapped woman’s boyfriend is a black man<\/a>, and the daughter told police that racism was a motive in the kidnapping.<\/p>\n

Based on my research on interracial relationships, this story actually fits fairly well into the narratives I have seen in many white families where relatives strongly object to interracial relationships. The only thing that surprises me about the story is that the parents attempted to kidnap this woman; the cases I know of personally generally involve less direct coercion. I know of 2 cases (one in my research and one in another sociological study) where parents of a white person in an interracial relationship suggested, encouraged, and promoted abortion to prevent the birth of a biracial child (I am hesitantly using the term biracial because most of the white relatives would say the child is black.). I also know of other cases where people encouraged white mother’s to place a child for adoption because the child’s father was black, and I know of many situations where white families offered bribes and\/or withdrew emotional and\/or financial support as a way to discourage an interracial relationship or a pregnancy that resulted from such a relationship. In these cases, white relatives feel they are protecting the family’s reputation, and\/or they feel that the relative in the interracial relationship is too naive (especially women) to know what she\/he is getting into. White relatives who feel this way believe that birth of a biracial child is a permanent marker of an interracial relationship that will hurt their relative’s social standing (white privilege), and to some extent, I’m sure they are right about this. The irony of this is that many white relatives of interracial couples would be the first to say that race doesn’t matter or that whites do not have unearned privileges, but suddenly when it hits close to home, they change their tune. <\/p>\n

The media attention given to this kidnapping has been varied, ranging from the first story, which was completely raceless, to the subsequent story where race is revealed as a motive. This story also has implications for abortion politics, and thus, it has received attention from those for and against abortion rights. I thought a nice sampling of headlines for this story would reveal a lot about our racial politics, our abortion politics, and where location where race and abortion politics intersect (or don’t intersect in public life).<\/p>\n