North Carolina has more living victims of forced or coerced sterilization than any other state in the U.S. There are around 7,600 known cases that were performed through a government-run eugenics program that culminated in 1974. A task force convened in 2011 to determine how the thousands of people who were forcibly sterilized by the state would be granted monetary reparations. Their preliminary report to the Governor includes testimony from victims given at the hearing, some of whom were teens or preteens at the time of their sterilization.

“Now I don’t know if North Carolina wants to hear this or not but this is North Carolina’s holocaust. We need a wall. We need a library,” said Australia Clay. Her testimony was one of the many transcribed in the report. She spoke up for her mother, who was forced into a mental institution by her husband after a nervous breakdown due to domestic abuse and postpartum depression. He received fifty dollars for committing her. It was in this institution where she was sterilized against her will and held for twelve years.

The eugenics movement was mass-scale reproductive violence, built upon white supremacy, racism, classism, xenophobia, and ableism. Nationwide, an estimated 60,000 men, women, and children were sterilized; determined to be “unfit” due to their race, ability, and/or low socioeconomic standing. Latinx, Native American, and Black people were among those most heavily targeted by this horrific movement and the practice has continued into this century. There are likely many, many more cases that were never properly recorded.

Eugenics brought about a long history of forcibly sterilizing marginalized populations in the U.S., an epidemic which has been largely ignored and, in some instances, even been encouraged by white feminism. Even now, the rhetoric surrounding reproductive rights is far too often remiss in addressing what amends for people of color, the poor, and the disabled might look like. Instead, the language of “pro-choice vs. pro-life/pro-birth” continues to be at the center, often failing to contextualize race and other factors. The movement often even neglects to address the many other uses for birth control besides contraception, such as treatment for reproductive disorders and other health concerns. Pro-choice rhetoric is so loud that it nearly drowns out anything else, and the movement as a whole continues to ignore how the history of white feminism and reproductive rights is rooted in white supremacist interests.

Reproductive rights is a subject that is central to the politics of white feminism because it is the second most prominent fight that it has historically engaged with, the first being voting rights for white women. It has always been understood as advocacy for the right to birth control and access to safe, legal abortion options as part of one’s ability to plan pregnancies and families on one’s own terms. In short, for able-bodied and able-minded white people, it has been primarily about the right to not be pregnant.

Considering the historical context of eugenics, scientific racism, and certain state-sanctioned violences, reproductive justice for non-whites would largely be quite the opposite. For many, it would instead be the ability to bear and nurture one’s own children without government interference or barriers created through white supremacy and systemic oppression.

In the dominant social conversation about reproductive rights, issues specific to people of color are often omitted or simply glanced over. This is why the term Reproductive justice was coined by a group of Black women in 1994, to specifically address the needs and concerns of people of color that are routinely left out of the conversation. The Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective known as SisterSong defines reproductive justice as “the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.” Black women and other people of color creating our own terminology is so necessary because white feminism has a reputation for ignoring oppressions until cis white women become affected by them, and reproductive violences are no exception.

The popularity of and discourse surrounding The Handmaid’s Tale is indicative of this neglect. Based on Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel, the Hulu television series and its subject matter resonate with those who work to combat rape culture and support bodily, sexual, and reproductive autonomy. The systematic sexual and reproductive violences on the show terrify those who view the story as a future dystopian (im)possibility for whiteness, when it is in fact a historical ghost for Black people who were enslaved.

Distinguished by their red robes and white bonnets, Handmaids are forced into slavery, repeatedly violated, impregnated, and made to give birth to children that are immediately taken to serve the interests of others. Essentially, The Handmaid’s Tale depicts cis white women stripped of the ability to bear and nurture one’s own children without government interference or barriers created through white supremacy and systemic oppression. This is a position that they have never seen themselves depicted in and it terrifies them.

As the current emblem for white feminism, these robes have become the new “Pink Pussy hats” in The Handmaid’s Protests; using costuming from the show in order to perform demonstrations against politicians who seek to enact laws against reproductive rights by allowing employers to fire anyone who uses birth control and lobbying to defund Planned Parenthood while also wanting to prevent the use of federal tax credits to buy insurance plans that would cover abortion services.

The costumed protesters gather and walk solemnly towards their destination, often in total silence. Other demonstrators shout loudly and use bullhorns, holding up signs with variations of “The Handmaid’s Tale is not and instruction manual.” True. It’s not. It’s a mirror. And what people see when they look at it is more revealing of their politics than they realize.

White feminists identify so strongly with The Handmaid’s Tale because it is a show about white women in slavery. They see clear connections between its horrors and the current state of U.S. politics. They see it as an omen. As a call to action. And now they cosplay it in order to protest government involvement in reproductive rights and “women’s bodies.” Within the dominant pro-choice rhetoric of The Handmaid’s Protest and beyond, the language of keeping the government out of “women’s bodies” is not only cisnormative, but it also fails to acknowledge the fact that this same government has already been routinely intruding upon and committing reproductive violences against people of color, the poor, and the disabled for centuries, and has even done so in the very same vein of The Handmaid’s Tale.

People of color have been disregarded in the deployment of the The Handmaid’s Tale, just as we have been in its celebration, and even in its critique. But this is nothing new. White feminism seems to always be at the expense of people of color. Indeed, the obsession with the show and the insensitivity of The Handmaid’s Protest reflect the shallowness of the reproductive rights movement as a whole.

Eugenics, white supremacist ideology, reproductive rights, and white feminism are all historically and intricately connected. When the Ku Klux Klan founded a chapter for women, it grew quickly and boasted nearly half a million members at its peak in the early 1900s. Women joined the white supremacist group in droves. Their passions lay in preserving the “eternal supremacy” of the white race through anti-immigration, anti-miscegenation, and racial segregation laws in order to ward off the “rising tide of color,” which they viewed as detrimental to the welfare of the nation and “the American way.”

Eugenics and the KKK had the same objective, to maintain the perceived supremacy of whiteness by suppressing the prosperity and growth of people of color, and their popularity grew alongside each other in the early 1900s. Both involved heinous violences, and the Women’s KKK committed some of the most unspeakable acts for the organization in the name of white supremacy.

To recruit members, the collective pulled from groups of white women who had been active in the suffrage movement, which is cited as the birth of white feminism. Suffragette and white feminist icons Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were both unrepentant white supremacists, as were many of their followers, as well as the majority of the other movement leaders.

Margaret Sanger, one of the founders of the mainstream reproductive rights movement and champion for Planned Parenthood, has long been accused of advocating for Black genocide. Several people have come to her defense, instead highlighting her ableist comments about the “over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective.” In 1921, she even penned an essay entitled “The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda.” Her feminism went hand in hand with eugenics, and regardless of her alleged opposition to racial containment, eugenics is still a tool of white supremacy. Reproductive rights and the pro-choice movement have long had a white supremacy problem.

In the second chapter of Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty, Dorothy Roberts details the reproductive histories of Black people in the U.S. “The Dark Side of Birth Control” is an unflinching look at the ways in which birth control has been used as a way to prevent the births of Black children.

“For privileged white women in America, birth control has been an emblem of reproductive liberty. Organizations such as Planned Parenthood have long championed birth control as the key to women’s liberation from compulsory motherhood and gender stereotypes. But the movement to expand women’s reproductive options was marked by racism from its very inception in the early part of this century. The spread of contraceptives to American women hinged partly on its appeal to eugenics bent on curtailing the birthrates of the ‘unfit,’ including Negroes. For several decades, peaking in the 1970s, government-sponsored family planning programs not only encouraged Black women to use birth control but also coerced them into being sterilized. While slave masters forced Black women to bear children for profit, more recent policies have sought to reduce Black women’s fertility. Both share a common theme — that Black women’s childbearing should be regulated to achieve social objectives.”