It's an inescapable fantasy: imagining what life would be like if I hadn't grown up as a minority.¹ Maybe I'd expect to be more successful, rather than simply believe in such possibility. Maybe I'd consider myself more attractive. Maybe I'd be more confident. The funny thing is that we so often try to itemize race - engaging it as personalized anecdotes rather than dangerously pulling millions under a single tent of stereotypes - and yet when I look at it through my eyes, through my prism, it's hard to understand how the light bends. It's hard to know what makes race and what race makes.

Sadly, what I've realized is that some of us - and by "us" I mean black people - aren't at all interested in how the light bends. For some, there is light and there is darkness and the composition of either could not be less intriguing. There are too many who, when confronted with a rock, drive a coarse wedge between it and an already really hard place, rather than reach for a more specialized tool.

The Georgia Right to Life Committee (GRTL) and Dr. Alveda King - the niece of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. - are forcing a wedge between a rock and a hard place. Convinced that Planned Parenthood has been targeting black women with a "pro-abortion" scheme, the GRTL is posting billboards that read "Black children are an endangered species." Using terms like "genocide," "ethnic cleansing" and "womb-lynching," King and the GRTL are campaigning against what they consider a policy-based selective breeding initiative, pitting the rock of racial relations against the already hard place of reproductive choice.

I hope it's obvious that the issue here is not what any of us think of abortion. Instead, it's the framework within which some of us are choosing to express these thoughts.

The GRTL, quite obviously with all the conveniently-inherited prestige of Alveda King's uncle's name, is using rhetoric that has no place in rational discourse. Rhetoric that tells black women who've had abortions with the assistance of Planned Parenthood that they have been duped - that the unparalleled choice they've made was a set-up; that they were essentially unwittingly complicit in the genocide of their race - is almost unimaginably severe vitriol.

I understand, though disagree, with not believing in choice. I understand, though disagree, that for many, choice presupposes a moral right the Supreme Court does not administer. But what I cannot understand is heinous propaganda that plots black women as points along lines of demarcation. What I cannot accept is an organization operating on the assumption that all black women who've had abortions after consultation by Planned Parenthood have done so with a single, manipulated mindset, especially when Alveda King readily admits she has had more than one herself.

Maybe some women decided that traditional religious doctrine wasn't a tenet of being black and female in America; that they could choose to have an abortion. Maybe some women decided that being black and female in America meant that they could believe in religion and choose. Maybe others thought religious ideology was paramount to all but carrying a child who was the result of situations like sexual abuse. I'd imagine that most, though, felt their choice was their choice and were not concerned with whether it was in step with marching orders from King and the GRTL regarding how a black woman should make reproductive decisions.

We are a people, but we are persons. We are not to be swept under a tent. We have reasons, motivations, stories and feelings all our own and the right to pursue them. Our lights can bend in different directions with varied shades. And yet here we are in 2010 and the GRTL is insisting that all black women are but a single refraction. They are insisting that being a black woman in America means not having an abortion, or despising your right to choose to do so, and that if you do have one, that you're quite literally complicit in the killing of your people.

I'm not a social scientist. I don't know whether we can be reduced to one social agenda. I don't know as fact whether race can be so easily funneled into one non-melting pot, with our tastes determined by the same palette and our ingredients dictated by strict adherence to a shared recipe. I can't prove that they're wrong. But everything I believe says they have to be.

¹I think there's a difference between being black and being a minority. Or maybe I just hope there is.