Pro-Black, Pro-Life with Cherilyn Holloway

In this episode, Herb is joined by Cherilyn Holloway, the founder of Pro-Black Pro-Life, to discuss ways the pro-life movement can better support the Black community.

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Transcript:

Voiceover Intro: Hello, and welcome to episode 11 of the Rehumanize podcast.

Herb Geraghty: Hello everyone. Herb Geraghty here, back on the Rehumanize podcast. Today, I am joined by Cherilyn Holloway, the founder of a new organization called Pro-Black Pro-Life. Welcome Cherilyn. So just first off the bat, what is the mission of Pro-Black Pro-life?

Cherilyn Holloway: The mission of Pro-Black Pro-Life is to reach inside the black community and to sit knee-to-knee and talk about the systemic issues that they face on a daily basis while also introducing them to the issue of life and abortion that's also happening in our community. And I just believe that in order to do that, we have to build trust and they have to understand that we are for them and not against them, but that they recognize that abortion is something that's happening in our community--to us and not for us.

Herb Geraghty: So I think the listeners of the Rehumanize podcast typically would, I would say know what it means to be pro-life. But I think that pro-black might be new to some of them. So could you just talk a little bit about what that means to you? How do you be pro-black?

Cherilyn Holloway: Yeah, I think that the pro-life movement has done an excellent job of polarizing and keeping out the black community in terms of talking about racism outside of abortion. And so the term pro-black just says that we are for the advancement of the black community at every stage of life. And saying that is really in camaraderie with what they're already seeing with Black Lives Matter and the other issues that they're facing, but also saying that I'm also pro-life. And so you can be both. Being pro-life does not put you in a box that says that you're a bunch of other things; being pro-life stands alone, just like being pro-black stands alone. And more so, being pro-black doesn't mean that we're anti-white. It just means that we focus on the issues that are in my community in order to bring them full circle, and understanding what it means to support whole life.

Herb Geraghty: You mentioned the sort of mainstream, traditional pro-life movement. Can we talk a little bit about where you think the pro-life movement, as it is now, sort of succeeds and fails when it comes to reaching the black community?

Cherilyn Holloway: I think the pro-life movement succeeds at reaching the black community with their pregnancy centers. I think pregnancy centers have missions to reach all abortion-minded women, and they desperately want to reach even outside of their community. And so I feel like in that situation, they are completely whole life. They understand the importance. But I think the pro-life message has been construed as a political message, and when we do that, we really polarize and keep people outside of the movement. Because if I'm not pro-Trump Republican then I can't be pro-life, or if I say I'm pro-life, then people are going to automatically think I'm those [additional] things. And we have not done a great job of saying, "No no no, pro-life is just a part of what your beliefs are, and it does not mean any of the other things." Just like when I say I'm pro-black doesn't mean that I don't believe that other image bearers matter. It just means that this is the part of my community that I'm relating to that is struggling right now and that they need help. And I think that the pro-life movement has failed us in terms of really not allowing that messaging in, by saying, "We're not talking about that, we need to have this narrative that says just this one thing on abortion and the abortion commute and the abortion industry," and not allowing for the other experience of black people to come in and to help shape that.

Herb Geraghty: I would say that as someone who--I've tried to be a supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement, I try to be knowledgeable on these issues, but I'm also very active within the traditional pro-life movement. I've definitely seen that. I've seen my sort of, what I see as an innocuous Twitter post--just #blacklivesmatter--something that I think is, you know, an obvious thing to say, can come across to certain people within the wider conservative movement especially, but also [within] the pro-life movement, as, you know, an attack against them in some way, or an attack against white people or an attack against their values. And I think for me, I have a hard time sort of bridging that gap because I think that we're talking past each other a lot of the time.

Herb Geraghty: I think that, in the way that when I say I'm pro-life and then all my, you know, fellow left-leaning LGBT friends assume that means that I'm a bigot and that I'm with Donald Trump on all of his policies, the same thing sort of happens when I say black lives matter. Pro-lifers think that that means that, you know, I'm a Planned Parenthood clinic escort and I support the Democratic Party, or I'm Antifa; sort of all these things that they, you know, have major issues with. And I think that it's so important for people like you, who can be a representative of sort of both sides of this very polarized debate, to say, "No, these aren't in conflict at all. In fact, these go together. You know, I'm pro-black because I'm pro-life, I'm pro-life because I'm pro-black. They don't contradict each other at all." And I think it's so important that people, you know, with your message, get that across, because without the black community, we're not gonna win this fight. Without the black community, even if, you know, abortion is illegal, we're still going to be losing, you know, how, how many millions of black children every year, how many black women are going to be hurt. So I think that this message is so crucial.

Cherilyn Holloway: Yeah. And I think that the thing is that we, as humans, love to put people in a box, right? Putting people in a box, putting people in categories makes us feel better about ourselves, because then we feel like we know how to treat people. Like if I agree with you on this, I know how to treat you. Instead of just looking at it from a grand scheme of, of like, I'm just going to treat everyone with kindness and love and really take time to hear what they have to say. Instead of feeling like everything is a defensive attack on my beliefs. If you are a Christ follower and you believe that we are all image bearers, then you should believe that black lives matter. That's not to say that you have signed up and are donating to the Black Lives Matter organization, because we're talking about two totally different things. No one owns the phrase "black lives matter."

Herb Geraghty: Yeah.

Cherilyn Holloway: You can say "black lives matter" without being a Marxist. Like, you can say it, it's fine. And saying that doesn't mean that other people don't matter. But what we're talking about right now is this point in particular that the pro-life movement has continued to talk about over and over and over again--is the abortion rate in the black community. If you are going to continue to make this point over and over and over again, then be prepared to talk about all the other issues. If you want my community to respond to your efforts to teach them that this is genocide, that Margaret Sanger was racist, and that the whole entire abortion industry was built on racism, then you have to wrap it around your brain that the banking industry, the healthcare industry, the housing industry, all those things too, were also built on systemic racism. Like, that's what we're dealing with.

Cherilyn Holloway: We're dealing with those on a daily basis, and what you are communicating to my community is, "We only care about this one thing. We only see racism this one way." And we're not going to listen to that. And so when you wanna know why we're not showing up, it's because we don't trust you. We don't trust you because you're not listening to us. You're not listening to our experiences. When a man has a knee on his neck for 8 minutes and 47 seconds, the first thing you go to is his, like, arrest record. Like, at what point in time does that even matter? Because you're telling me that my child in the womb has rights. It's an innocent child and it has rights. So if this person has an arrest record, all of a sudden they lose these rights? Like, it's a conflict, you know?

Cherilyn Holloway: And I just feel like that is where the pro-life movement continues to really disable their voice in my community, really discredit anything that they would ever have to say. And [it] allows people to say, "I'm going to continue to vote this way. I'm going to continue to speak this way, because this group over here clearly doesn't care about me." Like, they won't even address the issue. Every time an issue comes up, they defer to black-on-black crime, or they defer to, like, what criminal thing this person does. Or it's always like, "Oh, they were shot in their car at point blank range by a police officer? Well, what did they do?" Well, if they didn't try to shoot the police officer, what difference does it make?

Cherilyn Holloway: Like, nothing really makes sense at that point that would take that person's life. And that's what as pro-lifers we're trying to communicate to the women in the black community when they're going to Planned Parenthood, they're going to the abortion clinic. Like, whatever you're dealing with right now, it's fine. You can get over it, just bring this baby earth side. But once that baby becomes an actual living, breathing child, then we're like, "Eh, thank you. Thank you for doing that for us. Now, if they die at the hands of the police, or they die at the hands of, you know, a healthcare system from inf