As faithful readers of The Giving Review know, we consciously labor in the shadow of the historic distinction between charity and philanthropy. But rare among students of foundations and nonprofits, we tend to side with the former. This was brought to mind recently when Planned Parenthood of Greater New York removed the name of its national founder, Margaret Sanger, from its Manhattan health clinic because of her “harmful connections to the eugenics movement.”
The philanthropy/charity distinction was central to the eugenics movement. Unlike charity, which allegedly “just put Band-aids” on problems, modern philanthropy promised to get at the root causes of problems and solve them once and for all. And nothing says “root-cause solution” like eugenics—digging up the defective genes that seemed to explain most of society’s ills, and then eradicating them forever by sterilizing their human hosts.
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