OK, put your thinking cap on. Make sure it's on nice and snug. Comfortable? All right then. See if you can guess who wrote the following. Was it David Duke, the infamous Klansman who wrote My Awakening: A Path to Racial Understanding (1998)? Or was it perhaps Pat Buchanan in The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization (2001)? It's a tough one, so don't try too hard. Just get a feel for the text. I've highlighted several words and phrases to help you out. The answer is given below, but don't cheat. We're going on the Honor System here.

Over one-fourth of all the immigrants over fourteen years of age, admitted during the two decades preceding 19xx, were illiterate. Of the 8,398,000 who arrived in the [ten-year] 19xx-19xx period, 2,238,000 could not read or write. There were 1,600,000 illiterate foreigners in the United States when the 19xx census was taken. Do these elements give promise of a better race? Are we doing anything genuinely constructive to overcome this situation?

Two-thirds of the white foreign stock in the United States live in cities. Four-fifths of the populations of Chicago and New York are of this stock. More than two-thirds of the populations of Boston, Cleveland, Detroit, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Newark, Jersey City, Providence, Worcester, Scranton, Paterson, Fall River, Lowell, Cambridge, Bridgeport, St. Paul, Minneapolis and San Francisco are of other than native white ancestry. Of the fifty principal cities of the United States there are only fourteen in which fifty per cent of the population is of unmixed native white parentage.

Only one state in the Union -- North Carolina -- has less than one per cent of the white foreign stock. New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, the Dakotas, Montana and Utah have more than fifty per cent foreign stock. Eleven states, including those on the Pacific Coast, have from 35 to 50 per cent. Maine, Ohio and Kansas have from 25 to 35 per cent. Maryland, Indiana, Missouri and Texas have from 15 to 25 per cent. These proportions are increasing rather than decreasing, owing to the extraordinarily high birth rate of the foreign strains.

Did you guess correctly? No, probably not. Actually, that's a clip from Margaret Sanger's 1920 book, Woman and the New Race. The dates blocked out are 1910 and 1910-1920, and 1910, respectively. That bit is in chapter three, "The Materials of the New Race," which you can read in full at... wait for it... sacred-texts.com. Hmmm. Sanger's bio on the Planned Parenthood site states that "Margaret Sanger was not a racist, an anti-Semite, or a eugenicist" -- and goes to some lengths to exonerate her from such charges. Which, for some strange reason, persist. Do they persist because the Christian Right seeks to vilify this brave champion of women's reproductive rights? Or do they persist because Sanger's agenda did indeed overlap with that of the eugenics movement, and third-world and non-white birth control was her answer to saving the fiction still referred to in some quarters as the "Anglo-Saxon race"? It's a thorny question, politically charged to the flash point. Because of this polarization, much of the web-accessible background on Margaret Sanger is extremely questionable -- including the Planned Parenthood bio linked above. It's hard to know what to believe, isn't it? Here's the real pop quiz, though: is it just as hard to allow yourself to think about it? If so, then it's incontrovertibly but sadly true...

You've come a long way, baby.