eugenics

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• SOURCE: AMA Journal of Ethics
  7/10/2023
  

  The Body Mass Index Grew out of White Supremacy, Eugenics and Anti-Blackness

  by Sabrina Strings

  Beneath the statistical and scientific imprimatur of the measurement lie a host of assumptions that the bodies of affluent white people are normal and those of others are deviant and deficient. 

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  5/31/2023
  

  Major Genealogical Group Apologizes for Past Associations with Eugenics and White Supremacy

  The National Genealogical Society acknowledged that its founding in 1903 accompanied the rise of the eugenics movement, and that early leaders viewed genealogical study as  way of demonstrating and protecting racial purity. 

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• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  2/22/2023
  

  The Children of the Nazis' Genetics Project

  While much of Nazism was associated with destruction, it's racist ideological core was also preoccupied with creating or restoring racial purity, including through the Lebensborn program which viewed officers of the SS as the fathers of a new Aryan vanguard. 

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• SOURCE: Dissent
  1/11/2023
  

  Margaret Sanger's Ghost and the Antiabortion Movement

  by Melinda Cooper

  The anti-abortion right's invocation of eugenics in the Dobbs case and in their public rhetoric might seem cynical. But it could be effective, unless the history of Sanger's relationship to eugenics and reproductive freedom is better understood. 

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• SOURCE: Undark
  12/14/2022
  

  With its Eugenics Roots, does Standardized Testing Have Any Place in Education Today?

  by Deborah Blum

  A researcher discovered a pattern in the experimental vetting of SAT test questions in the 1990s: questions on which Black students outscored White students in trials were usually excluded from future tests. This practice is linked back to the roots of IQ testing in the eugenics movement.

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  11/28/2022
  

  Will the Era of the Butt Ever End?

  Heather Radke's "Butts: A Backstory" isn't (just) a provocation, but a carefully researched study of how bodily ideals and attractiveness are constructed and reproduced in societies. 

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• SOURCE: Nature
  9/28/2022
  

  "Nature" Editors Acknowledge Journal's Contributions to Scientific Racism

  The leading cross-disciplinary science publication acknowledges that it has given a platform to the scientifically discredited writings of eugenicists and has an ongoing obligation to ensure that it does not offer further support for oppression justified by the authority of science. 

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• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  9/20/2022
  

  US Neglect of Puerto Rico is in the News, but the Main Historical Relationship has been Abuse

  by Jaquira Diaz

  From forced disruption of native industry through mass sterilization and forced austerity, one writer argues that the only escape from mainland abuse is full Puerto Rican independence. 

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• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  8/4/2022
  

  The Coming Pregnancy Surveillance State Will Bring "Homeland Security" to Women's Bodies

  by Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz

  The Dobbs ruling puts longstanding racist and nationalist beliefs that white women's reproductive labor is the price of their citizenship, and punitive controls on women of color, on collision course with the modern capacity of digital surveillance, threatening the criminalization of any miscarried pregnancy. 

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• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  8/1/2022
  

  The Eugenic, Anti-Black History of the "Brazilian Butt Lift"

  by Daniel F. Silva

  Brazilian doctors developed the procedure in the wake of a eugenics movement that assimilated some stereotyped attributes of Black women's bodies into a new set of beauty standards that marginalized Afro-Brazilians. A similar dynamic occurs today on worldwide social media.

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  7/24/2022
  

  A Survivor of Forced Sterilization Fears its Return as a Consequence of Overturning Roe

  Without a recognized privacy right to reproductive freedom, legal precedents like the Buck v. Bell decision could allow states to resume forcibly sterilizing women they deem unfit for motherhood. 

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• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  6/24/2022
  

  The Court's Abortion Decision is Based in White Nationalist Myth

  by Samira K. Mehta and Lauren MacIvor Thompson

  The durable image of "motherhood and apple pie" is central to the myth of white Christian nationalism and part of the ideological impulse to strip away reproductive freedom. 

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• SOURCE: Science for the People
  2/1/2022
  

  "The Last Refuge of Scoundrels": E.O. Wilson's Support for Scientific Racism

  by Stacy Farina and Matthew Gibbons

  Evolutionary biology has long been used to promote the ideology that "races" are real and meaningful divisions of the human species. A recent controversy about a recently-deceased leader in the field shows that there is more work to be done to ensure that science no longer lends credibility to racism. 

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  9/30/2021
  

  The Historical Line Between Carrie Buck and Britney Spears: Labeling Women "Unfit"

  by Gillian Brockell

  Historians Elizabeth Catte, Audrey Clare Farley, and Keisha N. Blain give context to the discourse of unfitness that connects the conservatorship imposed on Britney Spears with institutionalization and forced sterilization of women in the 20th century.

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• SOURCE: WNYC
  9/27/2021
  

  The Brian Lehrer Show: Reckoning with History of Eugenics

  Historian Jack Tchen and organizer Cara Page discuss the way eugenicist ideas are deeply embedded in American Culture and how to move to a post-eugenics future. 

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• SOURCE: Dissent
  8/30/2021
  

  Daddy Issues

  by Bethany Moreton

  White American Christians have embraced aggressive patriarchy as access to social and economic power has become more concentrated in fewer hands. 

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• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  8/20/2021
  

  Both the Right and Left Need to Remember Demography is Not Destiny

  by Adam Serwer

  The 2020 Census has fueled optimism on the left and panic on the right about American demographics. But past periods of ethnic change have shown the fluidity of racial categories defies expectations.

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• 7/25/2021
  

  The Legacies of Un-critical Race Theory at Berkeley

  by Tony Platt

  For most of its history, the University of California has been a bastion of un-critical race theory from Manifest Destiny to The Bell Curve. 

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  4/17/2021
  

  Head of Planned Parenthood: We’re Done Making Excuses for Our Founder

  by Alexis McGill Johnson

  "Margaret Sanger harmed generations with her beliefs. In our second century, Planned Parenthood has a chance to heal those harms," says the organization's current leader. 

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• SOURCE: Nursing Clio
  4/15/2021
  

  “Containment and Control, Not Care or Cure”: An Interview with Elizabeth Catte on Virginia’s Eugenics Movement

  by Sarah Calise

  "I decided to have a 'turn to the camera' moment in Pure America and just explicitly say that I think the eugenicists I write about are rotten people, not particularly smart or even interesting, and that I’d present evidence they lied and bluffed and enjoyed hurting people."