eugenics

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

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. 

"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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

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. 

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. 

"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. 

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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. 

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. 

“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."