eugenics

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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."

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• SOURCE: Mother Jones
  3/30/2021
  

  One Man’s Quest to Crack the Modern Anti-Immigration Movement—by Unsealing Its Architect’s Papers

  John Tanton donated 25 boxes of documents related to his work with anti-immigration advocacy organizations beginning in the 1960s. The gift stipulated that much of the collection be sealed until 2035. An immigration advocate says that Tanton's connections to right-wing anti-immigrant groups and the pro-eugenics Pioneer Fund means the university should unseal the papers now. 

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• SOURCE: Paris Review
  3/11/2021
  

  The Trouble with Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  by Halle Butler

  The resurrection of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's literary stature in the 1970s ran counter to the author's own self-understanding, summed up in her statement "I abominate being called a feminist." It also obscured her racist nativism. 

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• SOURCE: Boston Review
  1/27/2021
  

  The Logic of Eugenics Still Haunts Virginia

  Ellen Wayland-Smith reviews Elizabeth Catte's book Pure America: Eugenics and the Making of Modern Virginia. 

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• SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
  10/26/2020
  

  UC Berkeley is Disavowing its Eugenic Research Fund after Bioethicist and Other Faculty Call it Out

  “Regardless of what was done with the money, it was just wrong for us to take it in the first place. It’s antithetical to everything that the school stands for.”

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• SOURCE: ABC11 (NC)
  7/23/2020
  

  North Carolina Committed Genocide Against Black People from 1958-1968, Duke Researchers Say

  "When you use the term genocide, it really brings home the fact that this isn't just over reproductive behavior, it's really about eliminating a group of people," said a co-author of the study.

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  7/21/2020
  

  Planned Parenthood To Remove Margaret Sanger’s Name From N.Y. Clinic Over Eugenics Support

  “The problem with Sanger was she was so single minded that she was willing to align herself with anybody,” Margaret Sanger Papers Project founder Esther Katz said. “These are problematic positions. She did speak to the Klan. But I think obliterating her...doesn’t allow us to discuss this in any way or debate it.”

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• SOURCE: Activist History
  7/2/2020
  

  Suspect Science: Today’s Anglo-American Eugenics

  by Alexandra Fair

  Time and time again, the Pioneer Fund subsidized research that advanced eugenic theories about racial difference and actively undermined racial equality.

• 
• SOURCE: The New Yorker
  6/15/2020
  

  Revisiting Mengele’s Malignant “Race Science”

  New histories suggest that the notorious Nazi was less a twisted figure than a true believer in a long-standing movement to use science to prove racial superiority.