I write about the history of genetics. Buffalo racially-motivated massacre refocuses attention on the dark side of the 100-year old eugenics movement…

Whenever I work on a new edition of my human genetics textbook and reach the section on eugenics, which flourished in the United States in the 20th century well into the 1930s, Im relieved that its history. But in the summer of 2017, as I wrapped up the 12th edition, the eugenics coverage took on a frightening new reality with the attack in Charlottesville, where white supremacists bellowed Jews will not replace us! A president noted at the time, there are very fine people on both sides.

Its now 2022. Ive just finished revamping the section in my textbook on eugenics for the 14th edition. And once again, eugenics is in the headlines, with the attack on Black shoppers at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York.

As another president once said, here we go again.

The ever-present white nationalism/supremacy echoes the century-old idea that a self-appointed group that perceives itself as superior can improve a human population through selective breeding or actions taken against individuals judged to be inferior. Theodore Lothrop Stoddard, an historian but also a eugenicist and Klansman, laid out his ideas in the 1920 book The Threat Against White World Supremacy: The Rising Tide of Color. Tack onto that todays fear of white replacement.

Its easy to see why white nationalism and white supremacy are used interchangeably.Merriam-Webster defines a white nationalist as one of a group of militant whites who espouse white supremacy and advocate enforced racial segregation. A white supremacist is a person who believes that the white race is inherently superior to other races and that white people should have control over people of other races.

So, the supremacists take the scope farther, but Ill use the terms synonymously. Its all hate.

Sir Francis Galtoncoined the term eugenics, meaning good in birth, in 1883. He defined it as the science of improvement of the human race germplasm through better breeding. In 1930, Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher, another pale Brit, embellished Galtons ideas by suggesting that governments reward high-income families when they have children, to encourage the passing on of the prized genes.

American botanist Luther Burbank entered the discussion in 1906 with his book The Training of the Human Plant. Burbank appreciated the value of diversity at the start of a eugenics program, even acknowledging the importance of immigration to seed that diversity. But he confuses populations, races, and species:

I have constantly been impressed with the similarity between the organization and development of plant and human life. I have come to find in the crossing of species and in selection, wisely directed, a great and powerful instrument for the transformation of the vegetable kingdom along lines that lead constantly upward. The crossing of species is to me paramount. Upon it, wisely directed and accompanied by a rigid selection of the best and as rigid an exclusion of the poorest, rests the hope of all progress. The mere crossing of species, unaccompanied by selection, wise supervision, intelligent care, and the utmost patience, is not likely to result in marked good, and may result in vast harm. let me lay emphasis on the opportunity now presented in the United States for observing and, if we are wise, aiding in what I think it fair to say is the grandest opportunity ever presented of developing the finest race the world has ever known out of the vast mingling of races brought here by immigration.

The eugenic movement in the US was officially legitimized in 1910 when Charles Davenport established the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island. His team compiled data from all manner of institutions that warehoused the feebleminded, criminal, promiscuous, or socially dependent. He attributed their diagnoses to single genes, well before anyone knew what a gene even was.

Interest in eugenics persisted. One notorious case took place, ironically, in Charlottesville, 95 years ago. Seventeen-year-old Carrie Buck was tried for having a mother who lived in an asylum for the feebleminded and for having a similarly impaired daughter following rape. Carrie was herself deemed feebleminded, despite being a B student. Her case led Sir Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. to famously rule, three generations of imbeciles are enough. Carrie became the first person sterilized to prevent future births of socially inadequate offspring.

And then came the Nazis, with their own version of controlled breeding that took negative as well as positive turns.

The Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, aka the Sterilization law, established Genetic Health Courts in 1933 to prevent people with any of several vague conditions, only a few of which are actually inherited, from having children. Two years later, the Lebensborn program placed the offspring of single women impregnated by the SS into Aryan households, and did the same for blond, blue-eyed orphans.

But the Nazis were picky. Acceptable whites came from Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. Unacceptable were those from Jewish, ethnic Pole, Slavic, or Roma ancestry. Nor were people of African ancestry included among the cherished, but they were not exterminated en masse.

The underlying assumption of the Nazis: Aryan genetic material is the best. The mechanism of perpetuating it: selective breeding. The Nazi science focused on selection, ignoring mutation, which happens in any DNA. Nazi thinking also steadfastly ignored the upped odds of recessive disease that come with endogamy marrying within a group.

The state of our knowledge of genetics today makes white supremacist ideology even more offensive than early eugenic thinking. I learned a lot five years ago when I read a white supremacist manifesto and published an article about it a day before it disappeared from the Internet. So, the rest of this post is mostly reprinted from August 2017.

In mid-August 2017, in the wake of the tragic rally in Charlottesville, STAT News and other high-profile media reported on a meeting in Montreal where two sociologists described reactions of white supremacists to genetic ancestry testing results that indicated that they werent as pure as theyd thought. I awaited the full report, the media coverage being short on detail.

I spent the final weekend that August reading the tome from Aaron Panofsky and Joan Donovan, sociologists from UCLA. That sucked me into Stormfront, the online community source for their many intriguing quotes.

The Southern Poverty Law Center credits Stormfront with being the first major hate site on the Internet. The organization was the brainchild of former Alabama Klan boss and long-time white supremacist Don Black in 1995.

My analysis, Memo To White Nationalists From A Geneticist: Why White Purity Is A Terrible Idea, was published online at Science Trends. It is now plagiarized here. I pulled the most alarming quotes from the Stormfronters, analyzed when they were accurate and not, pointed out the flaws and assumptions of DNA ancestry testing and interpretation, and reviewed the genetics behind skin color.

The scientific sophistication of some of the posts impressed as well as deeply disturbed me, and so I planned to write another article, using a different set of Stormfront remarks. A few days later, I clicked on Stormfront to find some new quotes.

Denied!

On Wikipedia I discovered:

Stormfront was a white nationalist, white supremacist and neo-Nazi Internet forum In August 2017, Stormfronts registrar seized its domain name due to complaints that it promoted hatred and that some of its members were linked to murder.

And so Stormfront vanished on August 29, 2017.

My Memo to White Nationalists From a Geneticist appeared August 28, 2017.

Coincidence? Of course it was. But at the time Id hoped that maybe my article helped in some small way to bury Stormfront, the meeting ground of hate.

Alas, Stormfront returned about a month later. Wikipediaattributes the return to Internet service provides Tucows, Network Solutions, and Cloudflare.

I hope that I never have to update this post again.

Ricki Lewis, PH.D is a writer for PLOS and author of the book The Forever Fix: Gene Therapy and the Boy Who Saved It. You can check out Rickiswebsiteand follow Ricki on Twitter@rickilewis

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I write about the history of genetics. Buffalo racially-motivated massacre refocuses attention on the dark side of the 100-year old eugenics movement...