Category Archives: Eugenics

For many decades, the conservative movement was a fusion of three main constituencies: libertarians, social conservatives, and Cold Warriors. The political culmination of this fusion was President Ronald Reagan, who successfully represented this old coalition by winning the Cold War, reviving the American economy, and preserving Americans constitutional freedoms. As Nathanael Blake remarks in his defense of the Old Right, it had its failures, but it also conserved quite a lot.

However, as younger generations of Americans come of age and men like Donald Trump are elected to the presidency, an update to the old fusionism is definitely in order. Gone are the days of confronting the Soviet Union, preaching free markets and globalism, and taking a laissez-faire attitude toward culture wars. Now, conservatives must face the challenges of a rising China, a corporatist oligarchy hollowing out the American economy, and ubiquitous woke propaganda.

So, what is this new fusionism? This was the question taken up by conservative writers Helen Andrews and Michael Brendan Dougherty at a recent event that I attended in Dallas.

Although the two writers come from opposing perspectivesAndrews is the editor at The American Conservative, while Dougherty is an editor at National Reviewthere was much more agreement than one might expect. As with the old fusionism, the new fusionism will be defined by its circumstance not really by its ideologues. Like everyone else, they must adapt or die.

This is especially true for the libertarian wing of the conservative movement that, as Andrews mentioned, proved weak and hypocritical in the face of the totalitarian Covid regime of the last two years. Rather than object and push back against the abundant violations of peoples civil rights, many of their writers joined in the derision and mockery of traditionalists who questioned what was clearly unscientific hysteria. To his credit, Dougherty conceded as much and even mentioned a similar instance in the eugenics debate of the early 20th century.

Furthermore, libertarian conservatives were directly complicit in empowering the Chinese Communist Party for decades, largely at the cost of hollowing out middle America. The prevailing view was that more economic opportunity and foreign investment in China would liberalize the country. In reality, it has mainly enriched a totalitarian state that regularly violates their peoples human rights, sponsors evil dictatorships like that of North Korea, poses serious threats to global security in general, and likely exported Covid along with its many other products.

Once again, Dougherty acknowledged this problem, though in his defense, few conservatives, libertarian or otherwise, believed China would grow in the manner that it did. The same can be said for Big Tech monopolies dominating public discourse in which 90s-style liberal entrepreneurs grew massive companies and began imposing what they thought were open platforms bringing people together.

Beyond these points, curiously little was mentioned about conservatives who favor foreign intervention and maintaining Americas role as the worlds policea group that has often been called the neoconservatives. This was probably because the neocons have dwindled to a vanishingly small minority that used up all their political capital in the War on Terror a decade earlier. They are no longer really conservative, and neither the libertarian or traditionalists would support their agenda in any meaningful way.

Although the speakers never really came to a clear definition of the new fusionism (which, to be fair, is difficult to do in a one-hour dialogue), they laid the groundwork for one, which Ill venture to make. Factoring in the ongoing changes in politics and the world in general, I believe the new fusionism will be a coalition of traditional populists and classical liberals.

At first, these two sides may look irreconcilable, with each deriding the other as hopelessly out of touch and hypocritical, but these differences are mostly superficial. The classical liberal emphasis on freedom and limited government complements the traditional populist focus on family, faith, and fairness. In a recent discussion on this topic at The Spectator, Stephanie Slade observes of old fusionist Frank Meyer: he said thatbothJudeo-Christian virtue and freedom from coercion (whether carried out by a bandit or by an agent of the state) are goods to be cherished and protected.

In other words, the new conservative fusionism, like the old, looks more like the friendly dialogue between Helen Andrews and Michael Brendan Dougherty and less like the heated debate between David French and Sohrab Ahmari. It is made between two people of good faith who want to see all Americans not only enjoy better lives but enjoy them together as a community.

Already, most conservative publications reflect these two sides (including The American Conservative and National Review), acknowledging that most conservative readers and voters are somewhere in the middle. What they agree on is that they are tired of the old fusionist establishment and desire arguments and leadership that is more effective at fighting the Left. This means learning from past fusionists, like William F. Buckley and Ronald Reagan, but finally letting them go and forging a new conservative movement for a new generation.

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What Does Being Conservative Actually Mean These Days? - Crisis Magazine

Chloe Cooper Jones

Andrew Grossardt Chlo Cooper Jones

"I am in a bar in Brooklyn listening as two men, my friends, discuss whether or not my life is worth living."

This is how Chlo Cooper Jones begins her memoir Easy Beauty, remembering a painful, but pivotal moment that occurred in 2017.

One of the men, whom she names Colin in the book, was an ethical philosopher she met in her doctoral program. As they sipped on their drinks, he revisited a longstanding eugenics argument when he told her that, in an ideal world, a person with her type of disability should have been aborted before birth.

The men had been sharing their own struggles with depression and Cooper Jones, who was born with a rare congenital condition called sacral agenesis, began to feel a moment of connection. That moment shattered quickly, she says.

"I'm leaning forward, both literally and figuratively, toward these men hoping we're going to have this, for me, very unique moment of kinship," Cooper Jones, 38, tells PEOPLE, "which turns into Colin saying, 'Well, I don't want to live and if I had a body like yours I definitely wouldn't. That'd be even worse. I'd just kill myself.'

"I think it's a painful moment because it reminds me how isolated the disability experience can be," she continues. "And how even in these moments of possible connection, I'm still seen by certain people as something other, something slightly less human even."

Easy Beauty cover

Avid Reader Press

Though Colin's comments were biting in their directness, Cooper Jones explains, "there are no villains in the book." In fact, she even had a "sort of a respect" for Colin, who was directly stating a viewpoint she encounters often, one that has seeped into the undercurrents on which society flows.

Cooper Jones, whose walk and stature is impacted by her condition, has had people cheer her on as she walks up the subway steps, a celebratory gesture whose effect is instead "condescending," she explains. The philosophy professor has been mocked and called mean names throughout her life, even by one of her students. And, just recently, she went to an event to promote her book where a woman said "weird" and "pretty harmful" comments to her, Cooper Jones says.

Story continues

Easy Beauty is, in part, an exploration and response to such interactions. The book follows Cooper Jones as she seeks a language to communicate her experience as a person with a disability and claim space for herself a journey she decided to embark on after that philosophical exchange (on the men's part, that is). As the men talked, she withdrew into herself.

"I had this sort of realization as they're speaking about whether or not my life was worth living," says Cooper Jones. "[I realized] that I didn't really possess a language to speak to them and to have a debate with them. It was largely because I had spent my life not talking about disability and not learning very much about disability, not understanding the ADA [Americans with Disabilities Act]."

Cooper Jones explains that she had a habit of separating herself from that part of her identity.

"I have a very physical, immediately recognizable disability, so it's not as if I can pass as anything other than disabled," says Cooper Jones. "But it always felt like a gate or a wall between myself and other people. So, I used to think that the way to lower that gate was to pretend that it just wasn't there, that my body wasn't there. ... I was sort of in this complicated act of self-erasure."

Chloe Cooper Jones and her son Wolf

Chlo Cooper Jones The author with her son Wolfgang

Cooper Jones realized she needed to reassess how she approached such interactions. Her memoir which started off as introspective journal entries is not only for herself, but for her 10-year-old son Wolfgang, whom she shares with husband Andrew Grossardt, a 34-year-old content creator.

"I thought, 'Okay, I've got to figure out how to live a life worthy of him,' " she explains. "And that's going to require me coming to some peace with this discomfort. And that required a lot of change."

The author hopes society will also be able to adapt how it views people with disabilities. Cooper Jones explains that we're all closer to disability than we think, either as life events happen or as we age. While people's fear of experiencing disability is reasonable, Cooper Jones explains that "those fears can turn into a rejection or even a disgust of the concept of disability or seeing disability as just part of the human spectrum." She says that type of fear "is something worth looking at and having maybe a healthier relationship to."

"Not just because I hope that that means that you'll treat me differently," Cooper Jones continues. "But because you might be able to have a capacity of grace for yourself when inevitably you have situations when your mental and physical body shift."

The multiple depths that Cooper Jones plumbs in Easy Beauty results in a memoir that can't easily be classified. The same can be said for the book's author. Cooper Jones is a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a philosophy professor and a writer, who delves into her journey as a daughter, mother, wife and her search for a new way of seeing the world.

In other words, her story is about the complexity of the human experience and the questions of identity and belonging that plague us all.

"I wanted to write a book I was searching for: a person, who at the very beginning, sees a problem in themselves and also sees a problem in the world and wonders how that could change," she says. "I wanted to be as true and honest and unfiltered and vulnerable as possible. I wanted that help myself. I wanted to be guided in that way."

From the time she was born, Cooper Jones has faced a unique set of challenges. She has a pain disorder that's tied to her disability, meaning that most regular activities cause her discomfort or pain throughout the day. To navigate the discomfort, Cooper Jones does pain management exercises, including going to the "neutral room", or a white room in her mind where she counts to eight on repeat to get through activities that cause pain.

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She first learned of the technique from her pediatrician when she was a little girl, she explains. "I was telling him how I would get really anxious when my mom and I would go to the grocery store and I would have to walk long distances," says Cooper Jones, "My pain would sort of rise as I was worried about standing in line at grocery aisles."

The doctor explained how the "neutral room" worked and she's used the technique ever since. "He would say, 'You're not in pain for a long time. You're not in pain forever,' " Cooper Jones recalls. "'You're only dealing with eight seconds, and you can survive that.'"

While growing up, doctors also told her other things, some of which turned out to be untrue. As she writes in Easy Beauty, Cooper Jones was told often that her body was "inhospitable" to a baby because of her condition. Both she and her doctors believed that she was incapable of getting pregnant.

"I had never conceptualized myself as a mother," she says. "Just as I don't conceptualize myself as an airplane. It's not a narrative that I thought about."

Cooper Jones was five and a half months pregnant when she realized her doctors were wrong about her body's capabilities. She'd initially dismissed the pregnancy symptoms as part of her daily life with sacral agenesis.

It was so inconceivable to Cooper Jones that she could be pregnant that she dismissed her expanding stomach as a tumor.

"I was like, 'Oh, there's a tumor that's in my body that's fluttering around or something. That's weird. I'm probably dying,' " recalls Cooper Jones. "But, no, it was Wolfgang."

The knowledge of her pregnancy was terrifying, she says. "The real traumatic part was suddenly having this child, who was extremely imminent, and not having any relationship to the future that that would then entail," she says. "I felt like I was thrown into somebody else's life all of a sudden."

After she and her then-boyfriend Grossardt got over the surprise, she found that there was a benefit to not having expectations of motherhood. "It was absolute chaos, but there is a bit of freedom in chaos to kind of develop a new way," she explains. Her love for her son is equally complex.

"My experience of love is joy and happiness and gratitude and fear and obligation and frustration and anger and imposter syndrome all these things are encompassed in my love for Wolf," she says. "And those things actually make that love, for me at least, weightier and more profound."

Grossardt was by her side through all of it. Cooper Jones explains that her husband is the first partner she's ever been with who has "forced" her into her own body because his love language is physical touch and "acts of daily care." Before she met him, Cooper Jones says she thought men could only be attracted to her for her mind.

"The first time he comes up behind me and rubs my shoulders, my first reaction is to tense up and to withdraw," says Cooper Jones. "Because I'm going, 'I don't want you to think about my body. I don't want you to pay attention to my body. My body will drive you away.' "

But that was a falsehood, she says.

"He loves my body and he loves being affectionate in that way," she explains. "So, I in order to have that loving communication had to sink down into my body and relax. And allow [my body] to feel the sensation of love and touch and care. That was very, very hard for me."

Cooper Jones says her husband, whom she loves dearly, has been laying the groundwork for years so she that she can fully be in her body and explore what that means in Easy Beauty.

Grossardt supported her as she traveled across the world from California to a Beyonc concert in Milan and the Killing Fields of Phnom Penh in Cambodia. Cooper Jones recounts these travels in her book, including what she describes as one of the most "beautiful" and "painful" moments of her life.

She was covering The Sundance Film Festival in Utah for a magazine when she met Game of Thrones actor Peter Dinklage at a party hosted in his honor.

Cooper Jones says that others in attendance "immediately assumed that we were there together, that I was somehow related to him." Dinklage, who was born with a form of dwarfism called achondroplasia, is also short of stature.

Peter Dinklage

Karwai Tang/WireImage Peter Dinklage

"There were several people who kept asking me questions that they wanted to ask him, thinking that I could be sort of a dwarf spokesperson for him," says Cooper Jones. "Which I can't because he is international celebrity Peter Dinklage, and I'm Chlo from Brooklyn."

At one point, she and Dinklage had a "moment of kinship," she says.

"We spoke and there was a certain understanding that passed between us," she explains. "It was sort of sparked by the fact that a bartender had both looked over our heads and not seen us. And people were kind of interacting with us in this very similar way. ... I just felt very seen by him."

But, after she left the party, Cooper Jones struggled with the fact that she was leaving behind a connection where her experience was completely understood, no "acts of translation" required.

"I leave that moment of very, very intense connection, and then I come back to a room full of my best friends and my husband the people who inarguably know me the best and love me the most," she says. "And I have to remember that there is so much of my life that I can't share with them and that they can't understand."

While that knowledge "hurts deeply," it also reminds Cooper Jones that "we're all always constantly in this act of translation with each other." She says that making the choice to love someone and translate your lived experience with them is "an incredible human act."

Cooper Jones adds, "It's the act of generosity and connection that's so magical."

Easy Beauty is available for sale now.

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Author Chlo Cooper Jones, Who Has a Visible Disability, On Deciding to Claim Space For Herself and Her Son - Yahoo Entertainment

Wallace Kuralt (left), the head of the Mecklenburg County welfare program in North Carolina, speaks to the Welfare Board in 1962. The county sterilized 485 people about three times more than any other in the state. More than 7,000 people were sterilized in North Carolina. Courtesy Charlotte Observer hide caption

North Carolina is trying to make amends for an ugly chapter in its history during which more than 7,000 people were sterilized many against their will. At least half of the states had eugenics laws, but only a handful kept their forced sterilization programs active after World War II.

Within North Carolina, one county sterilized three times more people than any other Mecklenburg, where Charlotte is the county seat. There, 485 people lost their ability to reproduce by order of the North Carolina Eugenics Board.

Exactly how Mecklenburg came to sterilize more than any other county has to do with the way the state referred people for sterilizations. Other states left the referral process to doctors working in prisons and mental hospitals, but only North Carolina gave that power to social workers.

And the head of Mecklenburg's welfare program believed referring women for sterilization was a good option for those who had no other means of birth control at the time. But that initiative was set in the ugly context of eugenics campaigns, and leaves open questions as to whether women really wished to be sterilized.

Social Workers As Middlemen

We don't know the names of the sterilized victims, or why the Eugenics Board sent them to the cold steel of a doctor's table. The board's records are closed to the public.

But what we do know is that the five bureaucrats who were on the board in the 1950s the peak period for eugenics in North Carolina didn't drive around the state plucking people off the street for sterilization. They had middlemen doing the leg work, picking candidates and summarizing their lives into terse paragraphs with just enough unsavory detail to make a case.

One girl sterilized by the board is described in her file as "often away from home" and "constantly talks about boyfriends." She was 12.

The middlemen volunteering these girls and women for sterilization were typically social workers, making North Carolina stand out in the history of eugenics laws.

Many have long since passed away, but not all. I found former social worker Merlene Wall in her Charlotte condo. She's 80, and her memory is going but she's willing to talk.

"It was an interesting time. We stayed busy, we really did," Wall says.

The Eugenics Movement Message

Mecklenburg County was booming then. The typical welfare recipient was a single woman with four or five kids. Politicians and public officials worried that these unwed mothers and their children would overwhelm the system.

The North Carolina Eugenics Board offered them a solution. Since the 1930s, it had sterilized people in mental hospitals and schools for troubled youth. In the '50s, the focus shifted to women on welfare, and on social workers like Wall.

"I keep thinking back about one case, and there were retarded daughters and my gosh ... what a time and what a mess," she says. "And how do you, how do you protect the children that these two females had?"

Wall brings up this one story over and over; I get the impression it was one of the few sterilization cases she was personally involved with. Through the fog of failing memory, it still haunts her.

"But I don't drive myself crazy with it anymore, because I drove myself crazy when I was working [on it]," she says. "It was it was a hard thing to do. I don't know what the answer is. What do you do? You do what you can, and you do the best that you can. And it's not just protecting the children, you got to protect that mother, too."

A lot of people were wrestling with this question back then. Some powerful elites, including heirs to Procter & Gamble, Hanes Hosiery and R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, formed a group called the Human Betterment League. They published glossy brochures that said things like this:

North Carolina offers its citizens protection in the form of selective sterilization.

And:

The job of parenthood is too much to expect of feebleminded men and women.

"Morons," the league called them. The Human Betterment League made social workers and doctors and public officials feel like humanitarian heroes for sterilizing people. The message spread to many states after World War II, but Mecklenburg County's eugenics effort had something even more.

Read more from the files of North Carolina's Eugenics Board and the cases instituted by Wallace Kuralt, courtesy of Rutgers University history professor Johanna Schoen.

Sterilization As Birth Control

There's a common thread in the case files from the summer of 1955: Many of them note that the sterilization proceedings were instituted by a man named Wallace H. Kuralt. He was the head of the Mecklenburg County public welfare program from 1945 until 1972; the name may sound familiar because his son Charles was a famous journalist for CBS.

Kuralt did not believe women should be sterilized against their will. He was a champion for reproductive rights who wanted to help women prevent pregnancy when they couldn't afford the children they already had.

But this was the '50s: Abortion was illegal, and the birth control pill wasn't available. Existing methods for women were complicated or unreliable. Having your tubes tied, on the other hand, was very reliable.

Kuralt knew his welfare clients couldn't afford to pay a doctor for sterilization, but if he referred them to the Eugenics Board, the government would pay.

Consider this case Kuralt initiated:

Married female, age 38. Two children. Currently pregnant. She wandered out into the woods to have her last child. They sleep on corn shucks and cotton piled in the corner. This couple came to the Welfare Department to request sterilization for the woman.

A Question Of Consent

Such requests did happen, though we'll never know if that woman truly wanted sterilization. Some social workers coerced consent out of women by threatening to withhold welfare benefits.

"Kuralt claimed that nobody in Mecklenburg County ever got sterilized against their will," says Rutgers researcher Johanna Schoen, who spoke to Kuralt in the early 1990s a few years before he died.

Schoen says she doesn't know whether Kuralt read all the petitions.

"In the larger scheme of things, of running the Department of Public Welfare in Mecklenburg County, reading the petitions for eugenic sterilizations probably was a relatively small thing," she says.

It was certainly not small to the hundreds of people forced into sterilization by those petitions, however. Kuralt may have had noble intentions, but not all of his social workers did and they were the ones in the field. Plus, those Human Betterment League brochures were everywhere.

In 1960, Kuralt didn't need the Eugenics Board anymore after the pill came on the scene. He opened a family planning clinic and gave out free birth control pills; sterilization referrals from Mecklenburg County dropped off dramatically.

Finally, in 1974, the Eugenics Board was quietly disbanded. And 37 years later, state officials have decided to try to compensate some 3,000 or so victims thought to be still alive. The question they're struggling with: How much money could possibly make things right?

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A Brutal Chapter In North Carolina's Eugenics Past : NPR

The second season of Star Trek: Picard features Jean-Luc Picard and his team traveling back in time from an alternate future to 2024 Los Angeles. The latest episode, Watcher, has spawned a lot of questions about how the show is handling the history of Treks past, and co-showrunner Terry Matalas is doing his best to try to guide fans along. Obviously SPOILERS ahead if you havent been keeping up with the season.

In Watcher, Jean-Luc Picard visited a younger Guinan in 2024. He revealed to her that they would become close friends in the future, but Guinan did not appear to recognize Picard and at no time did either one mention meeting before. This has many fans wondering about the two-part Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Times Arrow, when Picard and other members of the USS Enterprise-D crew went back in time and encountered an even younger version of Guinan in 1893 San Francisco.

Picard with Guinan, Riker, Dr. Crusher, and Geordi in 1893

In the second part of that episode, Picard revealed everything about who he was to Guinan. The reason their 1893 meeting wasnt mentioned in Watcher is because those events didnt happen due to the change in the timeline. Terry Matalas explained to Inverse that This Guinan wouldnt remember Picard because in this alternate timeline, the TNG episode Times Arrow never happened.

Matalas has confirmed with TrekMovie that the way they are treating time travel is that even though they arrived before Qs divergence in time, they are not in the Prime timeline; they are still in the altered Confederation timeline. This logic flows to other future instances of time travel, like Sisko going back to 2024 San Francisco (DS9 Past Tense) and Kirk going back in time to save the whales (Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home). Matalas explained this in our article about bringing back the Punk from Voyage Home, saying Star Trek IVwouldnt have happened in this alternate timeline.

Star Trek has dealt with time travel in a number of different ways, but according to Matalas, they are following the same rules when changes in the past rewrite the timeline, like in City on the Edge of Forever, or Star Trek: First Contact. The unique situation here is that we have a time traveler encountering someone who he has encountered before in a previous instance of time travel. So even though Picard himself can remember the events of Times Arrow, he knows that this timelines General Picard of the CSS World Razer never went back in time to meet Guinan.

Picard and Guinan meet for the first time, in this timeline.

One pivotal time in Star Trek history is the Eugenics Wars, which gave rise to the Augments and the franchises most famous villain, Khan Noonien Singh. Khan was first encountered in the Star Trek season one episode Space Seed, where he was discovered in a sleeper ship launched in the late 20th century. At the time it was said Khan was exiled after he ruled one-quarter of the Earth from 1992 to 1996.

Khan wakes up his followers on SS Botany bay

Of course, the 1990s came and went and there were no Eugenics Wars and no group of genetically enhanced supermen and superwomen vying for power over the globe. Nor was there the launch of the SS Botany Bay, or even the technology to launch a ship capable of putting people into extended hibernation for an interstellar voyage. This does create a bit of a conundrum of how one should treat this bit of history, and even in the alternate timeline, there is no clear reason why any future instances of time travel would have changed the events of the 1990s in such a profound way.

When asked this question on Twitter this weekend, Matalas explained that how to treat the Eugenics Wars was a big debate, but it was decided to sort of punt on the issue, explaining that maybe records became less clear after World War III (which itself is supposed to kick in the early 21st century). Matalas co-showrunner Akiva Goldsman also chimed in to back up the endless part of this writers room discussion.

Of course, there are some details to deal with, like howthe 1982 film Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan reinforced the 1990s timeline, but Matalas got practical, explaining that no one could have anticipated the franchise outliving these future dates.

There were a series of (non-canon) novels by Greg Cox that reimagined the 1990s where the Eugenics Wars were happening behind the scenes, but it appears thePicardteam decided its best to just fudge with the numbers a bit so the Eugenics Wars didnt happen in the 1990s, so they dont need to be addressed in the 2024 seen on the show.

No Eugenics Wars for this 2024

And there is a possible way out of this canon conundrum, as suggested by Prodigy executive producer Aaron Waltke: Perhaps the exact timing of the Eugenics Wars was changed during the Temporal Cold War from Star Trek: Enterprise.

Keep up with all theStar Trek: Picardnews and analysis.

Excerpt from:

Showrunner Explains How 'Star Trek: Picard' Is Handling Time Travel And The Eugenics Wars - TrekMovie

These are not idle questions for Newton. She writes: I came into being through a kind of homegrown eugenics project. My parents married not for love but because they believed they would have smart children together. Her father was both an Ivy League graduate and a white supremacist who extolled the virtue of slavery and covered the brown faces in the child Mauds books with nail polish because birds of a feather flock together. (She and her father have been estranged for years.)

Where Newtons father used to brag about his ancestors, her mother told Southern gothic horror stories from her lineage, including tales of those who died in mental institutions, one who married 11 women, and the one who had murdered their best friend. Newton tells the truths she found about these family lines, including her work uncovering documents that proved her familys history of holding slaves or stealing land from Native Americans.

While Newton could have settled for comparing the stories she heard as a child with what she found through genealogical research to reveal a singular family portrait, she presents instead a rich and powerful understanding of the ways that linking ourselves to our family tree provides a sense of connection that helps us feel grounded. She does this by weaving together strands of research on epigenetics, trauma studies, funerary practices, and spiritual connections while also asking tough questions about how to atone for the histories we inherit.

Perhaps the epigenetics debate with which people are most familiar is whether the collective trauma of the Holocaust has been passed down through genetics to descendants. Newton points to the early nature of the research and whether it can be replicated, and asks whether white supremacy itself is transmissible. She quotes trauma specialist Resmaa Menakem who argues that most Americans regardless of our background or skin color, carry trauma in our bodies around the myth of race and that dealing with that inherited trauma is the only way to excise racism.

In recalling the ways that the myths of white supremacy she grew up with influenced her life in Miami, inspiring her to search for ancestors, Newton also reveals her fear of whom she might find. She also longed for the counterweight of other ancestors whose lives might illuminate struggles with mental health or against the prevailing attitudes of their times.

The memoir parts of Newtons book read like a suspense novel, and part of the pleasure of the book is watching Newton play detective. Im wary of giving away too much of what she finds. Suffice it to say that legendary characters often had different motivations than those told in family lore. She also found those whose lives had been excised from family stories because of battles with mental illness or bad moral choices. Newton gives them a place within the family pantheon by telling their stories.

She also cites writers such as Dani Shapiro, Emily Raboteau, Sarah Smarsh, Jennifer Teege, A.M. Homes, Alexander Chee, and others who have wrestled what it means to inherit stories and what obligations come with them. What do we owe and own to/from those who came before?

Family trees in Europe were established as a means of proving connection to inherited power or property. Access to power was tied to the purity of the line. Newton doesnt shy away from the troubling connection between family trees and eugenics. She was the product of her fathers belief in eugenic superiority, and these notions of purity tie directly into myths of racial supremacy and continue to fuel the fascist faction of American politics. The legacy of eugenics cannot be dismissed.

Newton points out the connections between the treatment of the recently dead and fascination with the ancestral dead. For some, especially those whose pasts have been erased by the trauma of slavery or genocide, the connection to ancestry may offer a grounded sense of identity. For others, its a way of acknowledging fears of our own inevitable deaths and finding succor in notions of continuity. But American attitudes toward death illustrate an anxiety about mortality that causes many to separate themselves from hands-on interaction with the corpse. Newton participates in some of these rituals and finds emotional and transformational parts that, while difficult, help her move toward the reckoning and reconciliation for which her work aims.

When Newton was a child, her mother believed in the literal presence of demons and possession. She said everyone was born with demons because our ancestors sins created generational curses that attached to a family line for seven generations. Our own sins also brought on demons that would be passed down. In this brilliant mix of personal memoir and cultural observation, Newton shakes her family tree in search of those demons. What she finds is a dense wood in which the truth of her familys fairy tales lay hidden.

Lorraine Berry is a writer and reviewer from Oregon. She tweets @BerryFLW.

Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation

Maud Newton

Random House, 400 pages, $28.99

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Our tangled family trees in Maud Newtons Ancestor Trouble - The Boston Globe

The problem of racism has roots throughout history and is sadly still alive in Western culture and politics, writes Bilal Cleland.

THERE IS NO DOUBT that the Enlightenment led to mass participatory democracy, freedom of expression, religious toleration and growing emphasis upon human rights.

There was, however, a dark side, that of scientific racism and eugenics, promulgated with sincere respect for the betterment of a version of mankind.

Charles Darwin, the darling of the enlightened elite, horrified the church.

What it was horrified about, however, was the notion of evolution, not that often-ignored second part of the title of his work: On the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.

His cousin, Francis Galton, became convinced that natural selection did not work quite so effectively with humans as with the animal kingdom, so it needed a helping hand through the science of eugenics.

This fruit of the Enlightenment gained support for decades.

Galton in Hereditary Genius (1869) wrote on The Comparative Worth of Different Races:

...we would expect, as a corollary of the evolution theory, that human families would differ from one another in hereditary ability.

The conclusion is reached that the average standard of the negro race is two grades below our own; that the Australian native is at least one grade below the African; that the Lowland Scot and the English North-Country man is decidedly a fraction of a grade superior of the ordinary English.

This notion of the hierarchy of races has a long life.

In 1935, Non-Britishers in Australia: Influence on Population and Progress had a foreword by the leading history scholar of the time, Ernest Scott:

The ideological basis of the modern emphasis upon race is due largely to the writings of the French Count Gobineau. That philosopher contended: The history of mankind proves that the destinies of people are governed by a racial law. Neither irreligion, no immorality, no luxurious living, nor weakness of government causes the decadence of civilisations. If a nation goes down, the reason is that its blood, the race itself is deteriorating.

In 2022, our Prime Minister, speaking outside St Andrews Ukrainian Church promised to allocate additional places to Australias current humanitarian refugee intake, to accommodate those fleeing the unfolding war in Ukraine.

No such offer was made to the 700,000 displaced Afghans.

We all saw how African residents fleeing Ukraine were treated by Christian Poland.

It has been reported of Poland:

Its government... has warmly welcomed traumatised Ukrainians, just months after turning away Afghans.

However, there are other reasons why there has been such a difference between attitudes in the Western media towards Ukrainians and the brown-skinned refugees.

Sonali Kolhatkar, television and radio producer on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations, writes:

Welcoming those people fleeing wars that the West has fomented would be an admission of Western culpability. Not only do Ukrainian refugees offer palatable infusions of whiteness into European nations, but they also enable governments to express self-righteous outrage at Russias imperialist ambitions and violent militarism.

Alongside this, we must place the dominant attitude of so many compatriots towards our First Nations people.

The black armband view of history decried by the White conservatives has just been illustrated by the outstanding work of the team at the University of Newcastles Centre for the 21st Century Humanities, itself a fruit of the positive side of the Enlightenment.

It is becoming increasingly hard for the deniers of reality to smooth over this history.

Bilal Cleland is a retired secondary teacher and was Secretary of the Islamic Council of Victoria, Chairman of the Muslim Welfare Board Victoria and Secretary of the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils. You can follow Bilal on Twitter @BilalCleland.

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Sickness of racism still alive in Western culture - Independent Australia

This is an excerpt from Quibbles & Bits, the BuzzFeed News copy desks newsletter. Sign up below to nerd out about language and style with us once a month!

For BuzzFeed News Body Week, the copy desk is looking at the language we use when we write about bodies, particularly fat bodies. Its always been at the core of our style guide to avoid any sort of body-shaming, and were always learning when it comes to what words people want to use to talk about their bodies when its relevant to talk about them at all.

As always, we avoid euphemistic language. Unless someone describes themself as chubby or full-figured, were never going to refer to them as such. Theres nothing wrong with fat. The word itself is just a descriptor, but a society that praises and elevates thinness has tried to make fat so negative that people opt for terms they believe are based in medicine, like overweight or obese. But they fail to take a step further and question whats really behind those words and what stigmas they perpetuate.

People say obese and overweight under the guise that they are discussing someones health rather than their appearance, but this vocabulary insidiously upholds anti-fat bias. Overweight implies that there is some objective standard weight by which we can assess the health of every body. And obese comes from the Latin obesus, which means having eaten oneself fat, a definition that activist and writer Aubrey Gordon describes as inherently blaming fat people for their bodies in her book What We Dont Talk About When We Talk About Fat.

Obesity is a category people fall into based on their body mass index (BMI), a metric that has come up frequently in the last two years of the pandemic; the CDC claimed that it indicates a higher risk for severe COVID-19, and ones BMI measurement qualified some to get the vaccine earlier than others. As a copy desk, we had a discussion about person-first language when it comes to obesity (e.g., person with obesity), but the truth is the term itself is best avoided. BMI doesnt measure anything about an individuals health it simply looks at height and weight and is based on a Belgian scientists idea of the average man 200 years ago. Its racist and served as a stepping stone to the creation of eugenics. And both obesity and overweight have contributed to weight stigma that leads to employment discrimination and physical and mental health issues.

Story continues

Gordon, also known as Your Fat Friend, has written endlessly on this subject, and her book dives into the pervasiveness of anti-fat bias in society and its incredibly detrimental effects. In an essay for Self, she explains why she uses the words anti-fatness and anti-fat bias to discuss the attitudes, behaviors, and social systems that specifically marginalize, exclude, underserve, and oppress fat bodies. These terms, she writes, are clear about who is being hurt under this societal dynamic, and they denote an active discrimination as opposed to a legitimate fear, as suggested by the word fatphobia. (We follow a similar guidance on the suffix -phobia and try to use anti- constructions since were usually talking about a prejudice rather than a psychological disorder.)

Even in our own copyediting, there have been times when weve opted for body-shaming when we really meant anti-fat. This is perhaps reflective of how ingrained it is in us to avoid language that makes us uncomfortable or to cower to the vernacular of a body positivity movement that still centers thin bodies and isnt honest about the ways fat people are really under attack. Of course, we also want to use the language that people use to describe themselves, and sometimes doing so leads us to avoid words like fat, which society has trained everyone to read as pejorative. But theres a stark difference between sensitivity and euphemism.

Fat justice is how Gordon describes the goal of her work. I yearn for more than neutrality, acceptance, and tolerance, she writes in What We Dont Talk About When We Talk About Fat, all of which strike me as meek pleas to simply stop harming us. As with any movement for justice, language is only a small part of it, but it matters.

Thats why when we reference clothing sizes, we use the terms straight-size and plus-size. We dont use words like normal to describe people or their bodies.

So, as always, think about the words youre using to talk about peoples bodies, and also why youre talking about bodies in the first place. Do the physical descriptions in your story add color, or are they reminiscent of a tabloid headline? Does your choice to describe one body and not another affect how your reader perceives your subjects and sources in ways you didnt intend? Did you avoid a word that made you uncomfortable and replace it with one that fails as an accurate description?

Well keep striving to use neutral language when writing about peoples bodies, and, perhaps more importantly, asking ourselves if its even relevant.

glabella gluh BEH luh (noun) The area between your eyebrows. According to Merriam-Webster, its first known use was in 1823, and it descends from the Latin glabellus, meaning hairless (although eyebrowless might be more accurate).

This is where you see frown lines (or elevens) from furrowing your brow and squinting. Wrinkles that form in the glabella are known as dynamic wrinkles because they are caused by muscle contractions which injections of Botox, or botulinum toxin, can temporarily paralyze or relax.Used in a sentence: My glabella is so smooth that you cant tell how furious I am that I spent so much on Botox last week.

And finally, a tweet:

This story is part of our Body Week series. To read more, click here.

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The Problem With Overweight And Obese - Yahoo News

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds just dropped the mic with its latest casting when it revealed that The Vampire Diaries' Paul Wesley will join the series in Season 2 as James T. Kirk. Known more commonly as Captain Kirk (and made iconic by modern space traveler and actor William Shatner) when he helmed the Enterprise in the original Star Trek, he's coming to the upcoming Star Trek series, and thats cause for excitement. Its even more exciting when considering that this is presumably before Kirk served as Captain of the Enterprise, because Anson Mount is playing his predecessor, Captain Pike.

The possibility (and likelihood) of seeing a pre-Enterprise Kirk join the cast of characters already involved is exciting, as there isnt a ton weve seen of the iconic captains years before Starfleet. However, we do know a few things from the original series that are worth mentioning that could possibly come up when Paul Wesley makes his debut as James T. Kirk. Perhaps some of these moments will directly come into play during his run on the show, however long that may be.

While James T. Kirk was born on Earth, he spent some time elsewhere in his youth, Including Tarsus IV. That was especially important for Kirks development, as he witnessed a food shortage in his colony and the atrocious way one Governor Kodos hoped to solve it. Kodos, a eugenics sympathizer, decided to kill half of the least desirable 8,000 colonists to solve the problem. Kirk recalled in Star Treks Conscience of the King that supply ships were close and that those people neednt have died had Kodos known.

Kirk was one of nine survivors of that incident, and I cant imagine thats something that didnt stick with him for the rest of his life. Of course, its a coin toss if itll come up in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, as Kirk isnt the star of the show, and there will only be so many moments where he can recall the past. Id like to see that traumatizing memory play out in live-action, though, and how it shaped Kirk into the person he became.

James T. Kirk defeating the Kobayashi Maru is, perhaps, about the most-cited fact I see fans make about the Star Trek captain from his pre-Enterprise days. The Kobayashi Maru, as Star Trek: Discovery and even Prodigy recently reminded fans, is an impossible test to beat by design. The true meaning of the test is to teach cadets that theyll face no-win scenarios in their careers and must make the best possible choice given the situation. Kirk defeating the test is sometimes cited as an example of his excellence as a captain.

Were not here to debate that, but rather to explain how he beat the Kobayashi Maru. Kirk didnt somehow outmaneuver the no-win scenario as some might assume. He revealed in Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan that he just secretly reprogrammed the test so he could win. Thats an important distinction to make, though its worth noting that its still impressive Kirk became the first to find a way to win.

Kirk didnt just step out of Starfleet straight into command of the Enterprise. The future Captain had a few postings before he got to where he was on Star Trek, and one of his first was on the USS Republic. Kirk was still an ensign and joined alongside a former instructor and friend at Starfleet Academy, Lieutenant Benjamin Finney. Unfortunately, the tenure was notable for unfortunate reasons Kirk spoke about later, as he was forced to report a friend and halt his progress to promotion.

This is all revealed in the Star Trek episode Court Marshall, when Kirk is accused of killing Finney. Kirk revealed that when he served with Finney on the Republic, he nearly caused a catastrophe that wouldve destroyed the ship had Kirk not intervened. Kirk reported Finney, which ultimately sent Finney to the bottom of the promotion list, and Kirk surpassed him. The two ran into each other again, and Kirk didnt kill him, so Im unsure of whether or not this specific story will be recounted given the follow-up in the original series.

Many people celebrate Kirk for his time in command, but there isnt a lot of celebration for his stint teaching at Starfleet Academy. Kirk taught at the academy while he was a lieutenant in rank, as mentioned in Star Treks Where No Man Has Gone Before. Unfortunately, there aren't a ton of details on this period of Kirks life, outside of a few romances.

With that being said, Kirks time teaching at Starfleet Academy feels like uncharted territory for a series like Star Trek: Strange New Worlds to flesh out. If Captain Pike is still in charge of the Enterprise in Season 2, then this is definitely a part of Kirk's life that can not only be addressed, but further fleshed out for the lore.

This is likely no surprise to Star Trek fans, but James T. Kirk had a handful of romances during his time at Starfleet Academy. Kirk revealed he nearly married an unnamed blonde lab technician in Where No Man Has Gone Before. We also know he had a romance with Janice Lester, a passionate lover he made mention of in Turnabout Intruder.

James T. Kirks role in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is unknown, though one has to wonder if love is in the air for Kirk and any of the characters. Its not like Kirk to not be known as a lover of ladies in Trek canon, so Id be surprised if he doesnt get close with at least one or two during his stint.

Kirk also served aboard the USS Farragut before joining the Enterprise, which came along with its fair share of commendations. It also featured a pretty big event which resulted in Kirk surviving an incident that killed his captain, as well as 200 other crew members.

Kirk faced off against a dikironium cloud creature (which might be present in the trailer for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds), and as mentioned above, the encounter with it was a deadly undertaking. Kirk blamed himself for the incident (as mentioned in Star Treks Obsession"), but the general consensus was that he did the best he could. Id imagine the encounter haunted him all the same, and we might see that if it happens fairly close to his time on Strange New Worlds.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds premieres on Paramount+ on Thursday, May 5th. Pick up a Paramount+ subscription to stream it, as well as all of the other upcoming Star Trek shows arriving in 2022 and beyond.

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Star Trek: What We Know About James T. Kirk Before He Became Captain Of The Enterprise - CinemaBlend

Ms O'CONNOR question to PREMIER, Mr GUTWEIN

Premier, congratulations. Your Government's epic public health failure has led to more than 10 000 active COVID-19 cases, including 1979 reported overnight and a big jump in hospitalisations to 32. In total, more than 70 000 Tasmanians have been infected, including thousands of children and young people, with a novel bat virus. Fifteen people have died since you reopened the border; these were avoidable deaths.

Instead of taking steps to prevent infection, you have removed mask-wearing protections, allowing the BA.2 subvariant to run rampant. So high is our current case rate that if Tasmania was a country we would be in the top 15 nations in the world for cases per capita. As you know, no child under 12 is fully vaccinated, vaccines are waning in efficacy, they do not prevent infection or the risk of reinfection or long COVID.

Tasmanians want to know what is your endgame with this virus?

ANSWER

Mr Speaker, I thank the Leader of the Greens for that question. It does not surprise me that she is still continuing in the same vein that she started over the Christmas period -

Ms O'Connor - Jesus Christ, have you had a look at the numbers?

Mr GUTWEIN - where you claimed that -

Government members interjecting.

A member - Swearing in parliament.

Mr GUTWEIN - where you claim that Public Health, that the Government -

Ms O'Connor - It is not swearing.

A member - Taking the Lord's name in vain.

Mr GUTWEIN - was engaging in eugenics. It was just a disgrace.

Ms O'Connor - I am not using it in vain.

Mr SPEAKER - Order, Ms O'Connor, you have asked the question. I expect everybody to listen to the Premier.

Mr GUTWEIN - As to the matter Ms O'Connor has raised, Mr Speaker, the number of people in hospital being treated specifically for COVID-19 has remained relatively stable.

Ms O'Connor - It spiked overnight.

Mr SPEAKER - Order.

Mr GUTWEIN - There are 14 people in hospital who are actually being treated for COVID-19.

Ms O'Connor - What a load of crap. There are 32 people in hospital.

Government members interjecting.

Mr GUTWEIN - In terms of the total number of people in hospital, obviously as COVID

Ms O'Connor - I actually care about their health.

Mr SPEAKER - Order, Ms O'Connor. If you do not want to be the second leader to leave the Chamber this morning, I would stop interjecting.

Mr GUTWEIN - Mr Speaker, as COVID-19 spreads more widely, what we are seeing, importantly, is that it is not manifesting as higher rates of serious disease. The number of people in hospital being treated for COVID-19 has remained relatively stable right throughout this. But what will happen as people enter hospital over time, someone breaks their leg, because of the spread of the disease the chances of them entering hospital and having COVID 19 are much higher. But they will not be -

Ms O'CONNOR - Point of order, Mr Speaker, standing order 45, relevance. People who communicate with the Greens want to know what -

Mr SPEAKER - I am sorry, you will have to take your mask off, your voice is muffled.

Ms O'CONNOR - I do not regard this Chamber as particularly safe, as you know, Mr Speaker. But people who are worried about the spread of this virus want to know what the Government's end game is.

Mr SPEAKER - What is the point of order?

Ms O'CONNOR - The point of order is relevance. Could he answer the question instead of resorting to personal attacks?

Mr SPEAKER - Premier, if you could continue.

Mr GUTWEIN - With the greatest of respect, you have made an art form out of personal attacks.

The end game is exactly the outcome that we spoke about when we laid down the plan. That was to open our borders safely and successfully, and ensure that over time we could transition to living with COVID 19 safely and getting on with our lives. That remains our plan.

Public Health has been clear in their advice. We had Public Health speaking on the radio this morning; I think they were out there publicly yesterday. They stood with me on Friday. I have made this point before: unlike other premiers in other states or first ministers, I have stood with Public Health every step of the way. Public Health has made it clear on a number of occasions - last Friday, yesterday, and I understand today as well - that the uptick in case numbers is a result of the more transmissible BA.2 variant.

Ms O'CONNOR - Point of order, Mr Speaker. I believe the Premier is misleading the House. I cannot believe Public Health said that removing masks had nothing to do with spread.

Mr SPEAKER - It is not a point of order, Ms O'Connor.

Mr GUTWEIN - Mr Speaker, the higher spread is related to the BA.2 variant's higher transmissibility. That is directly from Public Health. Sensibly, in terms of masks, the position of Public Health was that in high-risk settings, they are to remain. In other settings, if you cannot socially distance, it is recommended that you wear a mask, which is what we are doing today. I have to say that, in a sparsely populated Chamber last night, I thought it was highly unfair of you to target a member of the House's staff in the way that you did. Somebody who was following the rules, as outlined by Public Health -

Ms O'CONNOR - Point of order, Mr Speaker. I seek the leave of the House to make a personal explanation after question time. I am flagging that I will, because Mr Boutchard's presence in here unmasked put us at risk.

Mr SPEAKER - The statement can be made after question time, not now.

Mr GUTWEIN - Perhaps in that personal explanation, Ms O'Connor, you can explain how you got to eugenics and that disgraceful claim over the Christmas period.

Ms O'Connor - I have explained that. It came from Women with Disabilities Australia.

See the rest here:

COVID-19 - Government Actions and Numbers of Cases - Tasmanian Greens MPs

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Ending the 'silent eugenics' against persons with Down syndrome - CatholicPhilly.com