Category Archives: Eugenics

Edward Osborne Wilson (1929-2021). Photo: Jim Harrison, CC BY 2.5

Did Edward O. Wilson Harvard professor, iconic biologist, champion of global biodiversity promote racist ideas? For years, some scientists have suggested the very question is rooted in smear campaigns and misreadings of Wilsons work. Other scholars have argued that racism and sexism are apparent in Wilsons writing on human evolution.

Since Wilsons death in late December 2021, at the age of 92, the question has been subject to renewed debate, after an opinion piece in Scientific American describing Wilsons dangerous ideas set off a backlash from some scientists.

Now, two separate pairs of researchers, drawing from Wilsons papers at the Library of Congress, have published details of correspondence in which Wilson privately supports a psychologist known for his racist work. It doesnt surprise me at all, said Joseph Graves, Jr., an evolutionary biologist at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University who has written extensively about scientific racism, and who reviewed some of the new archival work before it was published. Whats important about the new research, he added, was coming up with the smoking gun.

Not everyone agrees the new evidence is so definitive, but the revelations promise to prolong the reckoning over Wilsons legacy and to add to an ongoing discussion about how racism and sexism may have shaped entire fields of study.

Wilson may be best known for his widely praised research on ants, and for his push to protect biodiversity. But the scientists work on human evolution has been contested since 1975, when he published Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, a sweeping study of the evolution of social behaviour in animals.

The books final chapter, which aims to consider man in the free spirit of natural history, as though we were zoologists from another planet, touches on the evolutionary origins of language, territoriality, and other behaviours. In the chapter, Wilson wonders whether there could be marked genetic differences between socioeconomic classes. (He concludes theres little evidence thats the case.) And he speculates that some of the differences between human cultures could be rooted in genetic differences, calling for a discipline of anthropological genetics to explore the question further.

Wilson was touching on questions that remain deeply polarising: To what extent are certain features of human societies, like xenophobia, altruism or inequality, dictated by our genes? And can some of the complex variation among human groups, from IQ scores to incarceration rates, be explained by genetic differences, rather than by environmental and social forces?

Many racist projects from the eugenics movement to Nazism to present-day White nationalism have argued that racial differences have deep genetic roots. Such pseudoscientific ideas continue to fuel popular racist canards, such as the idea that Black people have genes predisposing them to violence.

Today, theres a broad consensus among experts in human evolution that that race is a social construct, not a biological category, and that it is extraordinarily difficult to link specific genes to complex human behaviours. And some researchers and advocates warn that, absent better data, explorations of those questions often just reproduce old stereotypes or offer thin cover for bigoted ideas.

After the publication of Sociobiology, Wilson was subject to fierce criticism, including from some of his Harvard colleagues, who argued he had gotten out ahead of the scientific evidence and that his conclusions about the way biology shapes human behavior veered into dangerous territory.

Wilson pushed back against those charges, arguing that his work had been misunderstood and, in some cases, distorted. (To keep the record straight, I am happy to point out that no justification for racism is to be found in the truly scientific study of the biological basis of social behaviour, he wrote in 1981, stressing his belief in a single human nature.) Despite the criticisms, Sociobiology was enormously influential: the book helped launch the field of evolutionary psychology, and it had a profound influence on the study of animal behaviour and biological anthropology.

Less than a week after Wilson died, Monica McLemore, a health researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, published the op-ed in Scientific American describing Wilsons work as problematic, and calling on scientists to reckon with his legacy. In response, the science blogger Razib Khan wrote an open letter challenging the way McLemores piece characterised Wilsons work, including baseless accusations of racism. Dozens of prominent scientists signed the letter.

The open letter pitted a group of mostly White scientists against a Black colleague who had raised concerns about racism. McLemore, who has received threats and hate mail since her piece was published, questioned the judgment of the researchers who signed it. That reputable scientists would be sloppy enough to sign a letter that would bring that kind of hate to my stance in this current moment to me the naivete is huge, she told Undark in a recent Zoom conversation. (Khan did not reply to requests for comment.)

Some of the letters initial signatories retracted their names after learning of Khans past connections with figures associated with white nationalism, including alt-right figurehead Richard Spencer and publisher Ron Unz.

Soon after, Wilsons own connections to the right-wing fringe upended the conversation again.

Also read: E.O. Wilsons Love of Ants, and All Things Living A Tribute

One pair of researchers who surfaced those connections, Howard University evolutionary biologist Stacy Farina and her husband, Matthew Gibbons, began reading sections of Sociobiology while stuck at home during the COVID-19 pandemic. They were taken aback by what they found.

I had read some chapters of Sociobiology as a grad student, said Farina. And theres a lot of really great science in there. Its a very interesting book. And I had no idea that the last chapter had any of that stuff in it. Part of her motivation for digging into Wilsons work, she continued, was a sense of gaps in her own training. I am frustrated with the lack of education about these issues in evolutionary biology.

Later, during a Library of Congress workshop for Howard faculty, Farina asked if the Library had archival material on Wilson. Sure enough, the institution holds his personal papers including boxes of documents related to the sociobiology wars. When she and Gibbons perused the collection, they were drawn to four folders labeled with the name of J. Philippe Rushton, a Canadian psychologist who, starting in the 1980s, published studies arguing that substantial genetic differences existed between racial groups.

Population differences exist in personality and sexual behaviour such that, in terms of restraint, Orientals > whites > blacks, begins one 1987 Rushton paper published in the Journal of Research in Personality. His work would eventually be dogged by accusations of statistical flaws and ethics violations, and key papers were retracted.

In 2002, Rushton took the helm of the Pioneer Fund, an organisation founded in the 1930s to promote eugenics, the idea that humanity can be improved by manipulating which people reproduce. He led the nonprofit until his death in 2012.

On weekends, Farina and Gibbons began returning to the Library of Congress. It was a nice little escape during the pandemic, said Gibbons, who works as a business development specialist for a public health organisation. Head out in the morning, go to an early session, grab some lunch, and sort of freak out over what the morning session revealed, race the clock and try to document as much as we could before they kicked us out at the end.

The letters, Farina said, demonstrate a warm relationship between Wilson and the psychologist. In the correspondence, which dates from the 1980s and 90s, Wilson expressed support for Rushtons work, and lamented a stifling culture that, he suggested, had prevented him from speaking more freely, referring in one note to a leftward revival of McCarthyism.

When Rushtons university seemed poised to sanction him for academic misconduct, Wilson sent letters in his defense. He also sent letters to drum up support for Rushton from colleagues at Harvard and at the conservative National Association of Scholars.

Unbeknownst to Farina and Gibbons, a pair of historians were also exploring the Wilson archive. In 2018, University of Illinois historian of science David Sepkoski began working with Wilsons papers while researching a book on biodiversity. Like Farina and Gibbons, he noticed and gravitated towards the Rushton folders.

Struck by what he was reading, Sepkoski began dropping scanned images of letters into a Dropbox folder he shares with Mark Borrello, a historian of biology at the University of Minnesota. Im sure I called you from the archives, and was like, Youre not gonna believe this, Sepkoski told Borrello during a recent Zoom conversation with Undark. The two began sketching out a book project on Wilson.

The correspondence, Sepkoski and Borrello now say, suggests that Wilson was carefully managing his public persona even as he quietly continued his dispute with his left-wing critics.

Providing comments on one Rushton paper which applied a famous Wilson theory, meant to examine reproductive differences between different species, to argue that Black and non-Black people pursue different reproductive strategies Wilson was effusive. This is a brilliant paper, he wrote, one of the most original and heuristic written on human biology in recent years.

Whether it can even be published in this or some other journal devoted to human sociobiology, Wilson wrote later in his comments, will be a test of our courage and fidelity to objectivity in science.

Earlier this month, spurred by the backlash against McLemore, Farina and Gibbons published their findings in Science for the People Magazine, a left-wing outlet linked to the activist group that prominently opposed Wilsons work in the 1970s.

Days later, Sepkoski and Borrello published their own essay in The New York Review of Books, with more details from the Wilson archives.

The reaction to the letters among the scientific community has been mixed. Some researchers suggested the revelations do not necessitate a substantial reevaluation of Wilsons legacy. Asked about the new letters, sociologist Ullica Segerstrale referred back to her influential 2000 book, Defenders of the Truth, which covers the dispute between Wilson and his antagonists.

In the book, Segerstrale challenges characterisations of Wilson as a racist thinker, and argues that his critics often failed to engage with the actual substance of his work. I stand by my general analysis in that book regarding the thinking and behaviour of both E.O. Wilson and Science for the People, she wrote in an email to Undark.

At the blog Why Evolution is True, biostatistician Gregory Mayer described Farina and Gibbons findings as small beer. Wilson, he wrote, appeared to be primarily defending Rushtons academic freedom, not endorsing his ideas. To do so does not imply an identity of views, Mayer wrote. In a phone interview, he suggested that historians should focus on more pressing historical topics, such as Wilsons role in the development of a key concept in ecology, rather than his correspondence with a discredited Canadian psychologist.

For other scientists, though, the letters felt significant. Writing for Small Pond Science, a science and teaching blog, biologist Terry McGlynn reflected on the letters impact. When navigating the whiter parts of the cultural landscape of biology, the general party line has often been that Ed was mostly right about sociobiology, but his ideas had been twisted by racists, and there wasnt anything he could do about that, he wrote.

But, he continued, its indubitable that the party line I have passively received over the decades simply does not comport with reality.

Also read: A Rift Over Carl Linnaeus Shows We Shouldnt Idolise Scientists

Not everyone found the content of the letters especially surprising. Indeed, close attention to Wilsons work and public statements, some scholars said, already provided ample evidence that he was sympathetic to ideas that most biologists now consider not just morally questionable, but scientifically unfounded.

In 2014, Wilson gave a warm blurb to then-New York Times science journalist Nicholas Wades book A Troublesome Inheritance. The book argues that Black people may be, on average, more impulsive and less hardworking than White or East Asian people, and that basic differences in human society why Haiti is poor, for example, and European countries wealthy are attributable to genetic differences among groups. In reviews, debates and public statements, experts in human evolution pilloried the book for misrepresenting the science.

A notable exception was Wilson, who, in his blurb, praised Wade for exemplifying the virtues of truth without fear and celebrating human genetic diversity.

Thats pretty much out in the open, said Princeton University biological anthropologist Agustn Fuentes, who describes A Troublesome Inheritance as awful, racist, horribly unscientific. What has changed, he said, is the scientific community itself. The field, he said, is really hitting a peak moment of reflection, of engagement with the complexities of racism and sexism, and how its structured some of the basic ideas.

Indeed, a recent paper in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, authored by faculty, staff, and graduate students in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UC-Santa Cruz, is titled Anti-racist interventions to transform ecology, evolution, and conservation biology departments. Recently, biologists have mobilised to change species names that honour Confederate officers and other figures with troubling histories.

Even just in the last two or three years, it feels like something has shifted, said Ambika Kamath, a behavioural and evolutionary ecologist at the University of Colorado-Boulder. Among other factors driving that change, she said, is that biologists from more diverse backgrounds are coming into the field.

Kamath is hopeful that the conversation around Wilson will spark broader introspection among her colleagues. The problem, she and some other researchers argue, goes far beyond Wilson. I dont really care that Wilson had racist ideas, because I know pretty much all of the people that I dealt with, when I was coming up through the science system, had racist ideas, said Graves, who in 1988 became the first Black American to receive a PhD in evolutionary biology. Wilson was just one of many.

For now, more work from the archives may continue to flesh out a fuller picture of Wilsons life and thought. Speaking last week, McLemore, the author of the Scientific American op-ed on Wilson, said she was still getting hate mail and threats. All I wanted to do, she said, was to have a more nuanced discussion about the work.

This article was first published by Undark.

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New Evidence Revives Old Questions About EO Wilson and Race The Wire Science - The Wire Science

In July 1912 800 delegates met at the Hotel Cecil on the Strand in London for the First International Eugenics Congress. Some of the foremost figures of the day including the former and future British prime ministers Arthur Balfour and Winston Churchill were there. The delegates represented a wide spectrum of opinion. Not only right-wing racists but also liberals and socialists believed eugenic policies should be used to raise what they regarded as the low quality of sections of the population.

The Liberal founder of the welfare state, William Beveridge, wrote in 1906 that men who through general defects are unemployable should suffer complete and permanent loss of all citizen rights including not only the franchise but civil freedom and fatherhood. In Marriage and Morals (1929), Bertrand Russell, while criticising American states that had implemented involuntary sterilisation too broadly, defended enforcing it on people who were mentally defective. In 1931 an editorial in this magazine endorsed the legitimate claims of eugenics, stating they were opposed only by those who cling to individualistic views of parenthood and family economics.

The timing of the 1912 congress may be significant. In May 1912 a private members Feeble-Minded Control Bill was presented to the House of Commons. The bill aimed to implement the findings of a royal commission, published in the British Medical Journal in 1908, which recommended that lunatics or persons of unsound mind, idiots, imbeciles, feeble-minded or otherwise should be afforded by the state such special protection as may be suited to their needs. The recommended measures included segregating hundreds of thousands of people in asylums and making marrying any of them a criminal offence. Curiously, the commission specified the number of people requiring this protection as being exactly 271,607.

The bill failed, partly as a result of intensive lobbying by the writer and Catholic apologist GK Chesterton of the Liberal MP Josiah Wedgewood. Despite continuing agitation by eugenicists, no law enabling involuntary sterilisation was ever passed in Britain. In 1913, however, parliament passed the Mental Deficiency Act, which meant a defective could be isolated in an institution under the authority of a Board of Control. The act remained in force until 1959.

Adam Rutherford, who reports these facts, writes that though wildly popular across political dividesplenty of people vocally and publicly opposed the principles and the enactment of eugenics policies in the UK and abroad. This may be so, but very few of the active opponents of eugenics were progressive thinkers. During the high tide of eugenic ideas between the start of the 20th century and the 1930s, no leading secular intellectual produced anything comparable to Chestertons Eugenics and Other Evils (1922), a powerful and witty polemic in which he argued for the worth of every human being.

[See also: Why liberalism is in crisis]

By no means all Christians shared Chestertons stance. As Rutherford points out, the dean of St Pauls Cathedral and professor of divinity at Cambridge, the Reverend WR Inge (1860-1954), wrote in favour of eugenic birth control, suggesting that the urban proletariat may cripple our civilisation, as it destroyed that of ancient Rome.

While Christians were divided on eugenics, progressive thinkers were at one in supporting it. The only prominent counter-example Rutherford cites is HG Wells, whom he calls a long-standing opponent of eugenics. Given the statements welcoming the extinction of non-white peoples in Wellss 1901 book Anticipations, this seems an oversimplified description.

Awkwardly for todays secular progressives, opposition to eugenics during its heyday in the West came almost exclusively from religious sources, particularly the Catholic Church. Eugenic ideas were disseminated everywhere, but few Catholic countries applied them. The only involuntary sterilisation legislation in Latin America was enacted in the state of Veracruz in Mexico in 1932. In Catholic Europe, Spain, Portugal and Italy passed no eugenic laws. By contrast, Norway and Sweden legalised eugenic sterilisation in 1934 and 1935, with Sweden requiring the consent of those sterilised only in 1976. In the US, more than 70,000 people were forcibly sterilised during the 20th century, with sterilisation without the inmates consent being reported in female prisons in California up to 2014.

For the secular intelligentsia in the first three decades of the last century, eugenics the deliberate crafting of a society by biological design, as Rutherford defines it was a necessary part of any programme of human betterment. This was how eugenics was understood by the Victorian polymath Francis Galton (1822-1911), who invented the term, a conjunction of the Greek words for good and offspring. Controlled breeding, aimed at raising the quality of the human beings who were born, was the path to the human good.

This was not a new idea. Selective mating was an integral part of the ugly utopia envisioned by Plato in The Republic. Galtons innovation was to link eugenics with the classification of human beings into racial categories, which developed in the 18th century as part of the Enlightenment. In his book Hereditary Genius (1869), he wrote: The idea of investigating the subject of hereditary genius occurred to me during the course of a purely ethnological inquiry, into the mental peculiarities of different races.

Since the Second World War, the idea of progress has been spelled out in terms of greater personal autonomy and social equality. The occasion of this shift was the revelation of what eugenics entailed in Nazi Germany and the countries it occupied.

The discovery that six million European Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, along with hundreds of thousands of people with physical disabilities, mental illnesses or other characteristics such as simply being gay that supposedly made their lives unworthy of living, was a rupture in history. Ideas and policies that had been regarded by an entire generation of thinkers as guides to improving the species were seen to be moral abominations. Eugenics had enabled an unparalleled crime. An earlier generations understanding of progress was not just revised. It was rejected, and something more like its opposite accepted.

This reversal should be unsettling for progressive thinkers today. How can they be sure that their current understanding will not also be found wanting? Rutherford, who shares much of the prevailing progressive consensus, seems untroubled by this possibility. As he notes on several occasions, he writes chiefly as a scientist. He has little background in moral philosophy, and at times this shows.

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The strength of Rutherfords book is in his demonstration that eugenicists pursue an illusion of control. Edwardian and Nazi schemes for weeding out the human attributes they judged undesirable were unworkable. Even eye pigmentation is complex and not fully understood. A primitive model of monogenetic determinism lies behind the current revival in eugenic ideas. Advances in gene editing are welcomed by some and greeted with horror by others for making possible the manufacture of designer babies. There has been loose talk of increasing the IQ of future generations, but there is nothing in current knowledge that suggests such a policy to be practicable.

Eugenics is a busted flush, Rutherford writes, a pseudoscience that cannot deliver on its promise. His scientific demolition of the eugenic project is brilliantly illuminating and compelling. His book will be indispensable for anyone who wants to assess the wild claims and counter-claims surrounding new genetic technologies. It is less successful as a study of the profound ethical questions they open up.

The principal purpose of eugenics in the 19th and early-20th centuries was to legitimise European colonial power. Eugenic ideology always had other functions. As Rutherford observes, the evils of Western societies were depicted as resulting from the inferiority of those they oppressed. Poverty was a consequence of stupidity and fecklessness, not a lack of education and opportunity. But it is the most radical ambition of eugenics to re-engineer the human species, or privileged sections of it that is likely to be most dangerous in future. Rather than exploring this threatening prospect, which has the backing of powerful tech corporations that are researching anti ageing therapies and technological remedies for mortality, Rutherford focuses on soft targets fringe figures and organisations attempting to revive discredited theories of scientific racism.

There is a direct line connecting early 20th-century eugenics with 21st-century transhumanism. The link is clearest in the eugenicist and scientific humanist Julian Huxley (1887-1975). In 1924 Huxley wrote a series of articles for the Spectator, in which he stated that the negro mind is as different from the white mind as the negro from the white body. By the mid-Thirties, Huxley had decided that racial theories were pseudoscience and was a committed anti-fascist.

He had not abandoned eugenics. In a lecture entitled Eugenics in an Evolutionary Perspective, delivered in 1962, Huxley reasserted the value of eugenic ideas and policies. Earlier, in 1951, in a lecture that appeared as a chapter in his book New Bottles for New Wine (1957), he had coined the term transhumanism to describe the idea of humanity attempting to overcome its limitations and to arrive at fuller fruition.

Huxley is a pivotal figure because he links eugenics with its successor ideology. Rutherford devotes only a sentence to him, noting that he advised his friend Wells on the 1932 film adaptation of The Island of Dr Moreau. But Huxley merits more extensive and deeper examination, for he illustrates a fundamental difficulty in both eugenics and transhumanism. Who decides what counts as a better kind of human being, and on what basis is the evaluation made?

Rutherford says little on foundational issues in ethics, and what he does say is muddled. He cites the US Declaration of Independence for its affirmation of the inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Authorised by God and enshrined in natural law, these rights are asserted to be self-evident. Rightly, Rutherford dismisses this assertion: They are of course fictions, noble lies. Yet Rutherford relies on something very like inalienable rights when he considers the moral dilemmas surrounding advances in genetics.

Discussing terminating a pregnancy in light of a pre-natal diagnosis, he writes that it is an absolute personal choice and should be an unstigmatised right for women and parents. Like Rutherford, I believe womens choices should be paramount. But if rights are fictions, how can these choices be considered absolute entitlements? Different societies will configure these fictive rights in different ways. One that enforced a dominant conception of collective welfare might restrict abortion for some women and enforce it on others, as appears to be the case in China.

[See also: Living in Fernando Pessoas world]

Rutherford goes on to contend that utilitarian arguments preclude the crimes of eugenics, such as killing people with disabilities. But a utilitarian calculus cannot give disabled people a right to life. In his book Practical Ethics (1979), the Australian utilitarian Peter Singer maintained that selective infanticide of severely disabled infants need not be morally wrong. Using the utilitarian metric, happiness could be maximised in a world without these human beings. Against utilitarian arguments of this kind, Rutherford writes: If we truly wanted to reduce the sum total of human suffering then we should eradicate the powerful, for wars are fought by people but started by leaders.

This may be rhetorically appealing, but it is thoroughly confused. The suggestion that suffering could be minimised by eradicating the powerful is nonsense. As Rutherford must surely realise, the powerful are not a discrete human group that can be eliminated from society.

The fundamental ethical objection to eugenics is that it licenses some people to decide whether the lives of others are worth living. Part of an intellectual dynasty that included the Victorian uber-Darwinian TH Huxley and the novelist Aldous, Julian Huxley never doubted that an improved human species would match his own high-level brainpower. But not everyone thinks intellect is the most valuable human attribute. General de Gaulles daughter Anne had Downs syndrome, and the famously undemonstrative soldier and Resistance leader referred to her as my joy, and when at the age of 20 she died he wept. The capacity to give and receive love may be more central to the good life than self-admiring cleverness.

This is where transhumanism comes in. It is not normally racist, and typically involves no collective coercion, only the voluntary actions of people seeking self enhancement. But like eugenicists, transhumanists understand human betterment to be the production of superior people like themselves. True, the scientific knowledge and technology required to create these people are not yet available; but as Rutherford acknowledges, someday they may be.

The likely upshot of transhumanism in practice a world divided between a rich, smart, beautified few whose lifespans can be indefinitely extended, and a mass of unlovely, disposable, dying deplorables seems to me a vision of hell. But it may well be what is in store for us, if the current progressive consensus turns out to be as transient as the one that preceded it.

John Grays most recent book is Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life (Penguin)

Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of EugenicsAdam Rutherford Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 288pp, 12.99

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This article appears in the 09 Feb 2022 issue of the New Statesman, Sunak's Game

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The sinister return of eugenics - The New Statesman

MADISON, Wis. As Republican legislators this weekcontinue to push an identical version of the unpopular and divisive Texas-style abortion ban, Kevin Nicholson and Rebecca Kleefisch have both doubled down on their promise to turn back the clock on health care in Wisconsin by slashing health care services, banning abortion care with no exceptions, and cutting cancer screenings for thousands of Wisconsinites.

Nicholson, whoconfirmed yesterday that he would sign the unpopular and divisive Texas-style billif he somehow became governor, believes that no one should be able to access abortion care with zero exceptions. During his last failed campaign, Nicholson received a perfect 100 percent rating from Pro-Life Wisconsin, which confirmed to the Associated Press that Nicholson promised to support all of their demands, including banning abortion in all cases, with no exceptions for rape, incest, or when a mothers life is in jeopardy.

Nicholson has long wanted to defund Planned Parenthood, which tens of thousands of Wisconsinites rely on for basic care like cancer screenings, testing, and access to contraception. Hes even previouslytweetedthat Planned Parenthood is not a healthcare provider; its a eugenics shop.

As lieutenant governor, Kleefisch worked to passfive bills limiting critical reproductive health care access and even agreed that survivors of rape should turn lemons into lemonade instead of being empowered to make their own health care decisions.

Kevin Nicholson and Rebecca Kleefisch want to insert themselves into some of the most personal decisions that Wisconsinites make, said Democratic Party of Wisconsin Communications Director Iris Riis. Whether its banning abortion care with no exceptions or cutting cancer screenings, the Republicans running for governor have staked out the most extreme and divisive positions on health care.

Learn more about the Republicans running for governor and their radical agendas atAntiChoiceKevin.comandRadicalRebecca.com.

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WisDems: Nicholson and Kleefisch want to turn back the clock on health care - WisPolitics.com

In the wake of the horrific slaughter of the First World War, artists struggled to make sense of the tremendous loss and suffering from the brutal industrialized war. Thanks to German psychiatrist and doctor of art history Hans Prinzhorn, many artists found inspiration in the art of mental patients that broke boundaries while expressing psychological pain and unbridled emotion without regard for convention or tradition.

Prinzhorn encouraged his psychiatric patients to draw and paint as a form of therapy, and then he published a groundbreaking collection of their work in 1922. Modern artists such as Paul Klee, Salvador Dali and Max Ernst were influenced by these raw, unfiltered images.

In the 1930s, Adolf Hitlera megalomaniac who saw himself as a great artist condemned the work of the artist-patients, as well as most forms of modernist art, as an insane deviation from the traditional realism he admired. In the late thirties, Hitlers Nazis mocked avant-garde artists and compared them with the mentally ill artists in their exhibits of Degenerate Art. And, by the early 1940s, the Nazi regime had murdered the more that 70,000 psychiatric patients, including several of Prinzhorns patient-artists, in a euthanasia program designed to exterminate so-called life unworthy of life, meaning the mentally and physically disabled. Aktion T4, as the program was known, paved the way for the Holocaust.

In his moving and riveting new book, The Gallery of Miracles and Madness: Insanity, Modernism, and Hitlers War on Art (Random House), acclaimed author Charlie English presents this complex history. He weaves together the life of Prinzhorn, his artist-patients, the rise of failed artist Hitler, eugenics and The Master Race, and the horrific Aktion T4 to advance racial hygiene and create an Aryan master race by killing those with disabilities.

Based on extensive research, Mr. Englishs book takes the reader into the lives of Prinzhorn and talented patients such as Franz Karl Bhler and Agnes Richter, and then illuminates Hitlers cruel world. The gripping storytelling creates suspense even though the reader knows of the tragedy to come.

The Gallery of Miracles and Madness is an urgent tribute to the creative spirit as it exposes the horrors of totalitarianism. Mr. English provides a humane and timely historical account with cautionary lessons for readers today and into the future.

Charlie English, a celebrated British nonfiction author, has written two previous books, The Storied City (published in the UK as The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu) and The Snow Tourist. He is a former journalist for The Guardian, where he served in several positions including arts editor and head of international news. Also, he has appeared on NPR and the BBC and written for numerous newspapers and magazines including The New York Times, The Telegraph and The Independent, and lectured at the Royal Geographical Society, where he isa Fellow. He lives in Londonwith hiswife and children.

Mr. English generously responded by email to a series of questions on his recent book.

Robin Lindley: Congratulations Mr. English on your powerful new book The Gallery of Miracles and Madness. You take a deep dive into art, psychiatry, and the policies of Nazi Germany. This book seems a departure from your previous work. What sparked your interest in this often-neglected history?

Charlie English: Thank you Robin. I realize it seems a long way from The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu, though in fact there are similarities. Both books are about culture under totalitarianism, one being set during Al Qaedas rule over Timbuktu, the other in Nazi Germany.

Im drawn to cultural stories, and when I discovered the Prinzhorn collection some years ago it seemed to speak to me. A history that directly links so many fascinating areas of twentieth century historyfrom modern arts interest in insanity to Hitlers ability as a painter to the Nazi mass-murder programswas one that I thought that deserved to be told and understood.

Robin Lindley: Your book begins with a focus on Dr. Hans Prinzhorn, a psychiatrist who collected the art of mental patients in early twentieth century Germany. He was also trained in art history. What are a few things youd like readers to know about Prinzhorn?

Charlie English: I guess youd say Prinzhorn was a Renaissance man, a war veteran, a medic, a baritone singer, an intellectual. He achieved something really astonishing in the space of two to three years, rather less time in fact than it took me to write my book. But his brilliance did not lead him to a good place, and he made a lot of poor decisions, not least his support, for a short time, for Hitler, who still seems to me to represent the polar opposite of Prinzhorns earlier work, which promoted psychiatric art as valid art. His biography shows, I think, that people are usually flawed and the truth is always complicated.

Robin Lindley: Why was Prinzhorn interested in inspiring and collecting the art of mental patients?

Charlie English: Several reasons. One is that this was an active field of enquiry for art at the start of the 20th century: Freud had revealed vast hidden depths inside every human being, and modernists saw mental illness or perhaps madness as a way to explore that, while escaping all the hated trappings of the bourgeoisie and so-called civilization.

Beyond that, Prinzhorn was psychologically fragile himself, perhaps a sufferer of PTSD, and an art critic and a medic. The stars aligned for him, you could say. His education meant he was unusually, perhaps uniquely qualified for the task of exploring the art of schizophrenic patients.

Robin Lindley: Several of the psychiatric patient artists you discuss were already recognized artists. Who are a few of the patient artists that stand out to you?

Charlie English: There are hundreds of artists in the collection, and for the book I needed to focus the story on a handful at most. The hero, if you like, is Franz Karl Bhler, an artisan-blacksmith before he was incarcerated as a schizophrenic. He had been a genius at metalworking, and won a gold medal at the Worlds Fair in Chicago in 1893, so he was trained in the design aspects of his craft, but he also managed to teach himself to become a great fine artist after his mental collapse. Others in the collection include Else Blankenhorn, a very great talent whose worked inspired Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, among others. The Surrealists favourite Prinzhorn artist was August Natterer, who depicted his psychotic episodes in his work. Like many Prinzhorn images they have an intriguing, uncanny quality.

Detail ofHexenkopf(The Witch's Head), c.1915, August Natterer

Robin Lindley: You write about how some of these mentally ill artists influenced surrealists, expressionists and other modernists. What did you learn about the influence of these ill outsider artists?

Charlie English: I was astonished by their influence over the major art movements of the time. If you think how substantial Surrealism was, for instance, and then discover how dependent those artists were on psychiatric patients art, it gives you a whole new understanding of where certain iconic twentieth century works came from. Evidence for artistic influence is often hard to pin down, as few artists are keen to discuss or write about the people they borrowed ideas from, but the Prinzhorn collections influence is really very well documented by dozens of art historians. Prinzhorns achievement, you could say, is to have expanded the idea of what art is, and widened the circle of permitted art-makers.

Robin Lindley: How did other medical professionals view Prinzhorns interest in the art of his psychiatric patients?

Charlie English: You have to remember that at the time opinion was highly polarized between arch-conservatives and the avant-garde, rather as I think it is now. Conservative psychiatrists really hated the idea that madness was polluting fine art, which they held up as something spiritual, superior, quasi-religious. The far right realised that they could capitalize on this natural distaste for the moderns.

Robin Lindley: Wasnt Prinzhorn attracted by some aspects of Nazism before his death in 1933?

Charlie English: Yes. During the economic crisis of the early 1930s there was a sense of pending catastrophe, which Hitler did his best to encourage, blaming the Jews and the left and the avant-garde. Prinzhorn, like other conservatives, felt Germany needed a strong leader, and thought Hitler could be that person. It seems very surprising given Prinzhorns earlier ideas, but he even offered to work with Hitler on a program of German cultural renewal. He was politically naive, and later realized he had made a mistake. He died soon after Hitler came to power, so we cant know what would have become of him during the period of Nazi rule.

Robin Lindley: Hitler also looms large in your book. The young Hitler was a starving artist. You stress that he saw himself as an artist through his life. Some readers may not be familiar with his actual art. How did his contemporaries see his art work and his personality?

Charlie English: As a teenager Hitler was determined to become an artist. He believed he was brilliant, of course, and that it would be childs play for someone of his great talent to get into Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, so when they rejected him, he was devastated and furious. Theres no doubt that he had some ability for drawing buildings, but he was terrible at figures. Read into it what you will, but the people in his paintings just dont seem to have interested him on any level.

After his rejection, he was homeless for a time, and made a living copying out tourist postcards depicting famous buildings, but even he would later dismiss these works as of no value. His real talentas observers from Albert Speer to Thomas Mann have pointed outwas for the art of politics, the spectacle, the rallies, the insignia, the speeches, the set designs

Robin Lindley: How did Hitlers artist persona play into his leadership style and beliefs about himself?

Charlie English: Hitler came to believe he was an artist-Fuhrer, a mythical Romantic idea for a type of leader that Germany was said to produce in times of crisis. This combined politician and seer would allegedly be able both to envisage the future of the German people and to bring it about, however abhorrent the methods. Hitlers propaganda consistently presented him in this way.

Goebbels once wrote that for the Fuhrer the people were no more difficult to work than clay was for the sculptor. It seems clear that Hitler took this almost literally, as he would try to genetically reengineer the Germans to fit his Aryan ideal.

Robin Lindley: After a failed putsch in 1923, Hitler was arrested andas you writehe was examined and diagnosed as a psychopath. What brought evaluators to this conclusion?

Charlie English: I wouldnt say this was a formal diagnosis, but the prison psychologist Alois Maria Ott spoke with him after he was admitted to the jail and described him much later as prone to hysteria and a morbid psychopath, with flecks of spittle showing around his mouth. Of course, Hitlers first great political gamble had just gone catastrophically wrong.

The issue of his sanity has been controversial since none of the many formal psychiatric opinions that exist come from people who actually examined him. Also, it used to be argued that calling him mad somehow let him off the hook for his crimes. These days, the binary concept of mad or sane seems less relevant, and I dont think many people who know his biography would argue that Hitler wasnt a deeply disturbed individual.

Robin Lindley: During his year in jail, Hitler wrote his hated-filled screed Mein Kampf. He was already attacking Jews and the weakness of the Weimar state. When did he become acquainted with eugenics and the idea of a German Aryan master race?

Charlie English: Eugenics was already a popular scientific concept at the turn of the twentieth century. A British polymath, Sir Francis Galton, invented the term in the 1880s, and sterilization was enthusiastically practiced in the United States. Hitler is said to have been inspired by some of these American programs.

The idea of an Aryan master race was older: it grew out of mid-nineteenth century concepts of so-called scientific racism, which separated people into a hierarchy of races, with the Nordic whites and Aryans at the top and the Jews at the bottom. One of the most bizarre aspects of these theories was that the only people who could have good ideas were the Aryans, and every other world culture could only continue what the Aryans had taught them or else destroy it by their bungling. One conclusion of this theory required that the ancient Greeks be categorized as Aryans, and in fact the Nazis did try to co-opt every good thing that had ever happened in historyincluding classical culturefor the German-Aryans.

You wonder at peoples credulity when faced with this nonsense, but, a bit like QAnon or another conspiracy theory, it didnt really have to make sense, it was just a labyrinthine way of justifying the emotional prejudices people felt about a particular issue. The Nazis adapted the language to support these racial concepts, promoting words such as Volksgemeinschaft (ethnic cultural community), Rassengefuhl (racial feeling), and Kulturbolschewismus (cultural Bolshevism).

Robin Lindley: What was the Degenerate Art exhibit that Hitler promoted? How did Hitler view works by recognized modernist artists and the mentally ill? Why was Nazi mockery of modern art so important to Hitler? What threatened him about expressionism and other styles?

Charlie English: Entartung, or degeneracy was another nineteenth century concept that went hand in hand with eugenics and race theory.

Degeneracy theory stated that a peoples racial health could be read in its cultural output, and that a race that had been polluted by foreign geneticsi.e., by racial intermarriage, notably with the Jewsproduced symptomatic art that no pure Aryan could understand. Art, then, was a barometer of cultural health and surprise, surprisemodern art was an indicator of the excessive Jewish influence on German culture.

It was Goebbelss idea to capitalize on this theory by organizing shaming shows of modern art designed to reinforce the idea that modernism=Jewishness=mental illness. These Degenerate Art shows included works from the Prinzhorn collection, as further evidence that madness and modernism were a Jewish conspiracy against the German people. They would be included in the exhibitions alongside professional works with sarcastic captions claiming that a really sick patients effort was better than that of the professional modern artist.

Josef Goebbels inspects the Degenerate Art Exhibition, February 1938

Photo Bundesarchiv,CC BY-SA 3.0 de

The Degenerate Art shows were vital for the Nazi propaganda effort. They toured the country for years, and are still the most popular art exhibitions of all time in terms of footfall: around four million people are believed to have seen them.

Robin Lindley: The Nazis T4 program, a precursor of the Holocaust, involved destruction of life unworthy of life, including those with genetic illnesses, the mentally ill, and others. How did Nazi eugenics evolve from sterilization policies in the mid-1930s to mass murder by 1939?

Charlie English: Once the principle of racial cleansing was establishedand Hitler had hinted at such a program in Mein Kampf in the mid-1920sthe question was how to do it without attracting too much public protest.

Months after Hitler came to power, a sterilization law was passed which meant that psychiatric patients with particular conditions could be forcibly neutered. As war loomed, Hitler decided to go further, starting to actually murder the mentally ill, to eliminate them from the gene pool and save the cost of their care. He knew that the conflict would provide political cover for this program, which could be explained as the sort of emergency measure required in times of war. A group of administrators in his private office were tasked with establishing the program, later known as Aktion T4. They brainstormed methods of mass-murder, and came up with the idea of gas chambers. These were put into action from early 1940. These tools and methods would later be used in the Holocaust, often by the same people.

Robin Lindley: Its heartbreaking that there was little public outcry about the T4 mass killing of disabled people. Did most Germans know of the mass murder? Who cared about it?

Charlie English: A large number of people knew. It was impossible for instance to disguise the smell of burning corpses that emanated from the incinerators, or to stop the soot gathering on peoples houses.

There was some resistance to Aktion T4 but this was entirely insufficient to prevent the murder of 70,000 or so people by the state. Only a few individuals spoke up, including the Bishop of Munster, and Lothar Kreyssig, a district judge in Brandenburg. The propaganda had been highly effective: people mostly either did nothing or tacitly supported the killings.

Robin Lindley: Your description of the last days of the Prinzhorns psychiatric patients is poignant and moving. Karl Bhler, a once prominent artist, was one of victims. How were the T4 victims located and then killed? What did you learn about the killing centers?

Charlie English: One of the most shocking aspects of the story is that the victims were identified, judged and murdered by the medical profession. Asylums were told to report people who had been diagnosed with certain conditions, including schizophrenia and alcoholism, or people who had been in the care system for several years. The names and medical notes of such people were sent to medical reviewers, who then decided if they fit the criteria for murder that Hitlers office had set out. Most of them did. After that, lists of selected patients were sent back to the asylums, and a special transport squadron came to pick them up on the appointed day. They were taken to the killing centers, which had been designed to look like hospitals, and put in sealed chambers disguised as shower rooms. A doctor turned on the gas and killed them all. The bodies were robbed of gold teeth and burnt.

More:

Charlie English's "The Gallery of Miracles and Madness" Links Psychiatry, Modern Art, and Hitler's War on the Mentally Ill - History News...

The name of a well-traveled street in Bloomington now honors a prominent local Black family.

Once known as Jordan Avenue, the section of the street from East Davis Street to East 17th Streethas beenrenamed Eagleson Avenue. A ceremony Tuesday celebrated the new name.

Previously named after David Starr Jordan, Indiana University's seventh president, the street's name came under scrutiny in recent years due to Jordan's support of eugenics selective breeding of humans based on the idea that some people have superior genes.

This past year, both the Bloomington Plan Commission and the IU Board of Trustees approved changing the street's name toinstead honor a family of Black Bloomingtonians who have made their mark on the community and the nation for more than a century.

Pictures: Eagleson Avenue replaces Jordan Avenue in Bloomington

The Eagleson-Bridgwaters story in Bloomington began in the 1880s, whenHalson Vashon Eagleson Sr. arrived. Born into slavery in 1851, he would become a prominent barber with a large family that would make its mark onBloomington and Indiana University.

The businessmanhelped found both the Bethel AME Church in Bloomington and an orphanage in Unionville. He raisedsix childrenwith two wives, and many of the children andtheirdescendants would attend Indiana University at a time when it was noteasy for Black Americans to pursue higher education.

Halsons oldest child,Preston, was bornin 1876 in Mitchelland graduated from high school in Bloomington at the age of 16 in 1892. Preston attended IU and became the first African American to take part in intercollegiate athletics at the university.

Previous: Bloomington approves renaming Jordan Avenue after prominent Black family

Preston was aforce on the footballteam throughouthis undergraduate career, despite theracial prejudice he sometimes encountered from rival fans and teams. He was denied service at multiple hotels, prompting his father to take legal action. Preston would go on to become thefirst African American toearn an advanced degree from IU, receivinga master of arts in philosophy.

Preston's brother Halson V. EaglesonJr., born in 1903, also faced pushback as he pursued his education. A leader of the IU marching band, he was kidnapped before he could perform at a game with Purdue. That did not stop him from becoming the first black student to earn an "I" letter in the marching band and a doctorate in physicsbefore starting a career as an educator and consultant.

Preston's son Wilson Vashon Eagleson Sr., born in 1898, continued the family's educational efforts at IU, earning his undergraduate degree in 1922 and marrying Frances Marshall, whowas the first black woman to graduate from IU. Marshall embarked on her own career in academia, and her name lives on at IU in theNeal-Marshall Black Culture Center.

The family continued to have an impact in Bloomington and beyond throughout the 20th century.

Another of Preston's children, Elizabeth Eagleson Bridgwaters, born 1908, would get her undergraduate degree from IU in 1930. Elizabeth would make her mark as director of the Housing and Neighborhood Development Department for the city of Bloomington,president of the local school board and as a mayoral candidate. She served on the first Civil Rights Commission of Bloomington and spearheaded other civic groups like Citizens for Constructive Progress.In addition to being named Monroe County Woman of the Century in 1999, Elizabethreceived statewide recognition for her work, including the Sagamore of the Wabash.

More: Bridgwaters led by example

Wilson V. Eagleson Jr.,son of Wilson and Frances Eagleson, began his studies at IU in 1940but left to join the Army Air Corps during World War II. The Tuskegee Airman flew in combatand hada 30-year career in the Air Force before retiring in 1970.

Contact Patrick McGerr atpmcgerr@heraldt.com, 812-307-5636, or follow@patrickmcgerr on Twitter.

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Eagleson Avenue: The family accomplishments behind the new street name - The Herald-Times

JACKSON, Miss. -- If you are Black or Hispanic in a conservative state that already limits access to abortions, you are far more likely than a white woman to have one.

And if the U.S. Supreme Court allows states to further restrict or even ban abortions, minority women will bear the brunt of it, according to statistics analyzed by The Associated Press.

The numbers are unambiguous. In Mississippi, people of color comprise 44% of the population but 80% of women receiving abortions, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, which tracks health statistics.

In Texas, theyre 59% of the population and 74% of those receiving abortions. The numbers in Alabama are 35% and 70%. In Louisiana, minorities represent 42% of the population, according to the state Health Department, and about 72% of those receiving abortions.

Abortion restrictions are racist, said Cathy Torres, a 25-year-old organizing manager with Frontera Fund, a Texas organization that helps women pay for abortions. They directly impact people of color, Black, brown, Indigenous people ... people who are trying to make ends meet.

Why the great disparities? Laurie Bertram Roberts, executive director of the Alabama-based Yellowhammer Fund, which provides financial support for women seeking abortion, said women of color in states with restrictive abortion laws often have limited access to health care and a lack of choices for effective birth control. Schools often have ineffective or inadequate sex education.

If abortions are outlawed, those same women often poor will likely have the hardest time traveling to distant parts of the country to terminate pregnancies or raising children they might struggle to afford, said Roberts, who is Black and once volunteered at Mississippis only abortion clinic.

Were talking about folks who are already marginalized, Roberts said.

Amanda Furdge, who is Black, was one of those women. She was a single, unemployed college student already raising one baby in 2014 when she found out she was pregnant with another. She said she didnt know how she could afford another child.

Shed had two abortions in Chicago. Getting access to an abortion provider there was no problem, Furdge said. But now she was in Mississippi, having moved home to escape an abusive relationship. Misled by advertising, she first went to a crisis pregnancy center which tried to talk her out of an abortion. By the time she found the abortion clinic, she was too far along to have the procedure.

Why cant you safely, easily access abortion here? asked Furdge, 34, who is happily raising her now 7-year-old son but continues to advocate for women having the right to choose.

Torres said historically, anti-abortion laws have been crafted in ways that hurt low-income women. She pointed to the Hyde Amendment, a 1980 law that prevents the use of federal funds to pay for abortions except in rare cases.

She also cited the 2021 Texas law that bans abortion after around six weeks of pregnancy. Where she lives, near the U.S.-Mexico border in the Rio Grande Valley, women are forced to travel to obtain abortions and must pass in-state border patrol checkpoints where they have to disclose their citizenship status, she said.

Regardless of what legislators say, Torres insisted, the intent is to target women of color, to control their bodies: They know who these restrictions are going to affect. They know that, but they dont care.

But Andy Gipson, a former member of the Mississippi Legislature who is now the states agriculture and commerce commissioner, said race had nothing to do with passage of Mississippis law against abortion after the 15th week. That law is now before the Supreme Court in a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade, the court's 1973 ruling that legalized abortion nationwide.

Gipson, a Baptist minister who is white, said he believes all people are created in the image of God and have an innate value that starts at conception. Mississippi legislators were trying to protect women and babies by putting limits on abortion, he said.

I absolutely disagree with the concept that its racist or about anything other than saving babies lives, said Gipson, a Republican. Its about saving lives of the unborn and the lives and health of the mother, regardless of what color they are.

To those who say that forcing women to have babies will subject them to hardships, Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch, a white Republican, said it is easier for working mothers to balance professional success and family life than it was 49 years ago when Roe was decided.

Fitch, who is divorced, often points to her own experience of working outside the home while raising three children. But Fitch grew up in an affluent family and has worked in the legal profession both factors that can give working women the means and the flexibility to get help raising children.

Thats not the case for many minority women in Mississippi or elsewhere. Advocates say in many places where abortion services are being curtailed, theres little support for women who carry a baby to term.

Mississippi is one of the poorest states, and people in low-wage jobs often dont receive health insurance. Women can enroll in Medicaid during pregnancy, but that coverage disappears soon after they give birth.

Mississippi has the highest infant mortality rate in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Black infants were about twice as likely as white infants to die during the first year of life in Mississippi, according to the March of Dimes.

Across the country, U.S. Census Bureau information analyzed by The Associated Press shows fewer Black and Hispanic women have health insurance, especially in states with tight abortion restrictions. For example, in Texas, Mississippi and Georgia, at least 16% of Black women and 36% of Latinas were uninsured in 2019, some of the highest such rates in the country.

Problems are compounded in states without effective education programs about reproduction. Mississippi law says sex education in public schools must emphasize abstinence to avoid pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. Discussion of abortion is forbidden, and instructors may not demonstrate how to use condoms or other contraception.

The Mississippi director for Planned Parenthood Southeast, Tyler Harden, is a 26-year-old Black woman who had an abortion five years ago, an experience that drove her to a career supporting pregnant women and preserving abortion rights.

She said when she was attending public school in rural Mississippi, she didnt learn about birth control. Instead, a teacher stuck clear tape on students arms. The girls were told to put it on another classmates arm, and another, and watch how it lost the ability to form a bond.

Theyd tell you, If you have sex, this is who you are now: Youre just like this piece of tape all used up and washed up and nobody would want it, Harden said.

When she became pregnant at 21, she knew she wanted an abortion. Her mother was battling cancer and Harden was in her last semester of college without a job or a place to live after graduation.

She said she was made to feel fear and shame, just as she had during sex ed classes. When she went to the clinic, she said protesters told her she was killing the most precious gift from God and that she was killing a Black baby, playing into what white supremacists want.

Hardens experience is not uncommon. The anti-abortion movement has often portrayed the abortion fight in racial terms.

Outside the only abortion clinic operating in Mississippi, protesters hand out brochures that refer to abortion as Black genocide and say the late Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood and a proponent of eugenics, desired to eradicate minorities. The brochures compare Sanger to Adolf Hitler and proclaim: Black lives did not matter to Margaret Sanger!

The Mississippi clinic is not affiliated with Planned Parenthood, and Planned Parenthood itself denounces Sangers belief in eugenics.

White people are not alone in making this argument. Alveda King, an evangelist who is a niece of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., is among the Black opponents of abortion who, for years, have been portraying abortion as a way to wipe out people of their race.

Tanya Britton, a former president of Pro-Life Mississippi, often drives three hours from her home in the northern part of the state to pray outside the abortion clinic in Jackson. Britton is Black, and she said its a tragedy that the number of Black babies aborted since Roe would equal the population of several large cities. She also said people are too casual about terminating pregnancies.

You just cant take the life of someone because this is not convenient I want to finish my education, Britton said. You wouldnt kill your 2-year-old because you were in graduate school.

But state Rep. Zakiya Summers of Jackson, who is Black and a mother, suggested theres nothing casual about what poor women are doing. Receiving little support in Mississippi for example, the Legislature killed a proposal to expand postpartum Medicaid coverage in 2021 -- they are sometimes forced to make hard decisions.

Women are just out here trying to survive, you know? she said. And Mississippi doesnt make it any easier.

Associated Press reporters Noreen Nasir in Jackson, Mississippi, and Jasen Lo in Chicago contributed to this report.

View original post here:

Minority women most affected if abortion is banned, limited - ABC News

In the fall of 1999, The New Yorker published a short piece about a twenty-three-year-old writer who had just released her first novel, in England. Zadie Smiths White Teeth was due to be published in the U.S. in the spring of 2000kicking off the millennium with a bang. White Teeth, a gentle satire of migration and cultural identity, concerns, among other matters, Nazi eugenics programs, the eschatology of Jehovahs Witnesses, the DNA of mice, and a militant group called Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation, or KEVIN, the piece, by Kevin Jackson, observes. Smith writes like an old hand, and, sometimes, like a dream. It can be immensely pleasurable, years later, to revisit the initial discovery of new talents and works of art, the people and projects that gave a decade its own flavor and Zeitgeist.

Sign up for Classics, a twice-weekly newsletter featuring notable pieces from the past.

This week, were bringing you a selection of piecesa culture review, of sortsthat capture the creative pulse of the early two-thousands. In Dont Look Back and New Frontiers, Anthony Lane explores the mind-bending machinations of Michel Gondrys Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the spare poignancy of Ang Lees Brokeback Mountain. (Brokeback Mountain, which began as an Annie Proulx story in these pages, comes fully alive as the chance for happiness dies. Its beauty wells from its sorrow.) In Flesh on Flesh, John Updike reviews Atonement, Ian McEwans majestic novel of unfulfilled love. (The frail, moist flesh, mutilated in war, corseted and shamed in peacetime, and subject, in the long view, to swift decay, gives this intricately composed narrative its mournful, surging life.) In Living Pains, Sasha Frere-Jones considers Mary J. Bliges accomplished career as she releases her eighth studio album. In Under the Spell and Counterlives, Joan Acocella delves into the phenomenon of the Harry Potter series and analyzes the far-reaching themes of Philip Roths The Plot Against America. (In an eerie conversion, The Plot Against America transforms the piety-spouting, finger-shaking elders of the Roth oeuvre into prophets.) In Sympathy for the Devil, Kelefa Sanneh studies the shifting musical styles of the rapper Eminem. Finally, in Heartbreak Hotels, David Denby examines how Sofia Coppola captures the loneliness and humor of Bill Murrays faded movie-star character in Lost in Translation. Coppola doesnt punch up her scenes; shes not interested in tension leading to a climax but in moods and states of being, Denby writes. Not much happens, but Coppola is so gentle and witty an observer that the movie casts a spell.

Erin Overbey, archive editor

Ian McEwans semi-Austenesque novel, Atonement.

At twenty-three, the author has had the nerve to ignore her misgivings and produce her dbut novel, White Teeth.

Philip Roths The Plot Against America.

Brokeback Mountain and The Chronicles of Narnia.

Lost in Translation and Dirty Pretty Things.

Eminem pleads his case.

Harry Potter explained.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Mary J. Bliges chronic brilliance.

Read more here:

Sunday Reading: A Cultural Review of the Aughts - The New Yorker

Shortly after the Mexican Revolution, the countrys leaders believed the best way to create a healthy young generation was through campaigns and efforts to minimize disability. In their eyes, disability both physical and intellectual was the effect of unhygienic living conditions or poor parenting. Minimize the cause, they figured, and the effect is ultimately reduced.

Susan Antebi, an associate professor in the department of Spanish & Portuguese in the University of Torontos Faculty of Arts & Science, says she wanted to dive into this period of history and study the perceptions and attitudes toward human differences elements of which are still perpetuatedtoday.

One of the unique aspects of my work is disability studies, says Antebi. I focus on departures from notions of normalcy, and on the ways such differences reshape our perceptions of history, as well as the injustices disabled people are often subjected to, historically and in the present day.

In Mexicos case, the approach to people living with disabilities in the early part of the 20th centuryaligned with the countrys overarching goal of eugenics the promotion of desired characteristics in order to improve future generations. While Antebi says Mexicos version of eugenics wasnt as harsh as those adopted by other countriesfor example, there were no sterilization programs for people with disabilities such as those conducted in Nazi Germany or the United States in the 1930s and 1940s she notes Mexicos government leaders still believed disability could be minimized.

Antebi says the topic has received relatively little attention.

It's a time period of very rich cultural production, says Antebi. People have worked a lot on the Mexican Revolution because it's such a tumultuous cultural period. But disability has not really been emphasized, and I thought that was something important to bring to the forefront.

That led Antebi to bring together Mexican literature, history, disability studies and personal reflections in her book,Embodied Archive: Disability in Post-Revolutionary Mexican Cultural Production,which was awarded theTobin Siebers Prize for Disability Studies in the Humanitieslate last year.

The title of the book refers to the experience of witnessing written documents, embodying them, or making them new through our experience, says Antebi. This witnessing as reactivation of the past also allows for a space through which to denounce historical and ongoing injustices.

Conducting archival research for the book, Antebi spent five months in Mexico City in 2014. She divided her time between the Archivo General de la Nacin (National Archive) and the Archivo Histrico de la Secretara de Salud Pblica (Public Health Archive).

There were many things that struck me certainly it's very disturbing, says Antebi. But my interest in the book was not just to study the contents of these documents, but also to write about the experience of encountering them in our contemporary world to think about what they mean, and what they come to mean in the present day.

In the archives, Antebi discovered a great deal of scrutiny paid to children, including anthropometric measurements of their bodies lung capacity, height and weight as well as their IQs.

Its very closely tied to notions of race and racialization, says Antebi. There's a sense in which the ideal Mexican population is Mestizo a mix of Indigenous and European ancestry coming together to forge a new and powerful race. And so, part of those measurements and interest in gradually purging the nation of unwanted differences coincide with that racial imperative.

Rigorous measuring and monitoring extended to the state of school buildings, with an emphasis on air quality, more hygienic spaces, lighting and even school desk and textbook placement.

Theres this biological metaphor that goes between the children who occupy the school and the health of the building, says Antebi. There were physicians who went into schools to monitor both the children and the buildings to make sure things were working properly.

In addition to frequent measurements and testing, there were also anti-alcohol campaigns, programs to eradicate syphilis, as well as efforts to enhance prenatal and postnatal care.

There were all kinds of social activities and programs to improve the health and robustness of the population, and ultimately create a positive impact and improve reproductive outcomes, says Antebi.

The efforts created a history of injustices for children with disabilities and their families.

The use of IQ tests, along with anthropometric testing, meant that schoolchildren were labeled as retrasados or delayed, and placed in different groups or sent to special schools, says Antebi.

Terminology such as idiots, imbeciles and feebleminded was used. Large sectors of the population were classified as abnormal because of their socioeconomic status, disability or appearance.

In some cases, the families of children with disabilities received public welfare. But many of them were kept in institutions against their will. Some children, either because of disabilities, behaviour or socioeconomic status, were sent to farm schools where they were expected to work to partially subsidize their cost of living.

One of the conclusions from my research is that eugenics, as a way of thinking,doesn't really end in the 1940s, says Antebi. Many of these ways of thinking about what constitutes a healthy child or a normal person continue and are perpetuated in different ways today.

Thats why she believes studying this history is so important.

The archive is not just a fixed repository in the past, its part of a disability genealogy through which we can go back and understand the connections and have a better understanding of how we conceive of differences today.

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U of T researcher explores perceptions of disability in post-revolutionary Mexico - News@UofT

Kathryn Paige Harden at Politics and Prose

Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality might sound like a book written by a 20th-century eugenicist, but its author, Kathryn Paige Harden, is far from that. A professor of clinical psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, director of the Developmental Behavior Genetics Lab, and co-director of the Texas Twin Project, Harden has spent years researching how DNA differences play a large role in educational and economic success to propose a new society where everyone thrives, regardless of how one fares in the genetic lottery. In her book, Harden chronicles the complicated history of genetics, sharing both her and other scientists findings, as well as personal experiences and analogies that help demonstrate how genetic inheritance can sometimes be sheer luck. Throughout Genetic Lottery, Harden challenges notions of racial superiority and eugenics to reclaim the field of genetics, arguing that we must acknowledge the importance (and power) of DNA to create a fairer world. On Jan. 24, at yet another Politics and Prose virtual event, Harden will be joined by Angela Duckworth, founder and the CEO of Character Lab, to discuss Genetic Lottery and how it can be applied to making real-life social change. The virtual talk starts at 6 p.m. on Jan. 24. Registration required. politics-prose.com. Free.

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City Lights: Professor and Author Kathryn Paige Harden at Politics and Prose - Washington City Paper

This weekends March for Life rally, the large anti-choice demonstration held annually in Washington DC to mark the anniversary of the Roe v Wade decision, has the exuberant quality of a victory lap. This, the 49th anniversary of Roe, is likely to be its last. The US supreme court is poised to overturn Roe in Dobbs v Jackson Womens Health, which is set to be decided this spring. For women in Texas, Roe has already been nullified: the court went out of its way to allow what Justice Sonia Sotomayor called a flagrantly unconstitutional abortion ban to go into effect there, depriving abortion rights to the one in 10 American women of reproductive age who live in the nations second largest state.

These victories have made visible a growing cohort within the anti-choice movement: the militias and explicitly white supremacist groups of the organized far right. Like last year, this years March for Life featured an appearance by Patriot Front, a white nationalist group that wears a uniform of balaclavas and khakis. The group, which also marched at a Chicago March for Life demonstration earlier this month, silently handed out cards to members of the press who tried to ask them questions. America belongs to its fathers, and it is owed to its sons, the cards read. The restoration of American sovereignty must follow the restoration of the American Family.

Explicit white nationalism, and an emphasis on conscripting white women into reproduction, is not a fringe element of the anti-choice movement. Associations between white supremacist groups and anti-abortion forces are robust and longstanding. In addition to Patriot Front, groups like the white nationalist Aryan Nations and the neo-Nazi Traditionalist Worker Party have also lent support to the anti-abortion movement. These groups see stopping abortion as part of a broader project to ensure white hegemony in addition to womens subordination. Tim Bishop, of the Aryan Nations, noted that Lots of our people join [anti-choice organizations] Its part of our Holy War for the pure Aryan race. That the growing white nationalist movement would be focused on attacking womens rights is maybe to be expected: research has long established that recruitment to the alt-right happens largely among men with grievances against feminism, and that misogyny is usually the first form of rightwing radicalization.

But the affinity goes both ways: just as the alt right loves the anti-choice movement, the anti-choice movement loves the alt right. In 2019, Kristen Hatten, a vice-president at the anti-choice group New Wave Feminists, shared racist content online and publicly identified herself as an ethnonationalist. In addition to sharing personnel, the groups share tactics. In 1985, the KKK began circulating Wanted posters featuring the photos and personal information of abortion providers. The posters were picked up by the anti-choice terrorist group Operation Rescue in the early 90s. Now, sharing names, photos, and addresses of abortion providers and clinic staff is standard practice in the mainline anti-choice movement, and the stalking and doxing of providers has become routine. More recently, anti-abortion activists have escalated their violence, returning to the murderous extremism that characterized the movement in the 1990s: In Knoxville, a fire that burned down a planned parenthood clinic on New Years Eve was ruled an arson. Maybe the anti-choice crowd is taking tips from their friends in the alt right.

Its not that the anti-abortion movements embrace of white nationalism is totally uncomplicated. When the Traditionalist Worker Party showed up at a Tennessee Right to Life march in 2018, the organizers shooed them off, and later issued a statement saying they condemned violence both from the right, and from left wing groups like antifa. Hatten was fired from her anti-choice job after a public outcry. The anti-choice movement has even started trying to appropriate the language of social justice. They posit equality between embryos and women, try to brand abortion bans as feminist, incessantly compare abortion to the Holocaust, and claim that abortion is an act rife with the potential for eugenic manipulation, in the words of supreme court Justice Clarence Thomas. Anti-choice groups are eager to claim the moral authority of historical struggles against oppression, even as they work to further the oppression of women.

But the link between the anti-choice movement and white supremacy is much older and more fundamental than this recent, superficial social justice branding effort. Before an influx of southern and eastern European immigrants to the United States in the latter half of the 19th century, abortion and contraception had only been partially and sporadically criminalized. This changed in the early 20th century, when an additional surge of migrants from Asia and Latin America calcified white American racial anxieties and led to white elites decrying the falling white birth rate as race suicide.

Abortion bans were quickly introduced nationwide. As the historian Leslie Raegan put it, White male patriotism demanded that maternity be enforced among white Protestant women. The emerging popular eugenics movement supported this campaign of forced birth for fit mothers, while at the same time implementing a widespread campaign of involuntary sterilization among the poor, particularly Black women and incarcerated women. Meanwhile, white women who sought out voluntary sterilization were discouraged or outright denied the procedure, a practice that is still mainstream in the medical field today.

In the current anti-choice and white supremacist alliance, the language of race suicide has been supplanted by a similar fear: the so-called Great Replacement, a racist conspiracy theory that posits that white Americans are being replaced by people of color. (Some antisemitic variations posit that this replacement is somehow being orchestrated by Jewish people.)

That the way to combat this, the right says, is to force childbearing among white people, to severely restrict immigration, and to punish, via criminalization and enforced poverty, women of color. These anxieties have always animated the anti-choice movement, and they have only become more fervent among the March for Lifes rank and file as conservatives become increasingly fixated on the demographic changes that will make America a minority-white country sometime in the coming decades. The white supremacist and anti-choice movements have always been closely linked. But more and more, they are becoming difficult to tell apart.

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White nationalists are flocking to the US anti-abortion movement - The Guardian