Category Archives: Eugenics

Twins! Twins! Ten-year-old Eva Mozes clung to her mother amidst the chaos of the selection platform at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Before arriving at the death camp, she had been stuffed into a train car on a seemingly endless journey from Hungary. Now, she and her twin sister Miriam pressed close as Nazi guards shouted orders in German.

Suddenly, an SS guard stopped in front of the identical girls. Are they twins? he asked their mother.

Is that good? she replied.

He nodded, and Eva Mozess life changed forever.The SS guard grabbed her and Miriam, whisking them away from their mother as they screamed and called her name. They never saw her again.

Eva and Miriam had just become subjects of a massive, inhumane medical experimentation program at Auschwitz-Birkenaua program aimed solely at thousands of twins, many of them children.

A group of child survivors behind a barbed wire fence at Auschwitz-Birkenau, on the day of the camps liberation on January 27, 1945. Twins Eva and Miriam Mozes are pictured on the far right.

Alexander Vorontsov/Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty Images

Led by physician Josef Mengele, the program turned twins like Eva and Miriam into unwilling medical subjects in experiments that exposed about 3,000 children atAuschwitz-Birkenauto disease, disfigurement and torture under the guise of medical research into illness, human endurance and more.

Twins were separated from the other prisoners during the massive selections that took place at the camps massive train platform, and whisked off to a laboratory to be examined. Mengele usually used one twin as a control and subjected the other to everything from blood transfusions to forced insemination, injections with diseases, amputations, and murder. Those that died were dissected and studied; their surviving twins were killed and subjected to the same scrutiny.

READ MORE:How the Nazis Tried to Cover Up Their Crimes at Auschwitz

Twin studies had helped scientists like Mengeles mentor justify what they saw as necessary discrimination against people with undesirable genetic characteristicsJews, Roma people, LGBTQ people, people with disabilities and others. But the twin experiments that had helped create the eugenics movement would, ironically, lead to the downfall of eugenics itself.

For eugenicists like Mengele, identical twins like the Mozes sisters were the perfect research subjects. Since they share a genome, scientists reasoned, any physical or behavioral differences in twins would be due to behavior, not genetics. Eugenicists held genetics responsible for undesirable characteristics and social conditions like criminality and poverty. They believed that selective breeding could be used to encourage socially acceptable behavior and wipe out undesirable tendencies.

Eva Mozes Kor attending a ceremony to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. She is holding a photograph of herself and her twin sister Miriam taken by the Soviets after the liberation of the camp.

Bjoern Steinz/Panos Pictures/Redux

By the time twin research began at Auschwitz-Birkenau in the 1940s, the use of twins in scientific experimentation was decades old. Though prior twin experiments had produced growing evidence that environment was as important as genetics, eugenics researchers clung to the idea that they could unlock new insights into nature and nurture through studying them.

One of them, Otmar von Verschuer, had significant power and influence in Nazi Germany. He authored texts that influenced Nazi policies toward Jews, Roma people and others, arguing that race had a biological basis and that inferior people could taint the Aryan race. An advocate for forced sterilization and selective breeding, von Verschuer collected genetic information on large numbers of twins, studying the statistics in an attempt to determine whether everything from disease to criminal behavior could be inherited. And he had a protege: a young physician named Josef Mengele.

Like his mentor, Mengele was vehemently racist and a devoted member of the Nazi Party. In 1943, he began working at Auschwitz-Birkenau as a medical officer. At first, Mengele was in charge of the Roma camp there, but in 1944 the entire remaining population of the camp was murdered in the gas chambers. Mengele was promoted to chief camp physician of the entire Birkenau camp, and became known for his brutal selections of incoming prisoners for the gas chambers.

READ MORE:This Midwife at Auschwitz Delivered 3,000 Babies in Unfathomable Conditions

Mengele wanted to continue the twin experiments he had begun withvon Verschuer, and now he had a captive populace on which to do so. Though his earlier experiments had been legitimate, his work in Auschwitz-Birkenau was not. Abandoning medical ethics and research protocols, Mengele began conducting horrific experiments on up to 1,500 sets of twins, many of them children.

German Nazi doctor and war criminal Josef Mengele.

Hulton Archive/Getty Images

The Mengele Twins received nominal protection from some of the ravages of life at Auschwitz-Birkenau. They were not selected for the gas chambers, lived in separate quarters, and were given additional food and medical care. In exchange, though, they became the unwilling subjects of inhumane experiments at the hands of Mengele, who gained a reputation as the Angel of Death for his power, his mercurial temper and his cruelty.

For Eva, life as a Mengele twin meant sitting naked for hours and having her body repeatedly measured and compared to Miriams. She withstood injections of an unknown substance that caused severe reactions. As twins, I knew that we were unique because we were never permitted to interact with anybody in other parts of the camp, she later recalled. But I didn't know I was being used in genetic experiments.

Eugenics itself was rooted in twin research. Frances Galton, a British scientist who coined the term eugenics in 1883, had used twin studies in his earliest eugenic research.Deeply influenced by his half-cousin Charles Darwins book The Origin of Species, Galton became intrigued by how and whether humans passed along traits like intelligence, and preoccupied with the potential of breeding desirable genetic traits into humans.

For Galton and other eugenics researchers, twins held the key to understanding which characteristics were genetic and which ones were environmental. Using data collected via self-reported questionnaires, Galton studied dozens of pairs of twins to determine how they were similar and different. He concluded that similarities between twins were due to their genetics. The one element that varies in different individuals, but is constant in each of them, is the natural tendency, he wrote. It inevitably asserts itself.

Though Galtons twin research was biased and seriously flawed by modern standards, it helped lay the foundation for the eugenics movement. It also convinced other eugenicists that twins were the ideal way to study nature and nurture. But though eugenicists hypothesized that twins could help them create more perfect humans, the results of twin experiments kept confounding scientists. In the 1930s, for example, a group of American researchers who compared twins found a large variance in IQ in twins who had been raised apart but nonetheless shared similar personalities and behavioral traits.

Though twins were the most favorable weapons for the study of the much-debated nature-nurture problem, they wrote, their conclusions suggested that the very qualities eugenicists thought they could encourage by monitoring marriage and eliminating individuals with undesirable traits from the gene pool didnt have to do with genetics at all.

The Nazis defeat ended Mengeles experimentation on twins at Auschwitz. At the end of the war, the Angel of Death" managed to escape prosecution. Shielded by Nazi sympathizers, he lived in South America until his death in Brazil in 1979.

READ MORE:The 7 Most Notorious Nazis Who Escaped to South America

In the aftermath of the war, scientists grappled with the aftermath of Nazi experimentation and the Holocausts use of eugenic principles in the name of genocide. In 1946, a group of German physicians who had carried out euthanasia and conducted medical experimentation in Nazi death camps were tried at Nuremberg during a 140-day-long trial. The trial resulted in seven death sentences and the Nuremberg Code, a set of research ethics that has influenced modern concepts of informed consent and medical experimentation.

Only 200 of the 3,000 twins subjected to medical experiments at Auschwitz survived. Among them were Eva and Miriam. In the 1970s, Eva Mozes Kor began lecturing about her experiences and seeking out other survivors. Eventually, she and Miriam formed a nonprofit called Children of Auschwitz Nazi Deadly Lab Experiments Survivors (CANDLES) and tracked down more than 100 other twin survivors, documenting their experiences and the health ramifications of the often unknown experiments they had been subjected to at Auschwitz.

Most records of experimentation at Auschwitz were destroyed, but the lives of people like Eva Mozes Kor, who died in July 2019 at age 85, bear witness to the twin experiments brutality. Ironically, the very type of experimentation Nazi physicians thought would uphold the pseudoscience they used to justify genocide ended up undermining the field of eugenics. In the face of unconvincing data revealed by twin studies and worldwide condemnation of Nazi medical experiments, scientists abandoned eugenics en masse and the field died out.

Today, the concept of twin studies has been challenged by research that demonstrates genetic variations even among identical twins. Buttwin studies are still used to learn more aboutage-related disease, eating disorders, sexual orientation and more, while a groundbreaking study of twin NASA astronauts is shedding new light on how microgravity affects the human body. But though twins remain invaluable to researchers today, twin studies are still a subject of debate among scientists eager to sidestep their hideous history.

READ MORE: The Jewish Men Forced to Help Run Auschwitz

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One of the most prominent buildings at USC stripped last year of the name of a leading eugenicist and former university president will instead honor Joseph Medicine Crow, a Native American alumnus who authored influential works about Indigenous history and culture, served in the U.S. Army during World War II and was awarded the Medal of Freedom, the nations highest civilian recognition.

In a move to reconcile with a racist chapter in its history, USC banished the name of Rufus B. von KleinSmid from the Center for International and Public Affairs in the heart of campus. Von KleinSmid held a leadership role in the California eugenics movement.

President Obama presents the Medal of Freedom to Joseph Medicine Crow in 2009.

(Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)

The university is planning a dedication ceremony in the spring to finalize the transition. In addition to the renaming, USC will offer scholarships for Native American students starting next fall, as a way to further Medicine Crows legacy, said USC President Carol L. Folt.

Students urged the university to remove von KleinSmids name after the campus community began confronting his involvement with the Human Betterment Foundation, a Pasadena-based eugenics group that supported a 1909 California law that authorized the forced sterilization of those deemed unfit. Von KleinSmid himself is said to have believed that people with defects should be sterilized.

As the universitys fifth president from 1921 to 1947, von KleinSmid led USC through an expansion that lifted the school to prestige. But his stance on sterilization was at direct odds with the universitys mission of inclusion, Folt said when the university announced the removal. A bust of von KleinSmid was also removed from campus after a unanimous vote from the board of trustees executive committee.

Folt said there was broad consensus to honor an alum who contributed greatly to society and would inspire students.

We wanted to make a very different statement than the name that had been there previously, and we wanted to recognize an alum, a person that has really had a big impact in his community and in the world, Folt said. We thought that every student that walked into that building and learned a bit about [Medicine Crow] is going to feel a bit prouder and a bit stronger about their own convictions and their own potential.

Universities across the nation have in recent years removed the names of campus figures after calls from alumni and students about their controversial or racist legacies. UC Berkeley, UC Hastings College of the Law and CalTech are among those that have stripped buildings or institutions of their titles.

To rename the building, the university put together the Center for International and Public Affairs Naming Committee, consisting of staff, faculty, students and alumni, to identify an alum who reflected the universitys values. After compiling more than 200 names, the committee unanimously agreed Medicine Crow was the right person to honor and the university received the support of his family.

For Native American students and alumni, the decision is meaningful to a group that is often underrepresented in media and academia.

Mato Standing Soldier, a member of the Oglala Lakota tribe of the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, graduated from USC in 2020. As a student, it became clear over the years that von KleinSmids role in supporting the eugenics movement needed to be addressed, he said.

As president of the Native American Student Assembly, he was a part of conversations to ensure the university was standing for students in the community. The naming for Medicine Crow shows Native students that a path in higher education is a space they too can occupy, he noted.

On a lot of these predominantly white institutions, Native kids can feel very silenced, and very underrepresented and very marginalized, Standing Soldier said. Seeing a name that is unapologetically Native can go a really long way.

Raegan Kirby, a USC junior and a member of the executive board of the Native American Student Assembly, said she viewed the naming as an example of cultural appreciation and shows how the university is taking the step of appreciation over appropriation. She added that for prospective Native students, it might give them a little bit of peace knowing they are represented at the school.

Medicine Crow, born in 1913 on the Crow Reservation in Montana, served as the last tribal war chief of the Apsaalook (Crow) Nation. He graduated from USC in 1939 with a masters degree in anthropology, the first from his tribe to earn a masters. He was on his way to earning a doctorate when World War II began. While serving, Medicine Crow captured 50 horses from a Nazi camp and engaged in hand-to-hand combat with a German soldier, whom he spared. USC later gave him an honorary doctorate degree.

In 2009, former President Obama awarded Medicine Crow with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. At the White House ceremony, Obama said Medicine Crows life reflects not only the warrior spirit of the Crow people, but Americas highest ideals.

He died in April 2016 at the age of 102.

Ron Medicine Crow, his son, said the family was grateful that the university is honoring his father, who used to recount his days as a student at USC and how he became friends with players on the football team. His father decided to attend USC after learning from his uncle that they offered scholarships for Native Americans, he recalled. When his father and mother got married, they traveled to Los Angeles and stopped by USC to see the campus.

We are very pleased and honored that USC would do this as a memorial and a tribute to Dad, he said, adding that he was looking forward to visiting Los Angeles for the dedication ceremony and retrace my dads footsteps walking the grounds of USC campus.

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USC building renamed to honor Native American alumnus - Los Angeles Times

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The field of eugenics a word derived from the Greek for well-born or of good birth was introduced in England in 1883 by a polymath named Francis Galton, a half-cousin of Charles Darwin. He coined the term and wrote a book about selective breeding in humans. Like horses and dogs, he proposed, people could be bred to promote positive characteristics, such as intelligence. (They cant, but animals probably can. These are the smartest dog breeds in America.)

In the United States a movement grew out of Galtons ideas, but with a different twist; eugenics offered an argument for keeping people with unfavored characteristics from having children. The concept gained popularity in the 1920s and 30s, supported by academics, scientists, and the progressive movement. A few states began to pass laws allowing for the compulsory segregation and sterilization of people seen as unfit to reproduce. Advocates argued that this practice was beneficial, not only to society at large, but to the victims, who would be spared the responsibility of raising children.

In 1927, a single sterilization in Virginia changed the course of the eugenics movement, giving it legitimacy and momentum. Carrie Buck, a 17-year-old inmate of the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, had given birth to a child deemed feebleminded at six months of age as a result of rpe by a foster family member. Like her mother and daughter, Buck was considered mentally deficient and authorities ordered that she be sterilized to avoid future pregnancies.

Buck challenged the order and her case went to the Supreme Court, which allowed the sterilization to proceed. The court held that, It is better for all the worldif society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. In the infamous concluding words of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Three generations of imbeciles is enough.

The case won wider acceptance for eugenics, and the number of sterilizations increased dramatically throughout the U.S. into the 1930s and beyond. Some 32 states eventually adopted legally documented eugenics programs involving sterilization, usually forced. (Fortunately, the promotion of eugenics doesnt need to be included in our listing of the worst thing about every state.)

Click here to see 32 states that used to sterilize their citizens

Poor people like Carrie Buck and women in particular were the primary victims. Foreigners and people of color were also targeted. Under the laws of most states, homosexuals, epileptics, criminals, the mentally deficient, and the insane, mostly from institutions and asylums, could be forcibly sterilized. Even when consent was required, it was often a quid pro quo for gaining release from a facility.

While sterilizations were still performed well beyond World War II, the Holocaust and mass forced sterilization in Nazi Germany (a practice influenced by American practices) helped end popular support for sterilization, and the 1960s and 70s saw the repeal of most state eugenics laws. In 2013, North Carolina became the first state to express regret for its eugenics history by setting up a fund to compensate victims still living.

Information on the 32 states with sterilization programs including the number and sex of victims, the years programs were in effect, and specific details about laws and practices in each state is drawn from research conducted by two groups of honors students at the University of Vermont as edited and amended by Lutz Kaelber, an associate professor of sociology at the university.

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The 32 States That Used to Sterilize Their Citizens - 24/7 Wall St.

Too frequently, the call for decolonisation translates into a call for diversity and inclusion. While the latter is important, LSEs Wendy Willems argues it is crucial to go a step further and ask how the act of including different vantage points disrupts dominant theoretical approaches and concepts, received histories, and canonical texts in the field of media and communication studies.

As Michel-Rolph Trouillot argued, any historical narrative is a particular bundle of silences. This also applies to the way we narrate the history of media institutions and technologies, as well as to how we document the historical emergence of the field of media and communication studies. A key task of media historians should be to unearth the fields multiple silences and to reveal how these are linked to the exercise of power as, in Trouillots words, the ultimate mark of power may be its invisibility; the ultimate challenge, the exposition of its roots.

In a 2014 Communication Theory article entitled Provincializing Hegemonic Histories of Media and Communication Studies: Toward a Genealogy of Epistemic Resistance in Africa, I critiqued how calls for the internationalising or de-Westernising of media and communication studies implicitly silence a much longer history of media and communication studies outside the so-called West. I argued that these calls suggested that scholars in the non-West had somehow not previously engaged in critical knowledge production on media and communication. My article reinscribed the epistemological and historical foundations of media and communication studies in Africa, which hegemonic histories of the field had marginalized. It called for an acknowledgment of the multiple genealogies of media and communication studies in different parts of the world.

Since my articles publication, demands for internationalization and de-Westernization have increasingly been replaced with calls for decolonization in the wake of the 2015 #RhodesMustFall protests at the University of Cape Town and other universities across the globe, as well as following the 2015 and 2020 #BlackLivesMatter protests. Demonstrations have pointed to the need for universities to transform in a number of ways, including teaching more diverse curricula, making higher education more accessible to students from marginalized economic backgrounds, revising teaching methodologies and research ethics to render them more democratic and less hierarchical, hiring a diverse pool of faculty, and addressing how universities have benefited from slavery or fed into colonialism through eugenics and scientific racism, as well as the need for reparations. Again, it is important to acknowledge here the longer genealogy of demands for decolonisation and liberation in the African context, ranging from W. E. B. Du Bois to Frantz Fanon to Ngg wa Thiongo.

These calls for decolonisation have provoked a response in our field, primarily from U.S.-based, African, and Latin American scholars whoif somewhat separatelyhave drawn attention to a multitude of problem areas; the continued marginalisation of scholars of colour in publication rates, citation rates, and editorial journal positions; the need for systemic redress; the silence on the history of European and American imperialism in graduate communication studies syllabi and canonical texts in media and communications; the characterisation of research on media, communication, and race as addressing peripheral rather than core issues; the need to centre Africa in media and communication studies and to problematize claims to universality in much of the work focused on the United States and Europe; the marginalisation of African media studies in the U.S. academy; and the relevance of decolonial approaches in making sense of media and communications in Africa and the Global South.

This body of work has once more highlighted that our field has always been raced, as evidenced by the white vantage points (presumed to be universal) adopted in canonical texts centred in the field, as well as by the longer history of institutionally racist practices in universities, journals, and professional associations. While both the older and newer calls for decolonisation may have different meanings in distinct geographical contexts, they are ultimately connected in their response to the afterlives of shared racialized histories of slavery and colonialism and their contestation of anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity in various parts of the world.

These studies offer much food for thought to historians of media and media studies. They point to the need for more inclusive and complicated histories of our field, ones that acknowledge both its multiple global origins and the racialized history of media and media studies. Yet increasingly, the notion of decolonisation runs the risk of turning into an empty metaphor, used to tick boxes or to attract new pools of student customers who can populate a diverse classroom that will enhance the competitiveness of the neoliberal university. Too frequently, the call for decolonisation translates into a call for diversity and inclusion. While the latter is important, it is crucial to go a step further and ask how the act of including different vantage points challenges, disrupts, subverts, and problematizes dominant theoretical approaches and concepts, received histories, and canonical texts in our field.

Armond Towns (2019) offers a good start here in critiquing both the way in which media history has been written and how received histories have become canonized in the field. His work on Marshall McLuhan shows McLuhans failure to acknowledge the crucial role of Black bodies in the emergence of Western media technologies. Relatedly, while media historians might have examined how the BBC promoted the idea of Empire through its overseas service, they have less frequently asked how histories of slavery and colonialism enabled the institutions emergence, and what implications this question might have for debates on reparations.

Similarly, Gurminder K. Bhambra highlights the erasure of slavery and colonialism in the Frankfurt Schools theorisation of modernity. As she argues, modernity did not emerge from separation or rupture, but through the connected and entangled histories of European colonisation (Bhambra 2021: 81). What, for example, would Jrgen Habermass eighteenth-century European public sphere look like if its emergence had been understood in the context of slavery and the slave trade? While the role of media and technology in perpetuating racism is relatively well documented, media and communication studies has yet to acknowledge the constitutive nature of race, recognising how histories of slavery and colonialism made possible particular media institutions and technologies.

The intimate histories extant among Africa, Europe, and the United States do not only relate to the history of media institutions and technologies but also to that of media and communication studies as a field. In his work on McLuhan, Towns highlights how McLuhan appropriated the racist ideas of John Carothers on the African mind. Carothers was a British psychiatristwho worked for the Kenyan colonial government. Other influential scholars in our field built their careers drawing on fieldwork in Africa. For example, Leonard W. Doob, a psychologist at Yale University associated with the field of cognitive psychology and propaganda studies, researched the link between media and modernisation. In his book Communication in Africa: A Search for Boundaries, one of the first academic monographs on communication in Africa, Doob discusses the sociocultural, linguistic, and psychological variables impinging on communication patterns in Africa. In other work, Doob sought to measure the levels of psychological modernisation in Africa and to assess the role of media in the process of modernisation based on empirical research in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and Somalia.

A number of studies have situated the work of modernisation scholars such as Wilbur Schramm and Daniel Lerner within the political context of the Cold War, but less often have commentators viewed those scholars research through the prism of race or sufficiently examined how their fieldwork in Africa shaped both their individual careers and early formations of media and communications studies on the African continent. Doing so would offer us a better understanding of the racialized and entangled histories of media and communication studies across different continents.

This article was previously published in the first volume of the new journal, History of Media Studies and is reposted with thanks. It givesthe views of the author and does not represent the position of theMedia@LSE blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Featured image: Desmond Bowles published under Creative Commons License CC BY-SA 2.0

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Disrupting received histories of media and media studies | Media@LSE - EUROPP - European Politics and Policy

Average IQ refers to the baseline score of the general population. Therefore, to have an average IQ means that you are within normal intelligence range.

However, don't worry too much about what your IQ score is, whether it's average or not. IQ scores are said to be great predictors of academic success and health, but they are also heavily criticized as poor indicators of overall intelligence because they cannot measure rationality, or the ability to make judgments in real-life situations.

Here's how average IQ varies depending on age, geographic location, and occupation.

The intelligence quotient (IQ) score is a number that attempts to measure an individual's intelligence based on their test performance in the areas of verbal comprehension, perceptual reasoning, memory, and processing speed.

It does this by measuring your chronological age how old you are in years against your mental age, which is measured by how well you perform on an IQ test.

There are many different kinds of IQ tests that use various equations to calculate IQ, but the fourth edition of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS-IV) is considered to be the gold standard in measuring intelligence, which has the following score range:

When interpreted properly, intelligence testing in children can identify specific learning disabilities, helping educators find the most effective teaching methods. However, treating IQ test scores as the end-all of learning may be detrimental.

"Misuse of the IQ test score can promote a channeling effect where an individual with a low score might be assigned to classes that do not expect students to excel. This kind of channeling can compound itself over a course of years," says Louis Matzel, PhD, professor of psychology at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.

It's important to note that many factors affect a person's IQ, including family income, place of residence, and even the amount of physical exercise you get. Therefore, always take IQ scores with a grain of salt.

Culture, philosophy, and a country's overall approach to learning can deeply affect how their citizens perform on intelligence tests. That's why, average IQ can differ dramatically depending on where you're looking on the map.

Here are the countries with the five highest average IQ scores:

Interestingly enough, another variable that may affect IQ scores is rates of infectious disease. Experts predict that infection causes the body to invest more energy into immune function, to the detriment of brain growth.

And it turns out, a 2011 study found that the US states with lower average IQ had higher levels of infectious disease, even after taking wealth and educational variation into account.

Various career paths generally require different skill sets and ways of thinking, so it's no wonder that average IQ for one career will be different from another.

However, research is extremely limited on this point. We were able to find one small 1967 study that used the WAIS to compare the average IQ scores of male scientists at the University of Cambridge:

The researchers noted that IQ does not appear to be related to career success. Seeing as this study was small and conducted over 50 years ago, the results may be different under today's circumstances.

That said, some experts challenge the notion that IQ score is correlated to job performance especially for complex jobs and doubt its ability to predict how well a person will do in their profession.

The Binet-Simon Scale, the first intelligence test, was created in 1905 by Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon. Binet was commissioned by the French government to develop a test that would identify low-aptitude students who can be placed in special schools.

"The IQ tests are about 100+ years old. Their history is problematic on many levels including its use with eugenics," says Daniel Wright, PhD, Dunn Family Endowed Chair and Professor of Educational Assessment at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Note: Eugenics is the attempt to influence the genetic composition of future generations by eliminating or "breeding out" undesired traits.

For example, in the early to mid 1900s, US eugenicists used IQ testing as a tool to promote racist-based segregation.

As a result, since the 1920s, Black scholars, among others, have challenged the validity of IQ tests and the ideology that Black people and certain ethnic groups are naturally mentally inferior. Many also argue that a single number can't stand for everything, says Wright.

At present, existing intelligence tests are constantly refined and improved to take research advances in neuropsychology into account. Even so, many still consider these traditional types of tests as outdated measures of human intelligence.

IQ scores vary from one individual to another and are affected by several factors. Although it can measure your abstract reasoning and logical thinking skills, it may not encompass the entirety of your mental abilities.

"Motivation, opportunity, and access to resources always matter more than a few points on an IQ test. Find out what you're good at, devote yourself to getting better at it, and do the best work that you can, and no one will ever wonder what your IQ score is," says Matzel.

Carla Delgado

Freelance Reporter, Insider Reviews

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Average IQ by geographic location and occupation - INSIDER

Coercedsterilizationisa shameful part of Americas history, and one doesnt have to go too far back to find examples of it. Used as a means of controlling undesirable populations immigrants, people of color, poor people, unmarried mothers, the disabled, the mentally ill federally-funded sterilization programs took place in 32 states throughout the 20th century. Driven by prejudicednotions of science and social control, these programs informed policies on immigration and segregation.

As historian William Deverell explains in a piece discussing the Asexualization Acts that led to the sterilization of more than 20,000 California men and women,If you are sterilizing someone, you are saying, if not to them directly, Your possible progeny are inassimilable, and we choose not to deal with that.

According toAndrea Estrada at UC Santa Barbara, forced sterilization was particularly rampant in California (the stateseugenics program even inspired the Nazis):

Beginning in 1909 and continuing for 70 years, California led the country in the number of sterilization procedures performed on men and women, often without their full knowledge and consent. Approximately 20,000 sterilizations took place in state institutions, comprising one-third of the total number performed in the 32 states where such action was legal. (from The UC Santa Barbara Current)

There is today one state, wrote Hitler, in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception [of citizenship] are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the United States. (from The L.A. Times)

Researcher Alex Stern, author of the new bookEugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in America, adds:

In the early 20th century across the country, medical superintendents, legislators, and social reformers affiliated with an emerging eugenics movement joined forces to put sterilization laws on the books. Such legislation was motivated by crude theories of human heredity that posited the wholesale inheritance of traits associated with a panoply of feared conditions such as criminality, feeblemindedness, and sexual deviance. Many sterilization advocates viewed reproductive surgery as a necessary public health intervention that would protect society from deleterious genes and the social and economic costs of managing degenerate stock.

Eugenicswas a commonly accepted means of protecting society from the offspring (and therefore equally suspect) of those individuals deemed inferior or dangerous the poor, the disabled, the mentally ill, criminals, and people of color.

More recently, California prisons are said to have authorized sterilizations of nearly 150 female inmates between 2006 and 2010.This article from the Center for Investigative reporting reveals how the state paid doctors $147,460 to perform tubal ligations that former inmates say were done under coercion.

But California is far from being the only state with such troubled practices. For a disturbing history lesson, check outthis comprehensive database for your states eugenics history. You can find out more information on state-by-state sterilization policies, the number of victims, institutions where sterilizations were performed, and leading opponents and proponents.

While Californias eugenics programs were driven in part by anti-Asian and anti-Mexican prejudice, Southern states also employed sterilization as a means of controlling African American populations.Mississippi appendectomies wasanother name for unnecessary hysterectomies performed at teaching hospitals in the South on women of color as practice for medical students. ThisNBC news article discusses North Carolinas eugenics program, including stories from victims of forced sterilization likeElaine Riddick. A third of the sterilizations were done on girls under 18, even as young as 9. The state also targeted individuals seen as delinquent or unwholesome.

For a closer look, see Belle Boggs For the Public Good, withoriginal video by Olympia Stone that features Willis Lynch, who was sterilized at the age of 14 while living in a North Carolina juvenile detention facility.

Gregory W. Rutecki, MD writes about the forced sterilization of Native Americans, which persisted into the 1970s and 1980s, with examples of young women receiving tubal ligations when they were getting appendectomies. Its estimated thatas many as 25-50 percent of Native American women were sterilized between 1970 and 1976.Forced sterilization programs are also a part of history in Puerto Rico,where sterilization rates are said to be the highest in the world.

Landmark Cases

The film No Ms Bebs follows the story of Mexican American women who were sterilized under duresswhile giving birth at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center in the 1960s and 1970s. Madrigal v. Quilligan, the case portrayed in the film, is one of several landmark cases thats affected the reproductive rights of underserved populations, for better or for worse.

Here are some other important cases:

Buck v. Bell: In 1927, Carrie Buck, a poor white woman, was the first person to be sterilized in Virginia under a new law. Carries mother had been involuntarily institutionalized for being feebleminded and promiscuous. Carrie was assumed to have inherited these traits, and was sterilized after giving birth. This Supreme Court case led to the sterilization of 65,000 Americans with mental illness or developmental disabilities from the 1920s to the 70s. (Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in reference to Carrie: Three generations of imbeciles are enough.)The court ruling still stands today. [Note: This story was also the subject of a 1994 made-for-TV movie starring Marlee Matlin.]

Excerpt from the documentary Fixed to Fail: Buck vs. Bell:

Relf v. Weinberger: Mary Alice and Minnie Relf, poor African American sisters from Alabama, were sterilized at the ages of 14 and 12. Their mother, who was illiterate, had signed an X on a piece of paper she believed gave permission for her daughters, who were both mentally disabled, to receive birth control shots. In 1974, the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Relf sisters, revealing that 100,000 to 150,000 poor people were being sterilized each year under federally-funded programs.

Eugenics Compensation Act: In December 2015, theUS Senate voted unanimously to help surviving victims of forced sterilization. North Carolina has paid $35,000 to 220 surviving victims of its eugenics program.Virginia agreed to give surviving victims $25,000 each.

Reproductive Justice Today

While the case in No Ms Bebs occurred forty years ago, issues of reproductive justice are still relevant today, as state laws continue to restrict access to abortion and birth control.Deborah Reid of the National Health Law program writes:

The concept of reproductive justice, which is firmly rooted in a human rights framework that supports the ability of all women to make and direct their own reproductive decisions. These decisions could include obtaining contraception, abortion, sterilization, and/or maternity care. Accompanying that right is the obligation of the government and larger society to create laws, policies, and systems conducive to supporting those decisions.

For organizations such as theNational Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, reproductive justice involves not only access to affordable birth control, abortion, and health care, but also providing access to women who are being held in immigration detention centers.

Its work that connects the dots between power inequities and bodily self-determination somethingthe eugenics movement sought to limit. AsNo Ms Bebsdirector Renee Tajima-Pea says in an interview with Colorlines: The reproductive justice framework is to make sure that people listen to the needs and the voices of poor women, women of color and immigrant women whove been marginalized.

2020 Updates:

The documentary Belly of the Beast tackles a more recent, equally shocking story of forced sterilizations in this case in womens prisons. As the women who investigate these cases discover, despite it being nearly forty years after being banned forced sterilization continued for decades in womens prisons, shielded by prison officials and doctors inside the correctional system. And may even still be happening. Read the interview with Belly of the Beast filmmaker Erika Cohn to learn more.

And as Cohn references in that interview, 2020 saw the revelation that there were forced sterilizations performed in an ICE detention center in Georgia. Learn more in this NPR piece, ICE, A Whistleblower and Forced Sterilization.

For Further Reading:Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America, by Alex SternStates of Delinquency: Race and Science in the Making of Californias Juvenile Justice System, by Miroslava Chavez-GarciaFit to Be Citizens: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1939, by Natalia Molina

Lisa Ko is a New York City-based writer and editor. Her writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Apogee Journal, Narrative, Hyphen, and many other publications.

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Unwanted Sterilization and Eugenics Programs in the United ...

This timeline gives an overview of scientific racism throughout the world, placing the Eugenics Record Officewithin a broader historical framework extending from Enlightenment-Era Europe to present-day social thought.

1759: Botanist Carl Linnaeus publishes the 10th edition of Systema Naturae, which is the first to fully describe the four races of man.

1770: Dutch naturalist Petrus Camper begins developing his facial angle formula, basing his ideal angle on Grecian statues.

1795: Anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach namesthe five races of man.

Early 1800s: Franz Joseph Gall develops cranioscopy, which is later renamed phrenology by his disciple Johann Spurzheim.

1810: John Caspar Lavater publishes the foundational text Essays on Physiognomy.

1828: George Combe publishes The Constitution of Man Considered in Relation to External Objects, linking phrenology and racial comparison.

1830s: Orson Fowler opens his Phrenological Cabinet in the heart of downtown Manhattan.

1832: Johann Gaspar Spurzheim invigorates the American phrenology movement with his series of lectures in Boston.

1839: Samuel George Morton introduces his theory of craniometry in Crania Americana.

1844: Scottish publisher Robert Chambers releases his Vestiges of the Natural History of Mankind, the most popular work of natural history prior to Darwins Origin of Species. Chambers argues that each race represents a different stage of human evolution with whites being the most evolved.

1852: American physician James W. Redfield writes Comparative Physiognomy, which equates each type of people with a specific animal.

1853: French thinker Arthur Comte Gobineau publishes An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Race, arguing for the primacy of the Aryan race.

1859: Charles Darwin release the first edition of On the Origin of Species.

1864: Herbert Spencer coins the phrase survival of the fittest in developing his theories of social Darwinism.

1865: French anthropologist Paul Broca develops his table chromatique for classifying skin color.

1866: Physician John Downs defines Mongolian idiocy which he argues is a regression to the Oriental stage of human development.

1869: Francis Galton publishes Hereditary Genius, outlining his theories or human breeding.

1876: Italian psychiatrist Cesare Lombroso releases Criminal Man, which outlines his theory of criminal anthropology.

1877: Richard Dugdale publishes The Jukes, which links crime and heredity.

1882: The Chinese Exclusion Act is passed, excluding Chinese laborers from immigration for ten years.

1883: Galton coins the term eugenics.

1886: Chief of the New York City Detective Bureau Thomas F. Byrnes publishes Professional Criminals of America in which he collects the mug shots of notable criminals.

1892: The Chinese Exclusion Act is renewed for ten more years under the Geary Act.

1893: The Worlds Columbian Exposition opens in Chicago with country pavilions organized according to scientific theories of race.

1889: Andrew Carnegie pens The Gospel of Wealth, justifying the extreme wealth of the robber barrons.

1900: Gregor Mendels theories of inheritance are rediscovered.

1902: The Chinese Exclusion Act is made permanent.

1904: Curator of physical anthropology at the Smithsonian Institute Ales Hrdlicka publishes Brocas table chromatique in the U.S.

1905: The German Society for Racial Hygiene is founded.

1905: Alfred Binet invents the IQ test for measuring intelligence.

1907: The Eugenics Education Society is founded in Britain.

1907: The first American compulsory sterilization law goes into effect in 1907 in Indiana with dozens of states following suit.

1910: Zoologist Charles Davenport founds the Eugenics Record Office at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory with a grant from Mrs. E.H. Harriman.

1911: The Joint-Congressional Dillingham Commission recommends reading and writing tests to slow undesirable immigration.

1911: Franz Boas publishes The Mind of Primitive Man arguing for the role of environmental factors in the apparent differences between races.

1912: The First International Conference of Eugenics is held in London, presided over by Charles Darwins son Leonard.

1913: Eugenicist Henry Goddard introduces the IQ test at Ellis Island.

1916: Madison Grant publishes The Passing of the Great Race, splitting Europe into three racial groups: Nordics, Alpines, and Mediterraneans.

1917: The Immigration Act of 1917 includes the Asiatic Barred Zone, which excludes nearly all immigrants from Asia.

1920: Lothrop Stoddard writes The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy.

1921: The Emergency Quota Act is signed into law, heavily restricting immigration from Eastern & Southern Europe.

1921: The Second International Congress of Eugenics is held at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

1923: Carl Bringham publishes A Study of American Intelligence, which uses the IQ testing done by Robert Yerkes to support differences in intelligence between races.

1924: The Immigration Act of 1924 becomes law imposing a quota system that favored Northern & Western Europe and excluding immigration from all of Asia.

1924: U.S. Congressman from New York Emanuel Celler gives his first major speech on the House floor against the Immigration Act of 1924.

1927: The Supreme Court upholds compulsory sterilization in Buck v. Bell.

1932: The Third International Eugenics Conference is held at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. ERO Director Charles B. Davenport presides.

1932: The Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences is released with many of the anthropology articles written by Boasians, not Grantians.

1933: The Third Reich enacts the first German compulsory sterilization law.

1935: The Carnegie Institution of Washington orders an external scientific review of the ERO, and finds its records unsatisfactory for the scientific study of human genetics.

1937: Madison Grant dies.

1937: The Pioneer Fund is founded by Wickliffe Draper to support racial research. ERO superintendent Harry Laughlin serves as its first president.

1939: The Eugenics Record Office shuts down.

1943: Chinese Exclusion is repealed and a quota is given of 105 immigrants per year.

1952: The McCarran-Walter bill is passed, revising but not eliminating the quota system of immigration.

1965: The Hart-Celler Act repeals the immigration quota system and establishes a new system based on skills and family relation.

1994: Richard J. Hernstein and Charles Murray release The Bell Curve which argues for racial difference in IQ.

1998: The American Anthropological Association issues a statement on race, concluding that contemporary science makesclearthat human populations are not unambiguous, clearly demarcated, biologically distinct groups.

2003: North Carolina finally repeals its compulsory sterilization law.

2014: New York Times journalist Nicholas Wade argues for race-based science inA Troublesome Inheritance.

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Timeline of Scientific Racism - Haunted Files | A/P/A | NYU

Scientists who fail to address the troubled histories of their disciplines can easily repeat the errors of the past.

That was the central argument of geneticist Adam Rutherford, an honorary senior research fellow at UCL, in a conversation on Why Science Needs History, which formed part of this yearsBeing Humanfestival of the humanities.

His own field of biology, he told festival director Sarah Churchwell, professor of American literature and public understanding of the humanities at the University of Londons School of Advanced Studies, had tainted origins. It did not develop in parallel with European expansionism and colonialismbut in service to themIt starts with [Carl] Linnaeus, who [in 1758] classifies four types of humans:Homo Africanus, Asiaticus, AmericanusandEuropeanus.The first three are describedwith value judgements about being haughty, lazy, unintelligent and sexually capricious, whileEuropeanusis described as white, blond, beautiful, governed by laws and elegant and inventiveLinnaeus taxonomic system is what biologists use to classify all organisms and the roots of that are fundamentally in the service of white supremacy.

Another classic case of how science or pseudoscience can be used serve political goals came in the 19th century when Charles Darwins half-cousin, Francis Galton, developed eugenics as a way to mould human populations to be better, to purge the weak and enhance the characteristics deemed positive.

All this remained highly relevant in an age of DNA testing.

DNA analysis had certainly proved crucial, Dr Rutherford pointed out, in demonstrating that Neanderthals are not our evolutionary cousins, they were our ancestors and in identifying the bones found in a car park in Leicester as those of Richard III. Yet it was still just one tool which needed to sit alongside all the traditional forms of knowing the past in a complementary way. When it began to emerge as plausible way of understanding history, people got overexcited and some geneticists started behaving badly in assuming our evidence is better than yours.

This had sometimes led, Dr Rutherford suggested, to a fetishisation of what DNA is and what it can doI spend a lot of time hanging around racist, neo-Nazi and white supremacist forums online and they are obsessed with DNA tests, racial purity and race mixing, because their whole ideology depends on a notion of white purity.

Asked by Professor Churchwell how we can reframe the narrative, Dr Rutherford replied that scientists have to be better at historythere is a tendency among my brethren to regard our evidence base and academic standards for the pursuit of truth to be somehow higher. A lot of scientists think that history is easy.

Yet many scientific researchers, he went on, were very rigorous in assessing evidence from their labs but really, really casual about reading Wikipedia or one book and thinking that they understand the cultural context of an idea related to their fieldA lot of scientists dont go into science to learn about the histories of their field, but maybe thats not a choice. Otherwise we just do the same shit over and over again.

matthew.reisz@timeshighereducation.com

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Adam Rutherford: scientists have to be better at history - Times Higher Education (THE)

Kamden Strunk, associate professor in the College of Educations Department of Educational Foundations, Leadership and Technology, recently published an article in Inside Higher Ed. Entitled Equity and Justice in Teaching Quantitative Methods, the article states that while methods are often considered value-free and unbiased, instructors must recognize how classroom practices can reinforce oppressive ideologies and narratives. He documents the historical entanglements of quantitative methods (and the people who created them) with oppressive and discriminatory intellectual traditions like eugenics. Given those entanglements, Strunk presents some practical suggestions for instructors teaching quantitative methods to engage with and work through the histories of these methods and their contemporary applications.

This is a short essay that arises from my writings on equity and justice in quantitative methods, Strunk said. The focus is on some basic moves that all quantitative methods instructors can make in the way of harm reduction, as well as more advanced moves to center equity and justice work in their teaching.

In the essay, Strunk writes that quantitative methods and the courses in which they are taught often come across as if they are neutral, value-free and unbiased.

However, the history of quantitative methods demonstrates an entanglement with eugenics, sexism, heterosexism, ableism and colonialism, Strunk said. Researchers have begun to grapple with those issues and propose ways forward in quantitative methods. But what about the courses? How might quantitative methods courses and their instructors possibly unintentionally contribute to and reify oppressive ideologies?

The goal is to help instructors move toward equity in their teaching and course designs.

Strunk is the author of two research methods textbooks (one focused on SPSS software, and the other on jamovi software) as well as a free online supplement designed to help instructors incorporate research on racism into their methods coursework.

The article in its entirety is available online.

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COE prof Kamden Strunk publishes article on harm reduction in teaching quantitative methods - College of Education - Auburn's College of Education

Racial responses to immigration throughout the history of the United States. It begins with the arrival of the first non-white immigrants on U.S. shores during Californias gold rush. While the United States was actively attempting to increase immigration from northern and Western Europe, as soon as a different group of people began to arrive, Americans developed mechanisms to exclude them. In the 1870s, the slogan was and whatever happens the Chinese must go, and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 did exactly that: exclude non-white immigration from China. By the 1890s, a wide range of different immigrants sailed to American ports who did not look like the northern Europeans who were the first wave of settlers.

V. S. McClatchy, the newspaper publisher, president of the Associated Press, and virulent anti-Asian campaigner, embodied the growing animus toward immigrants through his writings and testimony before congress as he pushed for a ban on all asian immigration. Politicians set out to stop the new arrivals, and scholars promoted the superiority of the Nordic race through eugenics and race pseudoscience. In the 1920s, President Calvin Coolidge campaigned to keep America American and signed into law the Johnson-Reed Immigration act of 1924, which banned Asian immigration and severely curtailed immigration from anywhere outside northern Europe. Senator David Reed of Pennsylvania, the co-author of the law that is commonly referred to as the national origins quotas, wrote an article that ran on the front page of The New York Times under the title America of the melting pot comes to an end. Reed concluded, We have closed the doors just in time to prevent our nordic population being overrun by lower races. In the 1930s and 1940s, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime took eugenics to its grisly conclusion with the "Final Solution" and the murder of 6 million Jews and other minorities, which forced a national reckoning in Germany with the consequences of racial pseudoscience and a disavowal. In the United States, there was never a complete reckoning with the race science that justified the 1924 national origins quotas. Although the underlying pseudoscience was disproved, the immigration policies that were created based on eugenics persisted through the 1960s. Obscure foundations like the Pioneer Fund continued to provide money for eugenics research and white supremacist causes. Even as the Immigration act of 1965, which was passed as part of the civil rights movement, removed the discriminatory national origins quotas, Senator Ted Kennedy pledged that the racial makeup of America would not be affected: our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually The ethnic mix of this country will not be upset. Kennedys pledge turned out to be wrong, and a new anti-immigrant movement emerged in the 1970s at the intersection of environmental population control efforts and white supremacy, mirroring the eugenics and white supremacist coalition of the 1920s.

In the late 20th century, John Tanton, a small-town ophthalmologist in upstate Michigan, built an anti-immigrant movement from scratch by founding dozens of different organizations and courting donors like Cordelia Scaife May, who was one of the wealthiest people in the United States. even as the Tanton network of anti-immigrant groups including FAIR, CIS, and Numbers USA eventually distanced themselves from Tantons racist writings and affiliations, Scaife Mays funding dramatically increased their influence in Washington, D.C., and around the country. The Tanton network built alliances with conservative politicians like Colorado Representative Tom Tancredo and Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions. They also spread their anti-immigrant message through right-wing radio hosts and like-minded media figures such as former CNN and Fox Business host Lou Dobbs and Steve Bannon, then chief executive at Breitbart News, as they looked for a presidential candidate that could take their anti-immigrant campaign to the White House. They found him in 2016, when Donald Trump ran for president on a pledge to build a wall to stop an invasion of criminals, rapists, and murders from crossing the border. as president, he enacted a Muslim ban and sought to stop all immigration to the United states in order to put America First and Make America great again. Even though Trump lost in 2020, the fact that over 74 million people voted for him demonstrated that his brand of nativism continues to be a potent force in American politics.

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The White Supremacist Great Replacement Theory Has Deep Roots - Teen Vogue