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Category Archives: Eugenics
Canadas policies are a death sentence for disabled people. The country must reckon with its modern eugenics – Toronto Star
Posted: December 28, 2022 at 11:23 pm
Canadas policies are a death sentence for disabled people. The country must reckon with its modern eugenics Toronto Star
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Op-Ed: Eugenics is making a comeback. Stop it in its tracks – Los …
Posted: November 23, 2022 at 4:05 am
Politicians often flatter their audiences, but at a rally in Bemidji, Minn., last month, President Trump found an unusual thing to praise about the nearly all-white crowd: its genetics. You have good genes, he insisted. A lot of it is about the genes, isnt it, dont you believe? The racehorse theory. You have good genes in Minnesota.
In case it was not clear from the sea of white faces that he was making a point about race, Trump later said the quiet part out loud. Every family in Minnesota needs to know about Sleepy Joe Bidens extreme plan to flood your state with an influx of refugees from Somalia, from other places all over the planet, he declared.
Trumps ugly endorsement of race-based eugenics got national attention, but in a presidency filled with outrages, our focus quickly moved to the next. Besides, this wasnt the first time wed heard about these views. A Frontlinedocumentary reported in 2016 that Trump believed the racehorse theory of human development that he referred to in Minnesota that superior men and women will have superior children. That same year, the Huffington Post released a video collecting Trumps statements on human genetics, including his declarations that Im a gene believer and Im proud to have that German blood.
On eugenics, as in so many areas, the scariest thing about Trumps views is not the fact that he holds them, but that there is no shortage of Americans who share them. The United States has a long, dark history with eugenics. Starting in 1907, a majority of states passed laws authorizing the sterilization of people deemed to have undesirable genes, for reasons as varied as feeblemindedness and alcoholism. The Supreme Court upheld these laws by an 8-1 vote, in the infamous 1927 case Buck vs. Bell, and as many as 70,000 Americans were sterilized for eugenic reasons in the 20th century.
Americas passion for eugenics waned after World War II, when Nazism discredited the idea of dividing people based on the quality of their genes. But in recent years, public support for eugenics has made a comeback. Steve King, a Republican congressman from Iowa, tweeted in 2017, We cant restore our civilization with somebody elses babies. The comment struck many as a claim that American children were genetically superior, though King later insisted he was concerned with the culture, not the blood of foreign babies.
Eugenics has also had a resurgence in England, where the movement was first launched in the 1880s by Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin. In February, Andrew Sabisky, an advisor to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, resigned after it was revealed that he had reportedly written blog posts suggesting that there are genetic differences in intelligence among races, and that compulsory contraception could be used to prevent the rise of a permanent underclass. Richard Dawkins, one of Britains most prominent scientists, added fuel to the fire by tweeting that although eugenics could be criticized on moral or ideological grounds, of course it would work in practice. Eugenics works for cows, horses, pigs, dogs & roses, he said. Why on earth wouldnt it work for humans?
There is reason to believe the eugenics movement will continue to grow. Americas first embrace of it came at a time when immigration levels were high, and it was closely tied to fears that genetically inferior foreigners were hurting the nations gene pool. Eugenicists persuaded Congress to pass the Immigration Act of 1924, which sharply reduced the number of Italian, Jewish and Asian people allowed in.
Today, the percentage of Americans who were born outside the United States is the highest it has been since 1910, and fear of immigrants is again an animating force in politics. As our nation continues to become more diverse, the sort of xenophobia that fueled Trumps and Kings comments is likely to produce more talk of better genes and babies.
It is critically important to push back against these toxic ideas. One way to do this is by ensuring that people who promote eugenics are denounced and kept out of positions of power. It is encouraging that Sabisky was forced out and that King was defeated for reelection in his Republican primary in June. Hopefully, Trump will be the next to go.
Education, including an honest reckoning with our own tragic eugenics history, is another form of resistance. It is starting to happen: Stanford University just announced that it is removing the name of its first president, David Starr Jordan, a leading eugenicist, from campus buildings, and that it will actively work to better explain his legacy. We need more of this kind of self-scrutiny from universities like Harvard, Yale and many others that promoted eugenics and pseudo race science, as well as institutions like the American Museum of Natural History, which in 1921 hosted the Second International Eugenics Congress, at which eugenicists advocated for eliminating the unfit.
Trumps appalling remarks in Minnesota show how serious the situation is now. Seventy-five years after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, a United States president not only spoke about good genes in racialized terms he believed that his observations would help him to win in the relatively liberal state of Minnesota. It is crucial that everyone who understands the horrors of eugenics works to defeat these views before they become any more popular.
Adam Cohen, a former member of the New York Times editorial board, is the author of Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck and, this year, Supreme Inequality: The Supreme Courts Fifty-Year Battle for a More Unjust America.
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Eugenics, Anti-Immigration Laws Of The Past Still Resonate Today …
Posted: November 21, 2022 at 3:15 am
The Statue of Liberty, which stands on Ellis Island in New York Harbor, was the America's busiest immigrant inspection station from 1892 until 1954. Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images hide caption
The Statue of Liberty, which stands on Ellis Island in New York Harbor, was the America's busiest immigrant inspection station from 1892 until 1954.
Nearly 100 years ago, Congress passed a restrictive law that cut the overall number of immigrants coming to the United States and put severe limits on those who were let in.
Journalist Daniel Okrent says that the eugenics movement a junk science that stemmed from the belief that certain races and ethnicities were morally and genetically superior to others informed the Immigration Act of 1924, which restricted entrance to the U.S.
"Eugenics was used as a primary weapon in the effort to keep Southern and Eastern Europeans out of the country," Okrent says. "[The eugenics movement] made it a palatable act, because it was based on science or presumed science."
Okrent notes the 1924 law drastically cut the number of Jews, Italians, Greeks and Eastern Europeans that could enter the country. Even during World War II, when hundreds of thousands of people were displaced and dying, access remained limited. The limits remained in place until 1965, when the Immigration and Nationality Act ended immigration restrictions based on nationality, ethnicity and race.
Okrent sees echos of the 1924 act in President Trump's hard-line stance regarding immigration: "The [current] rhetoric of criminality, the attribution of criminality not to individual criminals but to hundreds of thousands of people of various nationalities that's very similar to the notion of moral deficiency that was hurled by the eugenicists at the Southern and Eastern Europeans of the 1910s and '20s."
Okrent's new book is The Guarded Gate.
The Guarded Gate
Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America
by Daniel Okrent
On what immigration was like at the turn of the 20th century, before the Immigration Act of 1924
Ellis Island opens in 1892 and within a few years it becomes one of the busiest port spots anywhere in the U.S. Ellis Island was a teeming hive of activity as hundreds of thousands in some years more than a million immigrants came pouring through. [It] was a very, very busy place and a very alienating place for a lot of people, because of the examination that people had to go through, particularly for tuberculosis, trachoma and other diseases. But once through the line, and then onto the ferry boat that took people to Manhattan, it was really a wonderful place to have been.
On the Immigration Act of 1924, and the quotas set up to restrict immigration
First, there is an overall quota. At various times it was 300,000 people, then it got chopped down to ... 162,000 people. ... The second part is where did these people come from? And it was decided that, well, let's continue to reflect the population of America as it has become, so we will decide where people can come from based on how many people of their same nationality were already here. ...
If 10 percent of the current American population came from country A, then 10 percent of that year's immigrants could come from country A. Except and this is probably the most malign and dishonest thing that came out of this entire movement they didn't do this on the basis of the 1920 census, which had been conducted just four years before, or the 1910, or even the 1900. But those numbers were based on the population in 1890, before the large immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe had begun. So to any question about whether there was any racist or anti-Semitic or anti-Italian intent, this established there clearly was. ...
... in the year before the first of the quota laws went to effect, more than 220,000 Italians came into the U.S. And the year after, under the quota, it was fewer than 4,000 ...
Daniel Okrent
So if you take the Italians, in the year before the first of the quota laws went to effect, more than 220,000 Italians came into the U.S. And the year after, under the quota, it was fewer than 4,000 and similar numbers stretched across Eastern and Southern Europe. Suddenly the door has slammed in the faces of those people who had been coming in the largest numbers, based not only on bogus science, but based on a manipulation of American history itself.
On how eugenics began
The origin of eugenics was in England in the latter half of the 19th century. It really comes out of Darwin in a way, out of some very good science. Darwin upsets the entire balance of the scientific world with his discovery and the propagation of the ideas of evolution. And then, once you establish that we are not all derived from the same people from Adam and Eve which was the prevailing view at the time, then we learned that we are not all the same. We are not all brothers, if you wish to take that particular position. And the early eugenicists believed that and thought that we could control the nature of the population of a nation the U.K. at first, or the U.S. by selective breeding. Let's have only the "good" breed with the "good," and let's not let the less-than-good breed.
On how eugenicists believed morality was an inherited trait
You find some very well-established scientists, [Henry] Fairfield Osborn, the head of the American Museum of Natural History for 25 years, he outright declared that it is not just intelligence, it is also morality that is inherited, and criminality is inherited. It's really stunning to think that people who are very, very well-credentialed in the natural sciences could believe these things. But if you begin your belief by thinking that certain peoples are inferior to other peoples, it's very easy to adapt your science to suit your own prejudice.
On the evaluations to determine which ethnic groups were the smartest
There were any number of tests in various places, almost all of them of equal unreliability to determine whether people were of sufficient intelligence. One of the most famous ones was the so-called "Alpha Test" that was given to nearly 2 million soldiers in World War I by Robert M. Yerkes, who is now memorialized in the Yerkes Primate Research Center in Atlanta, a federal facility.
Yerkes gave tests that included questions that were almost [like] Jeopardy questions, although in reverse. A question like: "Is Bud Fisher a (choose one): outfielder; cartoonist or novelist?" If you've just been in the country for five years and you don't speak English terribly well, how are you possibly going to answer a question like that? But it was taken seriously as a measure of intelligence.
On how Trump's hard-line position on immigration echoes the anti-immigration and eugenicist sentiments of the early 1900s
When you choose your immigrants, when you choose your next door neighbors on the basis of their ethnicity or their race rather than the nature of the individual him- or herself, you're engaged in, in this case, official legal discrimination.
Daniel Okrent
I think that one could say that today's Central Americans and today's Muslims ... are the equivalent of 1924's Jews and Italians, or ... the Jews and Italians then were treated and regarded as these Latin American and Muslim nationalities are today. When you choose your immigrants, when you choose your next door neighbors on the basis of their ethnicity or their race rather than the nature of the individual him- or herself, you're engaged in, in this case, official legal discrimination.
Sam Briger and Mooj Zadie produced and edited the audio of this interview. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the Web.
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Eugenics, Anti-Immigration Laws Of The Past Still Resonate Today ...
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Eugenics: Its Origin and Development (1883 – Present) – Genome.gov
Posted: October 15, 2022 at 5:26 pm
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Francis Galton (pictured), Charles Darwins cousin, derived the term eugenics from the Greek word eugenes, meaning good in birth or good in stock. Galton first used the term in an 1883 book, Inquiries into Human Fertility and Its Development. Francis Galton (pictured), Charles Darwins cousin, derived the term eugenics from the Greek word eugenes, meaning good in birth or good in stock. Galton first used the term in an 1883 book, Inquiries into Human Fertility and Its Development.
We greatly want a brief word to express the science of improving stock, which is by no means confined to questions of judicious mating, but which, especially in the case of man, takes cognizance of all influences that tend in however remote a degree to give to the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had. The word eugenics would sufficiently express the idea.
Galton believed that eugenics could control human evolution and development. In his writings, he argued that abstract social traits, such as intelligence, were a result of heredity. In his book, he claimed that only higher races could be successful. Galtons writings reflected prejudiced notions about race, class, gender and the overwhelming power of heredity.
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Eugenics: Its Origin and Development (1883 - Present) - Genome.gov
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150000 Black Women Were Forced Into the Eugenics Program – History of Yesterday
Posted: at 5:26 pm
ince the start of eugenics in the 19th century, it has been one of the most debated ideologies within modern history, at least from an ethical perspective. The idea of human sterilization was invented by British explorerFrancis Galton who was inspired by Charles Darwins theory of natural selection. Due to the rise of hereditary diseases, natural selection in his eyes seemed like the best medical practice in combating these diseases and a way to remove these diseases for future generations.
During the same period of time, people around the world started to combat racism and fight for human equality as one racial prejudice seen among minorities was the higher chance of diseases or hereditary diseases being spread although medicine within the 19th century didnt permit an accurate check of hereditary diseases within ones organism.
The world of medicine (especially western) has its own section of racial prejudice where it seems to treat patients of different color differently, as if they are a totally different species, presenting (in the eyes of the western doctors at the time) more vulnerability towards hereditary diseases whilst having a higher resilience to pain, as presented in some of my works: The Myth of Black People Not Feeling Pain Is Still Believed to This Day
The biggest efforts for the eugenics program took place in America and mostly pointed toward African American and Hispanic citizens as well as mainly towards the female population. In my eyes, taking away a womans ability to give birth is pretty much like taking away her femininity and the most beautiful gift that God has given to women.
The 20th century was a long-lasting fight for the African American citizens of the United States as well as other minority groups that were seen as different due to their physical appearance. Racial prejudice and the fight for equality had become the tensest during the 1960s, especially with Martin Luther Kings movement within the United States.
Sterilization within the United States publicity began around the 1910s, and aimed to be applied by all the States of America. Although it was very much supported by the government, this program was very much influenced by racial groups such as theNeo-Malthusianswho believed that the world is overpopulated and that is what will lead to its ecological collapse.
By 1913 many norther states were already allowed by law to perform eugenics sterilization purely based on eugenic motives (avoidance of hereditary diseases).By 1913, many states had or were on their way to having eugenic sterilization laws. (Source: Boston Medical Library)
Within the eugenics program, their idea was that poverty is created due to overpopulation, and since most African Americans at the time were part of the lower class, it should be them to be sterilized above everyone else. The focus was not just on poverty, but on the finest genes and having the finest baby be born. The white population within America really made a big thing out of it by even having contests such as the Fitter Family contest or Better Baby contests.
The idea was not so much focused on creating or having the perfect race, but more like developing and reproducing the perfect white human.
At first, the group focused more on educating people below the poverty line aboutcontraceptives and sexual education. Seeing that it wasnt working, the people within the group being quite powerful, influenced the government towards a eugenics program (amongst many other external influencers).
The population was really easy to influence and indoctrinate with the idea behind the eugenics program, especially with the rise of all diseases and epidemics within the US during the 20th century. Another issue was that the population didnt really understand with exactitude in what conditions hereditary disease can be transmitted. This gave them another reason to become more racially inclined in the late 1940s and approve on an ethical level of the eugenics program when it came to people of a different color.Hereditary Genius 1869 by Francis Galton (Source: The British Library)
People did not care about the history of eugenics, such as the use of eugenics by the Nazis to remove the Jewish population within Germany in the late 1930s, early 1940s, something which also focused on the correlation between eugenics and racism. The idea of human sterilization started by Francis Galton has racism at its pillars, as with the idea of eugenics,he wanted to create the perfect race, this argument is presented by him in his bookHereditary Geniuspublished in 1869.
Since 1933 and up to 1974, between 100,000 and 150,000 black women have taken part within the eugenics program, most of them being forced and threatened by doctors and other racist groups. A small number were actually persuaded to deliberately take part in the program with small incentives or via other persuasive means. This is very much an argued number as many of the women that took part were forced and done off the record.
What is even more interesting is that the eugenics program continued even after forcing people into the eugenics program became illegal within the United States in 1974. This just adds up to the long list of human rights that have been taken from women of color within America, but the main focus should be on how the world was ok with eugenics in the first place.
Forceful sterilizationstill endures today within America, mainly in female prisons. A survey taken in 2011 by the state of California showed thatbetween 1997 and 2010 approximately 1,400 women within California prisons were forcedinto the eugenics program.
Having the ability to give life is the most human ability in my opinion, just like everything in this world has the right to reproduce and retain its legacy, so we should all. Sadly, knowing that forceful eugenics still takes place in some parts of the world and seeing the world wanting to take away a womans ability to give birth just makes me want to lose hope in humanity.
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20 million black babies have been aborted since Roe v. Wade. Where is the equity in that? – Washington Examiner
Posted: at 5:26 pm
Democrats love to talk about abortion and systemic racism, just not in the same conversation.
The National Right to Life Center estimates that by the end of 2021, 63.5 million abortions had been performed in the United States since the Supreme Courts 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. Nearly 40% of women who seek abortions are African American, which is astounding, considering this demographic made up just 13.6% of the population at the time of the 2020 census. This likely means that over 20 million black babies have been aborted during the past 50 years.
20 million equates to 6% of the total U.S. population. Its also approximately 45% of the current black American population of 45 million. And, had these children been born, blacks would represent about 20% of the total population. Clearly, abortion has had an enormous effect on blacks in America.
THE FIVE STATES THAT WILL HAVE ABORTION MEASURES ON THE BALLOT IN NOVEMBER
In August 2019, then-New York Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet assembled his troops to introduce the controversial 1619 Project, their deliberate attempt to "reframe Americas history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are."
The editors of the "paper of record" had decided that systemic racism should become the central issue in the upcoming presidential campaign. Baquet told his staff, "Race in the next year and I think, to be frank, what I hope you come away from this discussion with race in the next year is going to be a huge part of the American story."
Following George Floyds death in May 2020, systemic racism exploded into the national debate. Suddenly, every institution, the U.S. justice system, our history, our Founding Fathers, and of course, every Republican, was declared racist. Woke corporations forced employees to attend diversity training sessions to learn how to be "less white." And demands for equity became ubiquitous.
Planned Parenthood was also forced to recognize its own racist roots. The group admitted that Margaret Sanger, the organizations founder, was a racist with "harmful connections to the eugenics movement." Sanger established a predecessor organization, "The Negro Project," in 1939. In turn, Planned Parenthood removed Sangers name from its Manhattan health clinic and renamed nearby "Margaret Sanger Square." In a later, more formal declaration that it called "a reckoning," Planned Parenthood acknowledged that Sanger was a white supremacist. The group also confirmed that Sanger delivered a speech to "a womens auxiliary branch of the Ku Klux Klan in Silver Lake, New Jersey, in 1926."
The statement said Sanger "believed in eugenics an inherently racist and ableist ideology that labeled certain people unfit to have children." It added that Sangers actions had "undermined reproductive freedom and caused irreparable damage to the health and lives of generations of Black people, Latino people, Indigenous people, immigrants, people with disabilities, people with low incomes, and many others."
The racial disparities between abortion rates for black and white women in America cannot be denied. In his concurrence in the 2019 abortion case Box v. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote: "There are areas of New York City in which black children are more likely to be aborted than they are to be born alive and are up to eight times more likely to be aborted than white children in the same area." Unfortunately, renaming a clinic in New York City and disavowing the organizations founder are woefully insufficient to compensate for the evils put in motion by this repellent woman and perpetuated by her successors.
So, yes, lets talk about abortion and systemic racism in the same conversation.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Elizabeth Stauffer is a contributor tothe Washington Examiner andthe Western Journal.Her articles have appeared atMSN,RedState,Newsmax, theFederalist, andRealClearPolitics. Follow her onTwitterorLinkedIn.
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What Is a ‘Healthy’ Cereal, Anyway? – Lifehacker
Posted: at 5:26 pm
Photo: areallart (Shutterstock)
After the FDA changed the definition of healthy (for food labeling purposes), it turned out that many popular breakfast cereals dont meet the criteria. CNBC points out that Raisin Bran, Honey Nut Cheerios, and Corn Flakes have too much added sugar to qualify. If you were surprised, buckle in, because the idea of wanting breakfast cereals to be healthy has a long and bizarre history.
Commercially manufactured breakfast cereals have their roots in 19th-century health spas, or sanitaria, and the (frankly super messed-up) theories of health and disease promoted by their founders.
John Harvey Kellogg is one name you might know; he ran the Battle Creek sanitarium in Michigan. Bland foods were a cornerstone of health, according to his teachings; anything sweet, spicy, or meaty was supposed to excite the passions and weaken your nervous system. Kellogg believed that frequent enemas were also necessary for health, that masturbation was so harmful that children should be prevented from doing it through any means necessary, including mechanical devices and even surgery (you can thank him for the popularity of non-religious circumcision), and was a huge proponent of eugenics, to the point of starting a Race Betterment Foundation and writing books and articles on race degeneracy.
I dont see anything particularly healthy about the above, but Kellogg was obsessed with these ideas about bland foods, enemas, and NoFap being keys to good health. And those bland foods were the original source of breakfast cereals as we know them today. (Flat breads and crackers may have been so popular because yeast leavening was seen as too similar to the process of making alcoholic beverages; these guys also shunned liquor.)
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From the sanitaria and sanitarium-adjacent movements of the time, we get:
Im afraid to google any more cereal brands now, to be honest.
Who wants a bland breakfast cereal? Almost nobody, it turns out. One of the first things Will Kellogg did when he began selling Corn Flakes was to add malt, sugar, and salt. Graham flour products were originally unsweetenednothing like the cookie-like graham crackers we have today.
It didnt take cereal-preneurs long to figure out that they could sell more of their product if it actually tasted good. According to this timeline from the New York Times, it was around the 1950's that sugary cereals really took off. Corn Flakes werent sweet enough; we also needed Frosted Flakes.
In the 1970's, the escalation continued. Popular childrens cereals were packed with sugar, cocoa, and multiple hues of food coloring. (You could still, of course, buy Grape Nuts from the shelf right above them.) As a kid in the 1980's, I remember being told I couldnt have the rainbow-colored Rainbow Brite cereal because my mom was weirded out by it having so much dye. I read Calvin & Hobbes cartoons in which the title character chows down on the fictional Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs.
Granola came back onto this scene in the 1970s as part of a backlash against the sugared-up commercial cereals. The sugary cereals tried to cultivate their healthy image a bit more, too: Sugar Pops became Sugar Corn Pops in 1978 and Corn Pops in 1984. Cereals with added vitamins trumpeted these on the label. (The history of fortifying cereals with vitamins is a long one. Sometimes the vitamins were added to make the cereals seem healthier; sometimes the additions were required by law.)
This brings us approximately back to the present. Cereals like Corn Flakes and Raisin Bran may seem healthier than their cousins Frosted Flakes and Froot Loops, but they still fall into the category of sweet tasty stuff to eat in the morning. Its been said that American breakfasts are basically desserts, and that seems roughly accurate (outside of the bacon-and-eggs food group, that is).
So are Corn Flakes and their ilk healthy? I mean, I bristle at the whole concept, but I wouldnt exactly go looking for health food in the cereal aisle if you asked me for a place to start. Theyre not bad, though: Some have fiber, and most have added vitamins and minerals. We serve them with milk, which has at least a little bit of protein, vitamins, and other healthful stuff.
I think the more important question is if we have any reason to expect cereals to be healthy. The idea that a specific breakfast food gets our day off to a good start is more than a hundred years old at this point, and it never had a solid scientific basis to begin with. Eating cereal for breakfast is a lot like eating a muffin: tasty and well-accepted, but the nutrition label doesnt exactly hold up to many health claims.
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Eugenics and Scientific Racism – Genome.gov
Posted: October 13, 2022 at 12:45 pm
When the HGP began in 1990, there was widespread concern that genomics would lead to a new era of eugenics. Many bioethicists were aware of how past eugenic movements used genetic information to ostracize historically marginalized groups and believed that people would use the outcomes of the HGP and subsequent developments in genomics to further marginalize and stigmatize certain groups. People were also concerned that the HGP would usher in a new era of behavior genetics, where genes would be used to explain certain behaviors. Many discussions about the HGP revolved around whether employers or insurance companies could use genomic information to discriminate against specific individuals.
In response to these and other concerns, the National Center for Human Genome Research (now the National Human Genome Research Institute, or NHGRI) founded the Ethical, Legal and Societal Implications (ELSI) Research Program. For more than three decades, the NHGRI ELSI Research Program has funded research on all aspects of the social and ethical implications of genomics, including the legacies of eugenics and scientific racism in the context of new and emerging genetic and genomic technologies.
Building on a long tradition of these legacies, NHGRI is committed to taking proactive steps to provide leadership in the field of genomics in addressing structural racism and anything that would foster eugenics-based ideas. Together with efforts of the National Institute of Health, including the UNITE Initiative, NHGRI will continue to combat the legacies of eugenics and scientific racism and their present-day manifestations to develop an inclusive and welcoming genomics community.
In addition, the NHGRI History of Genomics Program is committed to interrogating the legacies of eugenics and scientific racism to further develop ethical and equitable uses of genomics.
Only by understanding and fully engaging with the history of eugenics and scientific racism will genomics serve to facilitate an inclusive and humane future.
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Eugenics Definition & Meaning | Dictionary.com
Posted: at 12:45 pm
Origin of eugenicsFirst recorded in 188085; see origin at eugenic, -icshistorical usage of eugenics
Modern eugenics was popularized by Sir Francis Galton in the late 1800s. In many cases, its methods have been entwined with prejudice. Selecting for desirable traits requires establishing what counts as desirable, and for some scientists of the late 1800s and early 1900s, people with disabilities, people in lower economic classes, and people belonging to any ethnic or racial minority group were automatically considered to be undesirable. In the United States, forced or coerced sterilizations were conducted throughout the first half of the 20th century, often targeting people with physical or mental disabilities, people who had committed crimes, Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous people, and other vulnerable groups. In Germany, eugenics was a crucial part of the Nazi Party's ideology. Because of this history of racism, ableism, classism, and other types of discrimination, eugenics is generally not studied or practiced within the scientific community today. The rise of genetic engineering, however, has brought new concerns to the conversation surrounding eugenics.
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The shameful support of eugenics by the Lewiston Evening Journal
Posted: at 12:45 pm
Over the course of 175 years and more than 2 million pages of newsprint, its no surprise the Lewiston Falls Journal and its successors have on occasion gotten some things wrong, sometimes egregiously so.
For instance, consider the Lewiston Evening Journals August 1972 take on Watergate: An incident that must be rated as trivial compared to the major issues that should be the focal point of attention during the 1972 presidential campaign.
When Richard Nixon, who won the race, resigned in disgrace from the presidency two years later, the Journals editorial stood out as notably off the mark.
But shortsighted is one thing. Unforgiveable is quite another.
From 1900 through the 1930s, the Journal backed a movement mired in the pseudo-science of eugenics, which led followers to conclude that bettering the human race required active steps to prevent some people from having children.
The newspaper at times endorsed involuntary sterilization and flirted with the notion of having the government murder people to prevent them from having sex and potentially bring children into the world who might share qualities the movement frowned on, such as intellectual disabilities or addiction to liquor.
The Lewiston newspaper wasnt alone in its support for the real-life application of eugenics theory.
The ideas pushed by eugenics adherents proved so popular that many states passed laws allowing forced sterilizations, including Maine, and many prominent men and women, from Winston Churchill to Helen Keller, endorsed it.
The embrace of eugenics became common enough to be taught in many schools, touted in international conferences and endorsed by such diverse organizations as the U.S. Supreme Court and Germanys Nazi Party.
Nazi leader Adolf Hiter once told comrades, I have studied with interest the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock, according to the former head of his economic policy office, cited in Stefan Kuhls 1984 book The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism and German National Socialism.
The American eugenics movement began to fade in the 1930s and fell into disfavor nearly everywhere after Hitler carried its ideas so far that his minions slaughtered millions in a bid to snuff out people seen as unfit, including Jews, homosexuals, communists and people with mental and physical challenges.
Academics who have since delved into the eugenics push in America cite it as one of the intellectual foundations for Hitlers concentration camps.
PEACEFUL EXTERMINATION
Arthur Staples, who worked at the Journal for 57 years and edited it for two decades, laid out how he saw the problem in a 1925 column in which he complained, We have bred from the worst to the worst in the most foolish way.
As a result, Staples wrote, We are striving to lug along incompetents and feeble persons in the march of progress.
He pointed out how potato farmers throw away the small potatoes while society, coping with far more important choices, was attempting to raise the culls when it comes to people who are idiots, imbeciles and sub-normals.
Then Staples took an even greater leap.
He said men of conscience and courage no doubt including himself among them wonder if a certain form of peaceful extermination were not better.
Though Staples immediately said he wasnt advocating any such thing, merely pondering it, he proceeded to compare these poor travesties of human beings with demon-possessed swine.
Staples concluded society must take care that imbeciles and sub-normals do not reproduce, urging the state to sterilize them to improve the overall quality of Mainers.
The state, he said, must stop the growing rot in the seed of the race and not be squeamish about telling things as they are.
At the time, Staples and the Journal were hardly alone in their calls for government to sterilize people they regarded as lesser beings.
The Supreme Court, in the never-overturned 1927 case of Buck v. Bell, widely noted as one of its most dreadful rulings, agreed with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. when he insisted three generations of imbeciles are enough, in a ruling granting the right for states to sterilize residents to prevent feebleminded and socially inadequate people from having children.
It was a decision, and a movement, which led to the forcible sterilization of at least 60,000 Americans, many of them Black women. Maine was among the states to do so.
Not surprisingly, Nazi defendants at the war crimes trials at Nuremberg after World War II sought to justify their crimes by citing the precedent set in the United States for sterilization and extermination.
The judges didnt buy it. But there was some truth to their finger-pointing.
NEWS AND VIEWS SUPPORTING EXTERMINATION
On March 2, 1900, the Journal carried a news story under the headline By Painless Extermination.
Beneath it was a lengthy account of a new book by Dr. Duncan McKim of New York who proposed the betterment of society and the abolition of the evils of heredity by the gentle removal from this life of incorrigible criminals, idiots, imbeciles, epileptics and habitual drunkards.
He said they could be led into a lethal chamber where they could be gassed to death.
The painless extinction of these lives would present no practical difficulty, McKim said.
The number of individuals to whom the plan would apply is large, McKim wrote in his book.
The Journals story did not question either the idea motivating McKims proposal or his suggestion for implementing it.
McKims Heredity and Progress, published by G.P. Putnam, was part of a movement promoting the notion that people should, in effect, be bred like livestock or pedigreed dogs, aiming to improve the overall quality of humanity by culling the least fit.
It is not the mere wearing of a human form which truly indicates a man, McKim wrote. The idiot and the low-grade imbecile are not true men, for certain essential human elements have never entered into them, and never can; nor is the moral idiot truly a man, nor, while the sad condition lasts, the lunatic.
He wrote they are no more human than beasts of prey.
Once dismissed as mere animals, it wasnt hard for some in the movement to embrace the suggestion that involuntary sterilization or death was a reasonable solution to the problem McKim identified.
Its an idea the Journal found attractive.
In its Book Chat column on Feb. 24, 1900, the Journals illustrated magazine praised the volume and hailed McKims call for a gentle and painless death to those who are very weak and very vicious degenerates who are under the absolute control of the state, including murderers, habitual drunkards, nocturnal house-breakers and people with epilepsy, who were seen by some as a uniquely criminal class in those days.
Dr. McKim has brought the darker side of life before us in a clear and forceful manner and his arguments are logical and convincing, the Journal said.
It was a theme repeated now and again, with only occasional hesitation, in many of the papers stories and some of its opinion columns in the following decades.
In a 1904 front-page news story headlined Minds Mislaid And Minds Lost By Heredity And Vice, the Journal noted how Auburn schools had reported having 14 mentally incapacitated children.
The next sentences said, Criminal re-enforcement of decadents and imbeciles is a grave menace to the State. There are many cases where the reproduction of dangerous imbeciles has proved a fruitful source of municipal expenditure and moral waste. To prevent the breeding and intermarriage of decadent classes is essential to the well-being of the commonwealth.
It said feeble-mindedness is typically hereditary and that to descend from a long line of paupers is to descend further into pauperism.
In ancient Sparta, the story said, the answer would have been to lop the heads off the people it viewed as problematic, but the Journal noted with a tinge of regret that modern morality would not allow such barbarism.
In 1914, the paper reported favorably on the views of Gertrude MacDonald, principal of the State School for Girls in Hallowell, who told the Maine Federation of Womens Clubs that because defects are passed on in family lines, government should see to it that the continued pollution of its bloodstream must be checked by such means that have the approval of sane, far-seeing men.
Reproduction of the feeble-minded, the insane, the grossly immoral, the physically imperfect must be cut off, and it should lie within the power of the state to bring this to pass by segregation, for the most part, and more drastic means when absolutely necessary, MacDonald said.
In the same year, after a judge threw out a eugenics law in Wisconsin he deemed unconstitutional, the Journal wrote an editorial fretting that damaged goods would multiply as what it viewed as feeble-minded people reproduced until societys views on the issue change.
With better education, it said, we can climb the hill of the Capitol and get into written constitutions the better things needed by the nation namely a constitutional amendment to ease the way for the practical application of eugenics.
A BIG YEAR FOR BAD IDEAS
The push for forced sterilizations appears to have peaked in the Journal in 1925, the year Staples mused in his column about peaceful extermination of unfortunate Americans.
In June, the daily spotlighted an honor thesis by Bates College student Priscilla Frew that insisted defectives should be controlled so they cannot multiply, which means strict segregation or sterilization.
The following month, the Journal covered a talk to the Lewiston and Auburn Rotarians by Dr. Stephen Vosburgh, head of the Maine School of the Feeble Minded in Pownal. He told the group that segregation and sterilization were the only ways to stop the growth of feeble-minded Mainers.
Vosburgh told the Rotarians that tests given to new arrivals at his school determine with ease whether the newcomer is an idiot, with the mental capacity of a 2-year-old, or an imbecile who has the mental abilities of a typical child between the ages of 3 and 7, or a moron, whose mind is equivalent to a 7- to 12-year-old.
He said a state law prevented all of them from getting married but town clerks failed to enforce it, so the state passed a law that permits sterilization of the so-called feeble-minded under some circumstances.
Vosburgh also said there were many sub-normal (people) in alms houses and attractive women of child-bearing age who should be cared for and segregated in institutions until they were too old to have children. Otherwise, he said, the state would have too many morons.
In November 1925, the Journal wrote an editorial about the states insane asylum discussing a delicate subject that requires a lot of common sense.
The paper said Maine ought to extend the sterilization law for idiots and imbeciles in order to sterilize these people by the authorities without having to get so many permissions.
After all, it said, society would never allow unnecessary operations of this sort only those approved after a proper hearing.
The chances of the idiot or the imbecile or even the moron or subnormal reproducing like to like are almost certain, the paper said. The chances are small that these people will produce normals.
Nobody likes to discuss this subject, the editorial noted. Nobody likes to sponsor these profoundly personal laws. But what is to be done? Is society through a mawkish sentimentality to be permitted to go on doing what we do not permit cattle to do? Are we going to overload society with fools?
It went on to detail a misinterpreted and often mistaken 1877 study of an American family published by Richard Louis Dugdale as The Jukes: a Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease, and Heredity, Also Further Studies of Criminals.
Comparing the Juke family to the successful descendants of famed colonial-era preacher Jonathan Edwards, the Journal used their example to prove idiots produce idiots when allowed to have children and should not be allowed to reproduce.
It was a theme pushed repeatedly over the years by the Lewiston paper, until the scale of the eugenics-inspired horror unleashed by the Nazis became clear.
AFTER THE NAZIS
The Journal printed hundreds of news stories during and after World War II detailing German crimes. It wrote about the international tribunals prosecuting Nazi criminals. It published stories about concentration camp survivors and about the reality of the Holocaust they witnessed.
But it doesnt appear the Journal ever took note in later years of its own role in promoting eugenics or its complicity in the spread of a doctrine leading directly to the crimes against humanity laid out at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals.
That the Journal chose to push eugenics is made clear by comparing its coverage in those years to its morning counterpart, the Lewiston Daily Sun, which rarely mentioned eugenics and doesnt appear to have hailed it at all.
There is no apology possible for having played any role at all in laying the foundation for the Holocaust. But the paper can, at last, recognize its failure.
This was perhaps the worst thing the Journal and its successors ever did in 175 years of news coverage.
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The shameful support of eugenics by the Lewiston Evening Journal
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