Category Archives: Eugenics

One of the most challenging items on President BidenJoe BidenThe Hill's Morning Report - Biden officials brace for worst despite vaccine data Congress looks to rein in Biden's war powers Democrats seize on voting rights; GOP cries foul MOREs policy agenda is comprehensiveimmigration reform. Debate on any bill will be overshadowed by the current surge in migrants to the southern border, the latest uptick in a secular trend that began in the 1980s. But looking back even further, the questions of who deserves admission to America and in what numbers were also on the agenda of a new administration 100 years ago.

Since we are confronted with the clamor of multitudes who desire the opportunity offered by American life, wrote Calvin Coolidge in February 1921, we must face the situation unflinchingly, determined to relinquish not one iota of our obligations to others, yet not sosentimental as to overlook our obligations to ourselves.

Coolidges immigration essay, Whose Country Is This, was published in, of all places, Good Housekeepingshortly before his inauguration as vice president. On the surface, his sentiments were not terribly different from those many might express today. But immigration legislation President Warren Harding would shortly sign set America on a course very different from paths being considered in 2021.

The 1920 Republican Party platform had declared that The immigration policy of the U. S. should be such as to insure that the number of foreigners in the country at any one

time shall not exceed that which can be assimilated with reasonable rapidity, and to favor immigrants whose standards are similar to ours. But such bland language belied the anti-immigrant fervor that was gripping the nation.

Between 1900 and 1915, more than 15 million immigrants landed in the U.S. That number was equal to the total who had arrived in the 40 years 1860-1900. The majority after 1900 came from non-English speaking European countries, including Italy, Poland and Russia. Italian arrivals numbered three million, and two million of the East Europeans who landed were Jews. These were not viewed as people whose standards are similar to ours.

By 1920, nearly 14 million Americans, 13.2 percent of the population, were foreign born. While a slightly lower percentage than in 1900, the gross number had increased by 3.5 million, or 33 percent, in just two decades. And after a migration hiatus during World War I, arrivals in 1921 were soaring. Exclusionists feared a return to pre-war numbers, when it was not uncommon to see over a million come ashore each year.

Moves toward immigration restriction had begun in Theodore Roosevelts administration. Concerned with the broad impact of immigration on both American culture and prevailing wages, Roosevelt signed the Immigration Act of 1907, the first federal statute to restrict new arrivals based on health or moral character. The Act created the Dillingham Commission, whose exhaustive report in 1911 recommended arrivals pass a literacy test and originated the idea of entry quotas based on national origin.

In his 2019 study The Guarded Gate, Daniel Okrent has documented the anti-immigrant pseudoscience of eugenics that had been gaining credibility since the turn of the century. Our obligations to others notwithstanding, Calvin Coolidges 1921 Good Housekeeping column went on to argue that biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend in America. The eugenicists provided data alleging to prove those biological laws.

On May 19, 1921, Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act of 1921. Theforce behind the legislation was Washington state Rep. Albert Johnson, Republican chair of the House Immigration and Nationalization Committee. The committees Expert Eugenics Agent, was Harry Laughlin, a former school principal, superintendent of the notorious Eugenics Record Office and a national advocate for compulsory sterilization laws.

But even among those for whom blatant racial arguments held little appeal, there was bipartisan support for restriction across the political spectrum. With the economy slipping into a sharp postwar depression, the Senate vote for the Act was an overwhelming 78-1, with 17 abstentions, and the measure passed the House by acclamation. Harding signed it the same day.

The bill mandated that no more than 3 percent of the total number of immigrants from any specific country already living in the United States in 1910 could now migrate to America in the year ending June 30, 1922. The math effectively capped total immigration to America at fewer than 400,000 for 1922, compared with 800,000 in 1921. But arrivals from eastern and southern Europe would feel the brunt of the impact: Italian immigration in 1922 would be limited to 40,000, compared with 220,000 in 1921.

The Emergency Act of 1921 would be one-upped by the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, signed by Coolidge as president. That legislation enacted an even more severe formula, capping a nations immigration quota at 2 percent of its U.S. population in 1890 (and formally excluded all immigration from Asia). For Italians, the 40,000 cap from the 1921 Act would be further reduced to 4,000.

The long-term impact of the 1921 and 1924 legislation could be seen half a century later. By 1970, the foreign-born population had plunged to 9.6 million, from 13.9 million in 1920. The percentage of the population that was foreign born dropped to an all-time low of 4.7 percent, down from 13.2 percent in 1920. It took until 1965 for legislation to pass reversing that trend. Today, the incidence of foreign-born residents is again approaching 14 percent.

In 2021, America is open to those divergent people who so troubled Calvin Coolidge and his contemporaries. And the case for immigrants to augment the countrys labor force and national wealth is stronger than ever. But in the long term, any comprehensive legislation still must confront the thorny issues of exactly what kind of documented immigrants America wants, and in what numbers they should arrive.

The system today offers preference to applicants who are members of families already resident in the U.S. But there is strong support for a merit-based system, used in Canada and Australia, that awards application points based on education, employment history and language ability. While not based on race or ethnicity, these criteria would represent a contemporary answer to the call in 1920 to favor immigrants whose standards are similar to ours.

Americans agree in principle with the Coolidge maxim that the nation should relinquish not one iota of our obligations to others. But balancing those responsibilities with our obligations to ourselves will remain a complex policy challenge.

Paul C. Atkinson, a former executive at The Wall Street Journal, is a contributing editor of the New York Sun.

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What Joe Biden can learn from Calvin Coolidge on immigration | TheHill - The Hill

The University of Maine System now has a policy for renaming campus facilities six months after it changed the name of a UMaine building named for a former eugenicist.

When the university systems trustees voted to rename Clarence Cook Little Hall in September 2020, the systems policy for naming facilities was silent on removing names from facilities or renaming buildings. The trustees on Monday approved a new policy that addresses changing or removing facility names.

Under the new policy, the Board of Trustees has the right to remove a building name under extraordinary circumstances when the continued use of the honorees name would compromise the public trust and reflect adversely upon the university and/or University of Maine System and its reputation.

It sets up a process for renaming a facility. And it requires that any agreement to name a facility as part of a campus donation include a morals clause, which protects the universities from financial consequences for changing a name when it brings discredit upon the university.

Last year, UMaine sought approval to rename the building named after Clarence Cook Little in 1966. Little was a former UMaine president from 1922 to 1925. He brought more funding to UMaine than any previous president and went on to start The Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor in 1929. But later in his career, he served as a scientific voice for the tobacco industry at a time when it denied the link between smoking and cancer. He was also a president of the American Eugenics Society.

Eugenics was a movement aimed at improving the genetic quality of the human population, historically by excluding people and groups judged to be inferior and promoting those judged to be superior. The term is now associated with white supremacy and racism.

The process any campus must now follow to recommend a name removal resembles the one UMaine developed to recommend changing the name of Little Hall. A task force must present grounds for removal in a written report after seeking input from a diverse group of stakeholders. The university system chancellor and the presidents council would then review the request and decide whether to refer it to the Board of Trustees for a final vote on the name change.

UMaine President Joan Ferrini-Mundy convened a task force in March 2020 to consider renaming Little Hall in response to a student petition. That task force recommended last June that the building instead be named after a person of Wabanaki descent, a historically significant Black person or woman.

See more here:

Maine universities now have a way to rename campus buildings - Bangor Daily News

A high BMI is one of the underlying health conditions that can now qualify you for a vaccine in the DMV - but what does that number really mean?

WASHINGTON A high BMI, or body mass index, is one of the underlying health conditions that can qualify you for a vaccine in D.C., Virginia, and now in Maryland. With about 40% of U.S. adults considered obese, how exactly do we use BMI measurements and obesity as a health indicator when it comes to COVID-19?

The Q&A Team at WUSA9 went to two local experts to find out everything you might not know about BMI.

QUESTION: Is BMI a true measure of health?

ANSWER: Turns out, the BMI measurement a simple calculation based on weight and height leaves a lot to be desired.

BMI is a little better than looking at just weight alone. Even still, it's only an estimate, Dr. Scott Kahan, Director of the National Center for Weight and Wellness, said. It's a proxy of body fat percentage, and even that is only a proxy of what their health risk is, secondary to the weight.

The CDC also speaks to the uses and shortcomings of the measurement, describing it as an inexpensive and easy screening method for weight, where the resulting score indicates a person is in one of four categories: underweight, healthy weight, overweight, and obese.

BMI does not measure body fat directly, but BMI is moderately correlated with more direct measures of body fat, it reads. Furthermore, BMI appears to be as strongly correlated with various metabolic and disease outcomes as are these more direct measures of body fatness.

Q: Whats the back story of the BMI measurement and its creator?

A: The modern-day use of the BMI measurement comes along with a disturbing origin story and leaves lingering questions about how useful it is today.

Psychotherapist and Professor at George Washington University Paula Atkinson teaches courses about the myths of the U.S.'s measures of health, thin idealism, and society's relentless oppression of large bodies.

She considers BMI a ridiculous indicator of health.

It actually has an exceedingly racist history in that the guy who invented it did it to perform race science ... he was using the BMI to prove that thin white bodies are superior to larger brown bodies, she explained. it's a super racist, awful measure of health. And we're still using it.

Atkinson referenced the Belgian mathematician, astronomer, sociologist and statistician Adolphe Quetelet, who first invented the BMI measurement nearly 200 years ago that is used today; originally known as the Quetelet Index until American physiologist Ancel Keys came up with the term Body Mass Index in 1972.

Quetelet's initial findings have since been associated with eugenics; a racist method of seeking to improve humanity that was used throughout history, such as in Nazi Germany and throughout American slavery.

Q: So given that the measurement alone isnt a one-size-fits-all health indicator, why should people with a high BMI still sign up to get the COVID-19 vaccine?

A: "We're not really talking about BMI but rather, we're talking about more broadly, whether meeting the clinical definition of obesity should be used as a condition that allows someone to have expedited access to the COVID vaccine, Dr. Kahan explained. "Everything that the studies show so far, would support that."

Atkinson says its especially important since people with a higher BMI are often marginalized in our thin-centric society, even in health care.

I like that most people who happen to be in these categories are saying, you know what, I don't get anything for living in a big body in this culture. I might as well go get the vaccine. And I think that's great."

On social media, many have spoken up to share their plans to go get the vaccine because of a high BMI, encouraging others to join them, and not let shame or stigma get in their way.

I've seen a lot of people who are hesitant to take up a spot in getting a vaccine early, they feel like they've done this to themselves, Dr. Kahan explained. Although there is a volitional component, in terms of weight gain or weight loss, much of our body weights are outside of our direct control.

Atkinson hopes people will keep that BMI number in perspective. What we know is that your relationship with your body is the most important thing. If you suddenly think that now your body is inferior, you're not going to take good care of it. And that's the history of fatphobia, she explained.

Please, Oh, please, please, don't let it affect your self-esteem. Don't let it affect your relationship with your body.

The rest is here:

Here's why BMI measurements don't tell the whole story of your health - WUSA9.com

Beyond the Classicsis a bi-weekly column in whichEmily Kubincanek highlights lesser-known old movies and examines what makes them memorable. In this installment, she highlights the historical value of Lois Webers Where Are My Children?

Few filmmakers knew how to make silent films about women as well as Lois Weber. Social topics barred from most feature films were never off-limits for Weber, who came to fame thanks to her scandalous political films of the 1910s. Webers films were revolutionary for their time, and even now they depict historical events like the birth control movement and the complicated ideas that came with them in rare moving image form.

Thanks to Webers insistence on bringing tough realities into narrative film, we can see how women viewed the subject of birth control and abortion more than one hundred years ago in Where Are My Children? (1916). Weber fictionalizes Margaret Sangers landmark obscenity case in an emotional story that is still fascinating to watch today. One of her first social issue films, Where Are My Children? kickstarted a career centered around crafting remarkable films about womens issues, even if those issues are thought of differently today.

Co-written and co-directed by Weber and her husband Phillips Smalley, Where Are My Children? is not shy about its political stance on birth control. The film begins with a statement onscreen stating the importance of discussing birth control and Universals support of depicting the subject in a drama film. While the studio and filmmakers note the necessity of adults having access to this film, it does not condone unsupervised children being subjected to the topic of birth control. The choice to begin the movie with a stark declaration of intent gives viewers a clear indication of what theyre in for, which was something audiences in 1916 had yet to experience.

The film then enters Heavens gates, where a golden hue tints the angelic images of clouds and angels. The intertitle cards tell us that unborn children reside here until they are either born on Earth, often unwanted, or theyre sent back to Heaven, hinting at abortions. Immediately, this is much different than most movies we watch today that deal with abortion or birth control, but the religious perspective on reproduction was the perspective many people understood in 1916. Weber knew this and recognized the effect it would have on capturing its audience. To modern viewers watching today, its the first of several signs of this films age, but also of the historical value of the film, too.

The main plot ofWhere Are My Children?centers around District Attorney Richard Walton, played by Tyrone Power, Sr., and his wife, Mrs. Walton. They live a lavish life but lack the one thing Mr. Walton longs for: a family. His wife cannot have children and so he soaks up time with his nieces and nephews to fill the void. Mrs. Walton is a socialite and liaison between her high-class friends who need abortions and the one doctor she knows will perform them in secret. What she isnt telling her husband is that she is capable of having children but isnt ready to be a mother yet and has had several abortions herself.

One of the events that impact the Waltons is a case that Mr. Walton takes on involving a Dr. Malfit, who has been charged with obscenity for distributing pamphlets on the new idea of birth control. This is a direct reference to Margaret Sanger, who coined the term birth control and was charged with obscenity two years earlier in 1914. Sanger, like Dr. Malfit in the film, spent time as a nurse in the poorer neighborhoods of the Lower East Side of New York City. There, she witnessed similar scenes depicted in the film, including worn-down mothers with more children than they can feed. The overcrowding and lack of sexual education in poorer neighborhoods led Sanger to advocate for efforts of preventing pregnancy before the need for abortion.

Many adults did not understand how to prevent pregnancy on their own, since the topic of sex was far too foul a topic to discuss openly. This is what led Sanger to distribute several magazines and pamphlets on the subject, including one in 1914 titled Family Limitation. This is also what led to her being indicted for obscenity. However, she did not plead her case in court like Dr. Malfit does in the movie. Instead, she fled to England, where she hid out and educated herself on European birth control methods until the charges against her were dropped.

The Dr. Malfit case takes up a small portion of Where Are My Children?, but its role in the film and in representing the birth control movement as a whole is very important. Sanger is a figure with a complicated legacy as we look back at what she believed in during the years she advocated for birth control and eventually founded the first Planned Parenthood. She, like many scientists and doctors at the time, supported the concept of eugenics as a viable reason for birth control within the United States.

Eugenics is most notably connected with the torture and genocide perpetrated by Nazis during World War II, but before that, many prominent Americans advocated for some kind of selective breeding. Even before the Nazis, eugenics was grounded in prejudice and racist ideals that viewed poor families, disabled adults, or people of color as lesser choices for parents. Since the invention of birth control by Sanger and the Nazis eugenics experiments, the beliefs that backed eugenics have been discredited. However, its important to consider when we remember the birth control movement and first-wave feminism of the early 20th century.

Eugenics bleeds into Dr. Malfits case inWhere Are My Children?, especially in the dramatized scenes of the doctor working with poorer families before his arrest. The people he takes care of are either helpless or drunks who are deemed unfit for parenthood. Many believe today that this sentiment underlined a lot of how advocates for birth control thought of people in poverty at this time. Eugenics is also within the other plots in the film that depict abortion.

Mrs. Walton helps her wealthy friends get abortions when they need them, but she also helps a young girl who is staying with the Waltons. They take in the daughter of one of their servants, but she soon comes under than charms of Mrs. Waltons skeevy younger brother. She becomes pregnant, but the father wants nothing to do with her or her baby. Mrs. Walton takes the girl to her doctor, but the procedure goes much differently for this young girl. She stumbles back to their house after the procedure and collapses in Mr. Waltons arms shortly before dying of complications from her abortion. Like the rest of the lower class characters, the young girl does not sidestep the consequences of unprotected sex and perishes as punishment.

Soon after, Mr. Walton takes the doctor to court for performing illegal abortions, and he learns that his wife has been lying to him and using the doctors services as well. When Mr. Walton finds his wife and her socialite friends having a party at his home when he returns, he goes on a rampage. He tells them that they are selfish heathens who are killing what should be children born to further the human race. These women are viewed as potentially the only thing worse than a poor mother of many children: a childless wealthy woman.

The outdated morality within the plot of Where Are My Children?is vastly different than what is believed today in terms of a womans right to abortions and why birth control is important. Still, it is a historical feat for Weber to have put these controversial and complicated topics on screen. When most movies skirted around the social issues involving American women, Weber put them front and center. Its thanks to her insistence on incorporating everyday issues into her films that we can see the origins of birth control, as problematic as they may be.

We also see in the story the prevalence of abortions at the time, which has been distorted when people discuss the history of abortion today. Webers film is an artifact that we can analyze alongside Sangers speeches or pamphlets as representations of this point in history. It also laid the groundwork for films that we watch today about abortion in our current political climate, like the fantastic 2020 drama Never Rarely Sometimes Always.

Where Are My Children?also led Weber to a prolific career in representing women in feature films. While it sparked massive controversy throughout the country, leading to bans on screening the film, it also led to significant recognition of Webers name as a filmmaker. She soon became the highest-paid director, male or female, of 1916, andwent on to make more films focused around womens issues, including her masterpiece Shoesthat same year. Eventually, Webers contributions and control over her films outshined her husbands, and she made films on her own, even creating her own production company. Other films she made that were concerned with womens experiences include What Do Men Want?, The Blot, and Too Many Wives.

Social issue films started to become outdated in the latter half of the 1920s, but Webers legacy has gained recognition in the past few decades. Beyond her ability to bring reality to movies, she has created some of the most striking images in cinema history. The cracked mirror shot in Shoesis an iconic image in and outside the world of film. And Where Are My Children? ends with Mr. Walton and Mrs. Walton sitting by the fire with their ghostly children they never raised hovering behind them, which is a scene as haunting as they come.

Lois Weber remains one of the greatest filmmakers of the silent era and her films are a rich source for understanding the social consciousness of the early 20th century. She dared to create social change via entertainment, which reached more people than other activists realized. Addressing the audiences lived experiences also moved them in ways other films that tried to separate themselves from real-life could not. Weber was committed to making the films she wanted to make, which were inseparable from politics. To Weber, Truth holds her mirror up to politics.

Originally posted here:

Where Are My Children? and Lois Webers Trailblazing Films About Women - Film School Rejects

The eugenic movement, therefore, cannot be a short campaign like many political or social movements. It is, rather, like the founding and development of Christianity, something to be handed on from age to age.

~Report of the President of the American Eugenics Society, Inc., 1926.

As this short history of the eugenics movement shows, eugenicists have always been associated with bigotry, racism, and elitism while working in favor of wealthy white people.

In 1798, the Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus published An Essay on the Principle of Population as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society. This shortwork stressed that the human population was growing at a geometrical rate, but food production was only growing at an arithmetic (straightline) rate. This meant that, sooner or later, widespread starvation and famine would occur, resulting in a catastrophic collapse in the human population. As the following ninety-second video explains, Malthus reasoning was faulty.

This idea was argued in academia and in other milieu for several decades. For example, Charles Dickens character Ebenezer Scrooge presented Malthus ideas in his novella The Christmas Carol.

The debate over the possibility of an inevitable food shortage reached a full boil when Charles Darwin set the scientific world on its ear in 1856 by publishing On the Origin of Species, which set forth for the first time a coherent explanation of the theory of evolution. In his preface, Darwin stated that evolution was an application of the theories of Malthus to the entire animal and vegetable kingdom. Darwin stated that his theory of natural selection why some species endured as others disappeared was based on Malthus mathematical theories.

In 1871, Darwin extended this thesis in his book The Descent of Man. He stated that humanity would see some of the weaker races reduced in number or even wiped out by natural selection in the form of famine, diseases, war, and other influences, while the stronger races would survive and thrive.

Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, coined the term eugenics in 1883, a derivation of the Greek good birth (it is no coincidence that the term euthanasia, the control of death, is derived from the Greek good death). Galton described eugenics as the science of improving [human] stockto give the more suitable races a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable.1 He founded the Eugenics Society in 1907, whose purpose was to spread eugenic teaching and bring human parenthood under the domination of eugenic ideals.2

Galtons new science, which came to be known as Social Darwinism, held that the struggle for existence in society and evolution would inevitably lead to the fittest races achieving domination over the less fit.

In 1869, Galton had published his work Hereditary Genius, in which he wondered if it might be possible to produce geniuses by inbreeding the upper classes through several generations, while sequestering the less desirable elements in monasteries, convents, and institutions, a combined program of both positive and negative eugenics.

Galton held the popular view that the naturally occurring evolution of the human race was being thwarted by philanthropy directed towards undesirable segments of the population. He proposed allowing Darwins natural selection to operate more freely without interference by society, and, further, combining it with humanengineered artificial selection in order to accelerate the evolution of the human race.

Galtons desire to eliminate these undesirable portions of humanity remains at the core of the eugenics movement until this day, as we shall see.

One of the first tasks at hand for the new eugenicists was to cut off, as far as possible, aid to the poor so that natural selection could once again do its work.

Margaret Sanger, in her book Pivot of Civilization, stated:

Such philanthropy, as Dean Inge has so unanswerably pointed out, is kind only to be cruel, and unwittingly promotes precisely the results most deprecated. It encourages the healthier and more normal sections of the world to shoulder the burden of unthinking and indiscriminate fecundity of others; which brings with it, as I think the reader must agree, a dead weight of human waste. Instead of decreasing and aiming to eliminate the stocks that are most detrimental to the future of the race and the world, it tends to render them to a menacing degree dominant.3

Galton believed in the power of religion to move mens souls and minds, so he proposed that eugenics evolve from a hard science into national policy and eventually into a religion.4 The American Eugenics Society even published a Eugenics Catechism for Clergymen, which outlined the tenets and dogmas of this new religion.5

Atheist and racist Julian Huxley was the most important strategist of the early twentieth-century eugenics movement. He was the first DirectorGeneral of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and President of the English Eugenics Society. He also founded the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), and was a member of both the British Euthanasia Society and Great Britains Abortion Law Reform Association (ALRA). His grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley, was a leading advocate of Darwins theories. His brother Aldous was the famous New Age psychedelic drug lobbyist.6

Julian Huxley seconded Galtons view that eugenics should eventually evolve into a religion:

I find myself inevitably driven to use the language of religion, for the fact is that all this does add up to something in the nature of a religion: perhaps one might call it Evolutionary Humanism. The word religion is often used restrictively to mean belief in gods; but I am not using it in this sense.I am using it in a broader sense, to denote an overall relation between man and his destiny, and one involving his deepest feelings, including his sense of what is sacred. In this broad sense, evolutionary humanism, it seems to me, is capable of becoming the germ of a new religion, not necessarily supplanting existing religions but supplementing them.7

One of the foremost eugenicists of the first half of the twentieth century is known to almost all prolifers as the founder of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) Margaret Sanger. Her journal The Birth Control Review, along with her many books, features hundreds of examples of racist and eugenicist thinking, culminating in her 1932 Plan for Peace. In light of all of these racist and eugenicist statements, it is astounding that Planned Parenthood continues to deny that Margaret Sanger had a program for Negroes.

American eugenicists confined themselves primarily to theorizing and philosophizing until the early 1920s, when state and local governments began to try out (purely for academic or fiscal reasons, of course) some of their more apparently innocuous schemes. These plans naturally targeted those who had the weakest voices, the poor and the institutionalized. The eugenicists soon found the simplest and most effective way of preventing the less desirable classes from reproducing widespread involuntary surgical sterilization.

Famous New York urologist William Robinson was certainly not unique in his view that it is the acme of stupidity to talk in such cases of individual liberty, of the rights of the individual. Such [unfit] individuals have no rights. They have no right in the first instance to be born, but, having been born, they have no right to propagate their kind.8 And this disgustingly arrogant attitude within the eugenics movement would find even more extreme measures.

Adolf Hitler was personally fascinated by the American eugenics program, and at one point said:

Now that we know the laws of heredity, it is possible to a large extent to prevent unhealthy and severely handicapped beings from coming into the world. I have studied with great 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. Im sure that occasionally mistakes occur as a result. But the possibility of excess and error is still no proof of the incorrectness of these laws.9

In the early 1930s, a number of leading German academics began to lay the foundation of thought and theory that would soon culminate in the mass elimination of the unfit, and ultimately the Holocaust. For example, Halle Universitys Professor Doctor Karl Krtner pioneered the first German university course on race hygiene for physicians. He based it on the American pathfinders Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard Stoddard being, of course, the author of The Rising Tide of Color against White World-Supremacy and a board member of Margaret Sangers American Birth Control League for a decade. Krtner also explained that he used American racial and eugenic legislation as a model for the German extermination program.10

By 1935, leading American geneticist Hermann J. Muller complained that the legitimate aspects of the science of eugenics had been hopelessly perverted into a cult for advocates for race and class prejudice, defenders of vested interests of church and state, Fascists, Hitlerites, and reactionaries generally.8 He was right: if there was ever any ethically sound eugenics which focused simply on improving the overall health of the human race, it has been entirely taken over by bigots who want all non-whites and all poor classes eliminated.

Of course, Britain, the United States, and Germany were not the only nations to violate their citizens rights on a vast scale through enforced eugenic sterilization. As shown in the history of the world eugenics movement, Japan, Sweden, Finland and other nations enacted and enforced draconian sterilization measures on their most helpless citizens.

The eugenics movement is not an aspect of American history that we should be proud of. Why are we supporting those who continue to propagate eugenics(such as Planned Parenthood), when we ought to be exposing the injustice of the abortion industry toward the poor and racial minorities?

[1] Francis Galton. Inquiries into Human Faculty. London: Macmillan, 1883, page 25.

[2] Francis Galton. Memories of My Life. London: Melhuen Publishers, 1908.

[3] Margaret Sanger. The Pivot of Civilization. New York: Brentanos, 1922. See especially Chapter V, The Cruelty of Charity. Sanger condemns philanthropy repeatedly in this book. She also said:

The curious situation has come about that while our statesmen are busy upon their propaganda of repopulation, and are encouraging the production of large families, they are ignoring the exigent problem of the elimination of the feebleminded. In this, however, the politicians are at one with the traditions of a civilization which, with its charities and philanthropies, has propped up the defective and degenerate and relieved them of the burdens borne by the healthy sections of the community, thus enabling them more easily and more numerously to propagate their kind. [pages 82 and 83]

But there is a point at which philanthropy may become positively dysgenic, when charity is converted into injustice to the selfsupporting citizen, into positive injury to the future of the race. Such a point, it seems obvious, is reached when the incurably defective are permitted to procreate and thus increase their numbers. [page 99]

My criticism, therefore, is not directed at the failure of philanthropy, but rather at its success. These dangers inherent in the very idea of humanitarianism and altruism, dangers which have today produced their full harvest of human waste, of inequality and inefficiency, were fully recognized in the last century at the moment when such ideas were first put into practice. Readers of Huxleys attack on the Salvation Army will recall his penetrating and stimulating condemnation of the debauch of sentimentalism which expressed itself in so uncontrolled a fashion in the Victorian era. [pages 108 and 109]

The effect of maternity endowments and philanthropy would have, perhaps already have had, exactly the most dysgenic tendency. The new government program would facilitate the function of maternity among the very classes in which the absolute necessity is to discourage it. Such benevolence is not merely superficial and near sighted. It conceals a stupid cruelty, because it is not courageous enough to face unpleasant facts. Aside from the question of the unfitness of many women to become mothers, aside from the very definite deterioration in the human stock that such programs would inevitably hasten, we may question its value even to the normal though unfortunate mother. [page 115]

[4] Francis Galton. Eugenics, Its Definition, Scope and Aims. Sociological Papers. London, 1905.

[5] Eugenics Catechism for Clergymen, prepared by the Committee on Cooperation with Clergymen of the American Eugenics Society. Advertised among other publications in the Report of the President of the American Eugenics Society, Inc., June 26, 1926, page 25.

[6] Julian Huxley wrote:

The negro mind is as different from the white mind as the negro body from the white body. The typical negro servant, for instance, is wonderful with children, for the reason that she really enjoys doing the things that children do.You have only to go to a nigger campmeeting to see the African mind in operation the shrieks, the dancing and yelling and sweating, the surrender to the most violent emotion, the ecstatic blending of the soul of the Congo with the practice of the Salvation Army. So far, no very satisfactory psychological measure has been found for racial differences; that will come, but meanwhile the differences are patent.[intermarriage between the] negro and Caucasian typegives rise to all sorts of disharmonious organisms.By putting some of the white mans mind into the mulatto, you not only make him more capable and more ambitious (there are no wellauthenticated cases of pure blacks rising to any eminence), but you increase his discontent and create an obvious injustice if you continue to treat him like any fullblooded African. The American negro is making trouble because of the American white blood that is in him.

Julian Huxley. America Revisited III. The Negro Problem. The Spectator, November 29, 1924.

[7] Julian Huxley. Evolution in Action. New York City: Signet, 1957, page 132.

[8] Gregory E. Pence, M.D. Classic Cases in Medical Ethics: Accounts of the Cases That Have Shaped Medical Ethics, with Philosophical, Legal, and Historical Backgrounds. New York City: McGrawHill Publishers, 1990. Chapter 14, Preventing Undesirable Teenage Pregnancies, pages 286 to 302.

[9] Adolf Hitler, quoted in Otto Wagener. Hitler aus nchster Nhe: Aufzeichnungen eines Vertrauten 19291932, edited by Henry A. Turner. Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1978, page 264.

[10] Reich Opens Race Study: Halle University Course Said to be Based on American Models. The New York Times, August 2, 1933

William McDonald revealed that Grant openly advocated for the establishment of a Nordic, Protestant America in his review of Grants book The Conquest of a Continent, or the Expansion of Races in America [New York City: Charles Scribners Sons, 1933]. This book featured a foreword by prominent eugenicist and racist, Professor Henry Fairchild Osborn.

The rest is here:

An Early History of the Eugenics Movement

By Pamela Bedore, Ph.D., University of ConnecticutSamuel Butler presents the difference between the Europeans and the Erewhonians in Erewhon. (Image: Sohel Parvez Haque/Shutterstock)Religion in Erewhonian Society

Erewhon has two religious movements, both containing substantial humor: the Musical Banks and the goddess Ydgrun. The Musical Banks are the official churches of Erewhon. These are beautiful edifices and all the people insist that the currency traded at the Musical Banks is worth far more than the worldly currency with which they dirty their hands every day.

Higgs visits the Musical Banks with great interest, only to find that theyre mostly emptycompletely respected by lip service, but in actual fact considered old, empty institutions. Theres nothing subtle about constructing devotion as lip service, or about constructing the Church as a kind of bank, thus underlining the intersections of religious institutions with money and power.

Higgs also learns that many Erewhonians actually worship the goddess Ydgrun. Ydgrun an anagram for Grundy, as in Mrs. Grundy, from an 18th-century play, a namesake for hypocrisy and prudery.

And Ydgrun is the goddess that Erewhonians arent supposed to care about, but that most of them actually worship secretly. In Erewhon, maybe like everywhere else, hypocrisy is publicly denounced but secretly accepted.

This is a transcript from the video seriesGreat Utopian and Dystopian Works of Literature. Watch it now, on The Great Courses Plus.

Another interesting feature of the Erewhonian society is the approach to illness and criminality, which might be Butlers best joke of the whole novel.

In Erewhon, a person faces punishment for having a physical ailmentjail time or even, in the case of incurable or chronic conditions, execution. If you commit a crime, on the other hand, you get medical attention and a whole lot of sympathy from friends and family.

If you have a headache, you would never mention it to anyone but your most intimate acquaintances. Higgs is initially astonished by the seemingly uniform beauty and health of the Erewhonians, but this becomes a bit more understandable as he learns that they disguise minor ailments and are jailed or executed for major ones.

Learn more about the origins of utopian genre.

The Erewhonians, are just as surprised to hear about the European approaches to health and crimecompletely misguidedas Higgs is to learn about theirs. They explain that there are physicians living secretly among them and these arent actively prosecuted.

After all, its understandable that people would want to hide their illnesses to avoid punishment and might even abet family membersin doing so. But if doctors were allowed to become frequent visitors in every household, one of the Erewhonians explains to Higgs, their organization and their intimate acquaintance with all family secrets would give them a power, both social and political, which nothing could resist.

Theres a certain comedy of errors element to Higgssand perhaps the readersmisunderstanding about the treatments of criminality and illness, but is there something else going on? What does it mean to imprison or even execute those who are ill? Is this a form of eugenics?

Following Charles Darwins incredibly influential Origin of Species in 1859, other thinkers, most notably Darwins half-cousin Francis Galton, began to speculate on the possibility of selective mating for humans.

It wasnt a new idea, Plato suggested it in the Republic, but it started to gain traction in the Victorian period.

Eugenics, a Greek compound, meaning good genes, wasnt named until 1883, by Galton. But still, the ideas were circulating in 1872 when Butler wrote Erewhon, and the Erewhonians seem to practice negative eugenics, the idea of limiting reproduction by the less fit, but not positive eugenics, the idea of encouraging reproduction in the more fit.

So what exactly is Butler saying about eugenics? Well, thats a hard question to answer, given that Erewhon is a true utopia, with a blendmaybe even a balanceof positive and satirical representations. The reader is certainly not meant to take seriously all the Erewhonian ideas.

A promising young Erewhonian would attend one of the Colleges of Unreason, whichnurture scholars inthe advanced study of hypothetics as well as the basic disciplines of Inconsistency and Evasion.

Higgs is toldbut absolutely refuses to acceptthat the problem with Reason is that it, betrays men into the drawing of hard and fast lines, and to the defining by languagelanguage being like the sun, which rears and then scorches.

The topics of study are funny, and the reader may certainly enjoy a superior laugh along with Higgs at the very concept of the College of Unreason. But still, its an interesting thought, isnt it? That Reason justifies the human tendency to see the world in black and white; that the notion of language as rigid, as able to accurately represent the world, contains perils that are for the Erewhonians very real.

Learn more about science and technology in Victorian Britain.

Higgs tells the readers at some length about the Erewhonians long battle in figuring out what to do about vegetarianism. At one point, centuries ago, a major thinkeran expert in Unreasonmade a decree that animals are intelligent creatures and should thus not be killed. It was considered fine to eat the meat of animals that had died of natural causes, including suicide. Heres how Higgs puts it:

It was found that animals were continually dying natural deaths under more or less suspicious circumstances. Suicidal mania, again, which had hitherto been confined exclusively to donkeys, became alarmingly prevalent even among such for the most part self-respecting creatures as sheep and cattle.

Things continued on in this absurd way until another Unthinkercame along and made another argument, this one even more extreme: vegetables are intelligent creatures, too. The result? The Erewhonians stopped worrying about eating intelligent creatures, since they certainly couldnt survive with neither animal nor vegetable substance, and the Erewhonian mindset on the important issue of what to eat changed again, nimbly and without any great stress.

This is how Butler presents the difference between the Europeans and Erewhonians, within a satirical construct which, at first glance, is laughable.

Erewhon has two religious movements: the Musical Banks and the goddess Ydgrun.

In Erewhon, a person faces punishment for having a physical ailmentjail time or even, in the case of incurable or chronic conditions, execution.

In Erewhon, a promising young person would attend one of the Colleges of Unreason, whichnurture scholars inthe advanced study of hypothetics as well as the basic disciplines of Inconsistency and Evasion.

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Social Norms of the Erewhonians - The Great Courses Daily News

New Eastern Outlook

ITS no secret that Bill Gates and the advocates of the UN Sustainable Development Agenda 2030 are also devout promoters of human eugenics, the thinning of the human herd as Britains misanthropic prince Philip once put it. Some such as Joachim Schnellnhuber, climate adviser to the Pope, openly welcome a human population below one billion as sustainable. Now serious research is emerging that one of the most effective reducers of the human population is being spread by so-called modern scientific agriculture through the select use of toxic agrochemicals, pesticides deemed safe which are anything but safe.

According to a new book by Dr Shanna Shaw, Count Down, the male sperm count in western industrial countries, including the European Union and the United States, is falling at a dramatic rate. Shaw estimates that over the past four decades the average sperm count has dropped by 50 per cent or more. In other words a young male today seeking to have a family has only half the sperm count his grandfather did, half the chance to conceive. Shaw estimates that unless toxic chemical exposures in agriculture and the environment are dramatically altered, we may not have the ability to reproduce naturally much longer, and that by 2050 most human beings in the industrial countries, including China, will need technological assistance to procreate.

Shaws book is a further elaboration of a 2017 peer-reviewed scientific paper which Shaw and colleagues published. In the paper, Shaw carefully analysed a total of 244 estimates of sperm concentration and Total Sperm Count, or TSC, from 185 studies of 42,935 men who provided semen samples in 19732011. What they found was alarming to the extreme. But beyond a few media headlines, no changes of consequence resulted, as the powerful agrochemical corporations such as Bayer-Monsanto, Syngenta, DowDuPont (now Corteva) lobbied regulators to ignore the findings.

Shaw found that Among unselected western studies, the mean sperm concentration declined, on average, 1.4 per cent per year with an overall decline of 52.4 per cent between 1973 and 2011. The same group of males, had an average decline in mean TSC of 1.6 per cent per year and overall decline of 59.3 per cent. That is a sperm count decline as of a decade ago of more than 59 per cent in men, unselected by fertility, from North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. And it continues to decline year by year.

Because of lack of serious support for new studies, updated data is limited. Fifteen years ago, over half of potential sperm donors in Hunan Province, China, met quality standards. Now, only 18 per cent do, a decline blamed on endocrine disrupting chemicals according to one study. A similar fall in sperm count was registered by researchers in Taiwan, as well as a similar result for Israel. Shaw concludes, male reproductive health, not just semen quality by the way, is in trouble, and this has consequences, not just for the ability to have a child, but it also impacts the health of the man. She cites as examples, low sperm count, infertility, testicular cancer, and various general defects. One of them is undescended testicles, another one is a condition where the opening of the urethra is not where it should be.

Endocrine disruptors

SWAN, today with the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, believes the cause is to be found in the huge rise in toxic chemical exposures in recent decades, especially of chemicals known as endocrine disruptors or hormone disruptors. She points to chemicals that make plastics soft, which are phthalates, or chemicals that make plastics hard like Bisphenol A, or chemicals that are flame retardants, chemicals that are in Teflon, and so on, pesticides.

The last, pesticides, is the group that should send loud alarm bells ringing because it is proven to get into groundwater and the human food chain. Today the two most widely used pesticides in the world are Bayer-Monsantos Roundup containing the probable carcinogen, glyphosate, and Azatrine made by Syngenta, which today is owned by ChemChina.

Atrazine effects

IN 2010, a renowned University of California, Berkeley scientist, Tyrone B Hayes, professor of integrative biology, led a major study of the effect of Atrazine exposure for frogs. He found that the pesticide, widely used on US corn crops and sugarcane, wreaks havoc with the sex lives of adult male frogs, emasculating three-quarters of them and turning one in 10 into females. He found ,These male frogs are missing testosterone and all the things that testosterone controls, including sperm. Moreover, Hayes noted that the 10 per cent of frogs exposed to Atrazine that turn from males into females something not known to occur under natural conditions in amphibians can successfully mate with male frogs but, because these females are genetically male, all their offspring are male. Hayes declared, I believe that the preponderance of the evidence shows atrazine to be a risk to wildlife and humans.

Atrazine is a potent endocrine disruptor. Atrazine is also the second-most widely used herbicide in the US behind Monsantos glyphosate product, Roundup. Despite the evidence, in a controversial ruling the US Environmental Protection Agency, in 2007 ruled that Atrazine does not adversely affect amphibian sexual development and that no additional testing was warranted. End of story? Hardly. But in 2004 the EU banned Atrazine saying Syngenta failed to prove its safety in drinking water.

Another agrochemical that has been determined to be an endocrine disruptor is Monsantos Roundup with glyphosate. Roundup is the worlds most widely used pesticide, in over 140 countries including Russia and China. Its use on US genetically modified crops has exploded in recent years as almost 90 per cent of US corn is genetically modified, and a similar percentage of its soybeans. Between 1996 when genetically modified Monsanto corn and soybeans were authorised in the USA, and 2017, Americans exposure to the chemical grew 500 per cent. It has been tested in drinking water, cereals in stores and in urine of pregnant women. Almost all meat and poultry is saturated with glyphosate from animal feed.

A recent study carried out in Australia by researchers at Flinders University found that Roundup killed the cells that produce progesterone in women, causing their levels to drop. Glyphosate and Roundup have been linked to birth defects, reproductive problems and liver disease, and it has been shown to have the potential to harm the DNA of human umbilical cord, placental and embryonic cells.

In 2015, scientists in Nigeria examined the effects of combined exposure to both glyphosate and Atrazine on rats. They found the combination was even worse with effects on sperm, testosterone synthesis and male reproductive organs.

In 2016, Chinas state-owned chemicals giant, ChemChina, bought Syngenta for a colossal $43 billion. At the time ChemChina had distribution rights in China and other Asian countries for Monsanto Roundup as well. On the ChemChina website it lists Atrazine among the herbicides it sells, calling it a safe and efficient herbicide for corn fields. ChemChina is also the leading producer of glyphosate for the Chinese agriculture market.

Today China is facing, by its own admission, a major agriculture crisis and is also struggling with ways to insure food security. Reports are that an increased role for genetically modified crops with Chinese patents will be a central part of a new five year plan which would undoubtedly mean using glyphosate and Atrazine. At the same time the state is increasingly alarmed by the falling birth rate which has not improved despite relaxations on the one child policy. With Chinese farmers using significant amounts of pesticide chemicals including glyphosate and Atrazine to improve yields, they are pursuing a disastrous combination that will not only not solve the growing food crisis, but also may destroy the reproductive potential of a major portion of its 890 million rural population, as well as countless millions of urban citizens.

Are these dangerous endocrine disrupting agrochemicals allowed worldwide because of bureaucratic ignorance of the damage caused by glyphosates, Atrazine and other endocrine disrupters on the human reproduction? Is it only because of corporate greed for hyper profits that they exist? A 1975 quote from Henry Kissinger, author of the eugenics document NSSM-200 during the Nixon-Ford era is instructive: Depopulation should be the highest priority of foreign policy towards the third world, because the US economy will require large and increasing amounts of minerals from abroad, especially from less developed countries. And from Bill Gates: The world today has 6.8 billion people thats headed up to about nine billion. If we do a really great job on vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by perhaps 10 to 15 per cent. Or the grand old dog of eugenics, prince Philip: I must confess that I am tempted to ask for reincarnation as a particularly deadly virus. (In his foreword to If I Were an Animal United Kingdom, Robin Clark Ltd, 1986).

We are rapidly making the human species extinct as we continue to ignore the dangers of these toxins to human and other life forms.

New Eastern Outlook, March 9. F William Engdahl is a strategic risk consultant and lecturer.

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Will mankind be extinct in a few years? - newagebd.net

The summer of 2020 brought a renewal of calls for racial justice around the world. For the first time, many scientists, including those in the geosciences, began to confront the ways in which racism and colonialism are systemic within their fields and institutions. In seeking ways to dismantle the systemic disenfranchisement of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) scholars, one group of geoscientists looked back on the origins of their field.

The way that were being trained today is similar to the way people were being trained at the turn of the [20th] century. The science we can envision doing, what we expect these tool sets to allow us to do, is limited in this framework, said Tamara Pico, an ice age geodynamics and feminist science studies researcher. Pico is part of a team of scientists who developed GeoContext, a set of supplementary teaching modules that aims to give the social and political context of geoscience history.

If we keep using the same tool sets without being a little critical and maybe skeptical of what these tools were designed to do, we are unknowingly perpetuating a lot of the same practices of exclusion and practices of exploitation, Pico added. Thats why we use GeoContext as our title, because giving the context of the past might help students see where their tools come from and how, if we keep using those tools, then we wont get a different outcome.

Eos staff writer Kimberly Cartier spoke with four of the scientists behind the development of the GeoContext curriculum: Pico, who will be an assistant professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz; geologist Christine Y. Chen, who conducted this research as a postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and is now a postdoctoral researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif.; Seth Olinger, a Ph.D. student studying glacial geophysics at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass.; and Wesley Wiggins, a geoscience undergraduate student at Princeton University in Princeton, N.J. Our conversation, below, has been edited for length and clarity.

Eos: What is scientific racism? In what ways is it present in the geosciences today?

Pico: Scientific racism is using science to create or justify racist ideas.Sometimes we think scientific racism is something of the past, but it exists in science today. Its pretty common to think that the Earth sciences are separate from social issues. But early geology, especially the early American geology that is [often] seen as the foundation of our field, was largely motivated by social issues, and especially issues of race.

Wiggins: There are not a lot of people of color in the geosciences, and part of that has to do with the values that these fathers of geoscience perpetuated through their work and through their teachings.Confronting our own history in our field is important for acknowledging those divisions and healing and repairing from the damage that has been done and also allowing new ideas to come in that arent based in those ideologies.

Audio: Minik and the MeteoriteWhere do the samples in our museums come from? Christine Chen explains how one of the worlds most famous meteorites is connected to the tragic story of a boy named Minik. Click here for a transcript of the recording.

Chen: For the longest time, Id also bought into this idea that all science, including my field of geology, was apolitical and separate from social issues. To find out that some of geologys foundational leaders were involved in these kinds of studies was really surprising to me. Id heard stories about the eugenics movement in biology, and I thought, Okay, well, thats a biology problem. But disciplines were not as siloed back then as they are today, and in fact, the eugenics movement was borne out by the very same people who led the field that Ive been working in.I have to hope that if we know more about the true history of our field, not the censored whitewashed history that we are generally taught, perhaps we will stand a better chance at not perpetuating deeply problematic ideals that dont represent who we want to be today.

Olinger: In general, we love stories and narratives. The most compelling way to teach the history of a field, in the case of science or anything else, is often by using the tales of specific people who exerted a strong influence on the discourse or ideas within that field. And unfortunately, in the case of the geosciences, a lot of the people in 1800s who exerted a strong influence on the direction of the field also were involved in scientific racism.Its important that, moving forward, educators recognize the negative influences that those people had as well and make their students aware of them so that theres a full picture presented and that those ideas dont become implicitly accepted.

Eos: That resonates a lot with the time of reckoning were in now as people work to confront the racism thats systemic throughout society, science, and academia. Why is it so important to teach the context in which geoscience got started?

Pico: The reason its so important to teach this fuller context is to help us see the ways that the tools were being given are reproducing the same harm that imperialists were doing. For example, we learn how to map out territory. Why do we learn that? Its because thats what historical geologists were doing. They were making maps of the land so they could make claims to the land and use it for their purposes.

Olinger: People agree that better science is done when more perspectives are included and a more diverse range of people are engaged in the science process.If we want to make a field thats more welcoming and will be a field that people who have a diverse range of backgrounds want to join, its important that the education process is honest about what the legacy of the field is and to indicate that we want to make a change moving forward.

If I dont go scurry up this really scrambly steep scarp to go look at that rock, I will be less of a legitimate field geologist than if I looked at a nice rock outcrop that happens to be by a road.Chen: For example, as a field-going geologist, I have come across the belief of fieldwork being this domain of the rugged masculine straight white man. This archetype persists today, both subtly and overtly. That picture of the ideal field scientist definitely plays a role in why so many people who do not fit that classic archetype feel excluded, disillusioned, or unsafe or even experience some level of traumatization in the field. And for me, one of the materials that [Olinger] presented was really striking to me.John Tyndall was well known for being an accomplished mountaineer, and his theory of glacial flow mechanics happened to prevail over this other guys theory at the time. And the reason why it prevailed was not because he had better data or better science, but rather because he was seen as more of an accomplished mountaineer.

Even today, outdoorsmanship is conflated with academic prowess and credibility, where the difficulty, remoteness, dangers of fieldwork are tied to the perceived scientific value of the ideas and the expertise of those involved.Ive encountered this in my field training where, if I dont go scurry up this really scrambly steep scarp to go look at that rock, I will be less of a legitimate field geologist than if I looked at a nice rock outcrop that happens to be by a road. This is a very ableist mindset. Ideas about who makes the best field geologists not only affect who can do that science and who can gain legitimacy in these spaces but also affect the actual scientific ideas that then get promulgated and researched.

Eos: What was the catalyst that brought you together to discuss the issues of scientific racism and racism in the geosciences and develop a tool to address it?

Chen: In the aftermath of George Floyds murder this past June, there was a reinvigoration of the Black Lives Matter movement. Within STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics], there was a particular movement called #ShutDownSTEM, which was a day where science departments would take one day to think about the ways in which structural racism permeates our spaces and affects not only the people who do science but also science itself. If you had not engaged with these topics very much before, it was a day where you were supposed to do just that and put a pause on your normal business-as-usual activities.

My very first meeting during #ShutDownSTEM day was with this lovely group of people [the GeoContext team]. We had all this information on things that we wish we had known when we were getting trained as geoscientists, and we asked, Whats next?

Pico: One of the people in our group, Harriet Lau, wanted to put into her lecture slides pictures of people of color and of women who were famous geoscientists and she struggled to find them for historical slides. But she explained to me, This is why its hard.So we thought, why dont we replace those slides with something that explains why the field looks the way it does today?

The modules are very short, about five slides each, and theyre meant to be easy to incorporate into existing lectures.Eos: And from those discussions, you developed GeoContext?

Pico: Yes. We created a set of teaching modules that are meant to be supplementary for geoscience education. They span a range of topics that are generally included in geoscience, whether its an intro geoscience class or many of the standard classes that get taught for majors and graduate students. The modules are very short, about five slides each, and theyre meant to be easy to incorporate into existing lectures. Our hope is that the flexibility allows instructors to choose how to include this information however they want.People dont always have time to look into this on their own.

Eos: Thats one of the most common things that I hear when I talk to professors or teachers about why they arent talking about issues like this in classrooms. They say, I want to but I dont have enough time to do it from scratch or I dont know enough about it to create a slide on my own.

Pico: That is exactly the idea. We got together and figured out how to split topics so that it was manageable and done in a way that would help people not have to do that work.

Eos: What do some of the modules look like?

Wiggins: My module was about links between oceanography and the Atlantic slave trade and specifically related to one figure named Matthew Fontaine Maury. He was most known for being in the Navy, and he has been known as the Pathfinder of the Seas. He spent a lot of time looking at the trade winds and did a lot of work in the Atlantic Ocean. But there are a lot of other things that are less known about him and definitely surprised me. Essentially, his motivation behind work in the ocean was to profit off of enslaved people.He was pro moving slaves to Brazil and having them still be owned by American slave owners. And then the trade winds would optimize the market and make it very efficient for agricultural products produced by enslaved people.

Looking at that cinched for me. Its so surprising and yet not surprising at the same time. Of course, people will conduct work in oceanography to more efficiently trade goods, and of course, at that time, goods meant enslaved people.

Pico: The one I did was on landscape science and geomorphology. You might know John Wesley Powell for talking about rivers, but while he was writing these theories about rivers, he was also writing about the inferiority of Native American languages in the canyonlands of the United States. He actually spent most of his time doing that.We also mention William Morris Davis, whose work is used in geomorphology today. He would say, Warm climates are what makes these races stupid, and thats why Scandinavians are the best, or things like that. Im paraphrasing, but he would make arguments about climate and location of continents to justify a hierarchy of human races. Ultimately, we can trace these ideas to some of the eugenics movements that were used by the Nazi government.

Olinger: My slides are titled Glaciology, Race, and Masculinity. One slide addresses the fact that Indigenous Peoples are faced with a much higher level of hazard associated with glacial processes, including things like sea level rise, glacial lake outburst floods, and water scarcity associated with draining glaciers. Yet theres not a ton of work within glaciology that deals directly with Indigenous Peoples.

I cite a paper in which the authors examine descriptions for different types of snow used by the Smi people, who are an Indigenous People from Scandinavia. They find that, unsurprisingly, these folks who have been working in a glacial environment for a long time have incredibly interesting observations about the material properties of snow that would probably go unnoticed by scientists who havent spent any time in that area. Not only is it our duty to make an inclusive field, but the field is also improved by including other peoples perspectives.

Eos: The content you covered touches on some very heavy topics: slavery, white supremacy, eugenics. How did it feel personally to engage with these topics in the context of geosciences?

As an early-career researcher, you could imagine thinking, Louis Agassiz might be proud that I figured out global ice volumes or This was a continuation of his work, but actually, he wouldnt be proud of me. He didnt want me to exist.Pico: I study the ice age. And when learning about the ice age, Louis Agassiz was someone I revered very much. He really contributed a lot to the field, and it wasnt until the end of my fourth year as a graduate student that I learned about his work [perpetuating] scientific racism. And it felt like the carpet was being pulled out from under me.That, personally, was a feeling of I dont know what Im standing on anymore. As an early-career researcher, you could imagine thinking, Louis Agassiz might be proud that I figured out global ice volumes or This was a continuation of his work, but actually, he wouldnt be proud of me. He didnt want me to exist.

Wiggins: I definitely relate to that experience, though Im thinking about Princeton with Arnold Guyot. Guyots ideas about climate-based superiority of races were part of his ideology thatI just learned about this past summer. I havent been back in Guyot Hall, which is the home of the geoscience department, since then. But now, in some ways, it plagues my memories of the building because its a building that I personally loved, and thats the legacy that I have to think about every time I think of the building now.

Its really important to not memorialize these individuals. Put them in a museum, maybe, but make sure you talk about who they actually were.They did good things, but they also did pretty terrible things, and acknowledging that and not memorializing them is the first step to healing. This is our pathway to take a deeper dive into not only these individuals legacies but also the legacy of the field itself.

When I saw this project [GeoContext], it filled me with so much joy because this is what Ive known that my geosciences education has been missing this whole time.Its not that every single moment has been oh so happy. There have been times in this project that I walked out of my room to my dad and I said, Hey dad, I just want to scream right now.But it really felt, in my own way, that I could give back. Its something that I could use to help change the field of geoscience, coming from someone who hasnt even graduated college yet. There are not a lot of other Black geoscientists out there, and this helps me to make my mark and to be the change that the geoscience field really needs.

Eos: In what ways are you hoping this project grows and shapes the future of the field?

Chen: This first release focuses on the historical roots of various subdisciplines in Earth sciences. Were all hoping this project will expand to focus on issues more in the present day to help people reflect on what we as geoscientists can do now to reduce harm and even redress past harms to marginalized communities like Indigenous groups.

Pico: Were really hoping that this will be a growing resource that can be contributed to by the community. On our website, if people want to contribute, we would be happy to keep growing these resources through contributions. This was our first release, and in our next set, well focus on Indigenous Knowledges and Indigenous interactions.

Chen: If there is one thing that I hope for this project, it is that it will dispel the idea that geoscience, or any science for that matter, is apolitical and independent of human societal concerns. We, the Earth sciences community, have yet to collectively acknowledge and come to terms with our dark past. I hope the project shows how the social and political context of our science has, and continues to have, a huge impact on our ability to practice truly objective and empirical science. Who does the science? How does this impact what science is prioritized, funded, or considered elite? Who benefits or is harmed from the science?

Kimberly M. S. Cartier (@AstroKimCartier), Staff Writer

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Teaching Geoscience History in Context - Eos

To the editor: In light of the Los Angeles Times irredeemably racist past, I am tempted to cancel my print subscription and relegate the publication to the cancel-culture ash heap. (How the Los Angeles Times shilled for the racist eugenics movement, Feb. 28) I am not in the market for evasive excuses about The Times mirroring the culture and thinking of the day. Prescience remains the standard.

Unfortunately, I cannot cancel. The Herald Examiner and the New Times are long gone. The LA Weekly is a bundle of cannabis ads. The Times is the last newspaper standing.

Instead, I will point out that nothing really has changed, other than the fact that I pay considerably more now for my subscription than I did in 1988. In the 1930s, The Times editors, writers and columnists pandered to racists. In the 2020s, The Times editors, writers and columnists pander instead to the progressives.

James Moore, Los Angeles

::

To the editor: Alexandra Minna Sterns op-ed exposed the part played by The Times and its past owners in supporting the racially discriminating eugenics movement some 70 years ago. There can be no excuses for this horrible behavior and The Times needs to be punished for its part in this terrible chapter of history.

First we should cancel The Times in any way possible. All current and past employees should also be canceled, and the children of current and past employees should pay retributions to the decedents of those harmed by actions of the L.A. Times.

This would be a good start. After all, what is good for the goose is good for the gander.

Paul Salerno, Riverside

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To the editor: I found the article by Alexandra Minna Stern regarding The Times support for eugenics in the 1930s and early 1940s to be surprising. It seems that the more things change, the more things stay the same sometimes in other ways.

Today, children with Down syndrome are routinely aborted. Many Down syndrome children are able to lead fairly normal lives. They express great happiness and joy. Their crime is not being perfect.

Nathan Post, Santa Barbara

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Should the L.A. Times be 'canceled' for its racist past? - Los Angeles Times

INFINITE COUNTRY By Patricia Engel

To someone who grew up reading the giants of the Latin American Boom generation in translation Vargas Llosa, Garca Mrquez it was surprising that Patricia Engels third novel, Infinite Country, was not translated from the Spanish: The book sounds like Edith Grossman but with a borrowed amp and feedback. The prose is serpentine and exciting as it takes the scenic route to nowhere. There is a compliment in that. Her writing sets out to be majestic, and it is, like an overflowing souffl.

The novel follows a mixed-status family as they struggle to survive and reunite after a fathers deportation from the United States. The teenage Talia, American-born but raised in Colombia, escapes a reform school in the Andes and races to make her plane to rejoin her mom and siblings in New York. Twenty years of page-turning family history are told as she rushes to catch that plane.

The most unforgettable scenes in the novel are the intimate and meticulously rendered descriptions of Andean landscapes and mythology, of Colombias long history of violence. Engels capacity to dive deep into history and folklore extends also into her narration of the life of Talias father and the family patriarch, Mauro. One senses Engel building a mythology around him, too.

The novel captures the romance of the immigrants first days in America with a visceral tenderness. Their skin darkens in the Texan sun. They see the ocean for the first time. I feel sorry for their lost youth, then angry at their gullibility. For Talia and her family never lose their innocence, even as they withstand unimaginable systemic violence, and find phantoms of intergenerational trauma like buried mines inside themselves. Such windup dolls exist, to be sure, but most undocumented immigrants I know are being held together by faith and rubber bands.

Talias young mother, Elena, in particular, is presented as a saint, nave and eternally suffering an exquisite new iteration of a noble savage in the hands of a writer who is not herself undocumented. When the white owner of the restaurant where Elena cleans bathrooms rapes her, she feels guilty for her infidelity. The narrator points out that until now, she has been with no man besides her husband, a testament to her purity.

Elenas body, it seems, has integrity only when it is uncorrupted by knowledge and awareness. When she is in the hospital giving birth to her third child, a nurse tactlessly inquires how she plans to take care of three kids on one income. Elena thinks about forced sterilizations in Colombia, how they lured women to clinics offering free gynecological services and the women came out unaware they could no longer have children. To her, babies are not burdens. The scene implicitly links the American nurse with the centuries-old record of colonial eugenics imposed on Indigenous and Black women, and our brave Elena champions her reproductive rights.

But does she really know her reproductive rights? After her rape, she prays and panics until she gets her period. When my undocumented mother gave birth to my brother in this country, the nurses, always Afro-Latina or Mestiza, waited until my father was out of the room to discuss family planning not to talk about children as a burden, but to suggest social services that could help my poor family. But they knew sex was taboo for my mom, and that this might be her only chance to make a choice. Elena quotes the Colombian saying that a baby arrives with a loaf of bread under its arm as a sort of rebuttal. Such earnest, romantic repetition of ancestral wisdom in Latino art is often done by American artists who have choices, privileges and resources that our subjects, fictional or not, do not have. Literature about undocumented people in this country is too rare and too often written by writers whove never been undocumented for the literary world to continue to act as if we all still lived in Macondo.

This is a compulsively readable novel that will make you feel the oxytocin of comfort and delusion. The ending reads like child-of-immigrant fan fiction. Id hire Engel to ghostwrite my nightmares. Mauros love for his daughter motivates him to overcome alcoholism and homelessness, cross the border safely and reunite with the wife he still loves. The siblings whove never met yet smell familiar to one another. The novel closes as husband and wife are dancing, their bodies in perfect sync.

Read more from the original source:

In This Novel, Immigration Status Is Part of the Family Drama - The New York Times