Category Archives: Eugenics

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va., Feb. 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ --Two writers who have delved into the past and present challenges facing treasured places on the Southeast coast will receive the 2021 Phillip D. Reed Environmental Writing Awards from the Southern Environmental Law Center. SELC will present the awards March 25 during this year's Virginia Festival of the Book.

In the book category, former Georgia state legislator Paul Bolster will receive the Reed Award for Saving the Georgia Coast: A Political History of the Coastal Marshlands Protection Act. In the journalism category, Tony Bartelme of The Post and Courierin Charleston will receive the Reed Award for his in-depth reporting on South Carolina's coastal environment, including communities where the damaging impacts of climate change are happening now.

The featured speaker for the Reed Award presentation will be Lulu Miller, co-host of WNYC Studios' Radiolab and author of the widely acclaimed Why Fish Don't Exist, a nonfiction scientific thriller and memoir. The free, online event will be at 2 p.m. Eastern Time. To register to receive a link to the Zoom session, visit http://www.southernenvironment.org/reedaward/.

This Year's Book Award Winner: Paul Bolster

In Saving the Georgia Coast, published by the University of Georgia Press, Paul Bolster brings to life the unlikely coalition of local residents, wealthy landowners, hunters and anglers, garden club members, courageous politicians and others who came together more than 50 years ago to defend Georgia's unspoiled coastal marshlands. At the same time, he traces the intricate legislative maneuvers that resulted in passage of the 1970 Coastal Marshlands Protection Act, a law that remains the most comprehensive protection of marshlands along the Atlantic seaboard.

Bolster, who served a diverse Atlanta district in the Georgia House of Representatives for 12 years, does more than look back at this landmark legislative achievement. He also examines the policy challenges facing the Georgia coast today, among them how to address unrelenting development pressures and how to deal with rising sea levels and other impacts of a warming planet. He continues to follow environmental legislation in the state capitol and feels that lawmakers could look to the lessons from 50 years ago as a guide to protecting Georgia's fragile coast today.

A free-lance writer and historian, Bolster holds a Ph.D. degree in history from the University of Georgia and a law degree from Georgia State University School of Law. He taught American history at Clark Atlanta University for 14 years and has worked as a lobbyist for the Georgia Hospital Association and the American Hospital Association. A tireless advocate for affordable housing, he ran a Health Care for the Homeless program in Atlanta and served for three years on Governor Nathan Deal's Council on Criminal Justice Reform.

This Year's Journalism Award Winner: Tony Bartelme

Tony Bartelme, aspecial projects reporter for The Post and Courier, is being recognized in part for his stories from the Rising Waters Project, a series documenting how the accelerating forces of climate change are affecting Charleston and the South Carolina Lowcountry. Bartelme explains not only the science behind wetter hurricanes, intense "rain bomb" events and flooding high tides, but also the policy issues they raise and how they are making life harder for many South Carolinians. In other pieces recognized by this year's award, Bartelme displays a gift for linking science with sense of place. These include a story tracing the human and natural history of South Carolina's Santee Delta, and another on the quest by researchers to learn more about an elusive and rapidly disappearing marshland bird, the eastern black rail.

A graduate of Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, Bartelme is a three-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and has won some of the highest honors in journalism. He was awarded a prestigious Harvard University Nieman Fellowship in 2010. His investigative reporting has exposed government corruption and has explored subjects ranging from changes in ocean plankton to the global shortage of doctors. His latest book, A Surgeon in the Village: An American Doctor Teaches Brain Surgery in Africa, was published by Beacon Press.

This Year's Featured Speaker: Lulu Miller

Lulu Miller is a Peabody Award-winning science journalist who fell hard for radio when she joined the staff of WNYC Studios' Radiolab, initially as a volunteer. She returned to the show as co-host this past year. She is also co-founder ofNPR'sInvisibilia, a show about the invisible forces that shape human behavior. Her book Why Fish Don't Exist has been hailed as a wondrous debut and was listed among the best books of 2020 by The Washington Post, NPR, Chicago Tribune and Smithsonian. It follows the life of taxonomist David Starr Jordanthe first president of Stanford University and a proponent of the eugenics movementand reveals both the triumphs and the dark side of his relentless search for order in a chaotic world. Her book is also a deeply personal story about how to go on when everything seems lost. Miller is a graduate of Swarthmore College and earned an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Virginia.

About the Reed Environmental Writing Award

SELC's Reed Environmental Writing Award is named for the late Phillip D. Reed, a successful attorney, a committed environmental advocate, and a founding trustee of the Southern Environmental Law Center. Reed believed deeply in the power of writing to raise awareness of environmental issues and the forces that threaten natural treasures and special places.

Selected by a distinguished panel of judges, Reed Award winners have recently included New York Times opinion writer Margaret Renkl for her book Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss; Megan Mayhew Bergman, director of the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers' Conference at Middlebury College; Earl Swift for his book Chesapeake Requiem: A Year with the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island; J. Drew Lanham, author of The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature; Janisse Ray, author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood; and science writer Deborah Cramer, whose work has also won honors from the Society of Environmental Journalists and the National Academy of Sciences.

About Southern Environmental Law Center: For more than 30 years, the Southern Environmental Law Center has used the power of the law to champion the environment of the Southeast. With more than 80 attorneys and nine offices across the region, SELC is widely recognized as the Southeast's foremost environmental organization and regional leader. SELC works on a full range of environmental issues to protect our natural resources and the health and well-being of all the people in our region. http://www.SouthernEnvironment.org

SOURCE Southern Environmental Law Center

http://www.southernenvironment.org

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2021 Reed Awards Honor Great Writing About the Southeast's Fragile Coast - PRNewswire

With the dramatic expansion of new blood tests, many more pregnant mothers are testing their fetuses for defects such as Down syndrome.

NIFTY is a simple blood test that can pick up Down syndrome and an array of other genetic conditions, including relatively rare ones such ascri du chatsyndromeand conditions known by obscure numbers like1p36 deletion syndromeand16p12.2-p11.2duplication syndrome.

A number of other similar products, like Harmony Prenatal Test and Verifi, are also available in the international marketplace. These prenatal screening tools have already ushered in a new era of consumer choice in reproductive medicine.

Increasingly, in the US and China, all expectant mothers are being encouraged to undergo prenatal genetic screening. As the reach of DNA tests quietly expands, ideas about normalcy and deviancy, fitness and disability are subtly changing.

Technologists, prospective parents, and policymakers all now have the opportunity to make new choices and to accept new responsibilities. Creating a safe space for a child with a mental disability or a boy with Klinefelter syndrome who might look androgynous can involve a lifelong commitment of love and care. It is possible to selectively embrace these technologies while pushing back against what seem to be preordained courses of action.

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Eugenics? As embryo screening opens-wide the door to manipulate human traits, notions of normalcy and deviancy, fitness and disability, are changing -...

A BRADFORD dad has called Emmerdale's controversial Down's syndrome storyline"malicious and outdated" and says it "skirts dangerously close to eugenics".

Emmerdale's Laurel Thomas and Jai Sharma take a CVS (chorionic villus sampling) test, after a scan reveals their unborn baby has a possible chromosomal condition. When the test shows the baby has Downs syndrome, the couple decide to terminate the pregnancy. Emmerdale producer Laura Shaw said the story is not about right or wrong but about people taking really, really difficult decisions.

She added: People are going to have really strong views but I guess thats what makes it such an important story to tell.

Tim Curtiss 17-year-old daughter Ella, who has Downs syndrome, is a top cyclist, winning a bronze medal at the Special Olympics in Abu Dhabi and becoming double British champion in Manchester in 2019. She is part of a Yorkshire cycling squad for next years Special Olympics. Last year Ella was named in Cycling UKs 100 Women in Cycling list and in October she won the Young Achiever of the Year prize at the Disability Sport Yorkshire awards.

Mr Curtis said the Emmerdale storyline "has produced fury and anger" in the Down's syndrome community nationally and in Bradford. "As a parent of an athlete born with Down syndrome I can fully understand that anger," he said. "I understand the public interest and information defence put forward by the programme-makers, scriptwriters and actors but I feel it does not offer balance or justify this malicious and outdated attack on human beings and their right to life and skirts dangerously close to eugenics.

"I agree with Eddie Mc Connell of Down Syndrome Scotland who said: 'This is an attack on a community of people with protected characteristics. It is an assault on both the UN Convention on the Rights of Children and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. People with Downs syndrome have human rights and they are being trampled on by this storyline and the gratuitous way in which the programme-makers have sought to promote the storyline and its outcome'.

Mr Curtis added: "Further to this, actress Sally Phillips has accused ITV of being irresponsible and causing unnecessary hurt over the Emmerdale storyline. A petition objecting to the storyline has amassed over 25,000 signatures and many adults born with Down Syndrome have commented. Thousands more, including young adults with Down syndrome, have posted comments and videos on social media claiming the story serves only to perpetuate outdated ideas that those who were born with Down syndrome are unable to live full lives and are a burden to society. #dontscreenusout.

"Anyone who knows somebody born with Down syndrome knows these ideas are outdated and have their roots in the bad old days of people born with Down Syndrome being legally excluded from education until as recently as 40 years ago.

"All academic research and surveys that ask people with Down syndrome how they feel about their lives report an overwhelming majority being content, happy and fulfilled.

"For myself, it speaks to a fundamental philosophical question: Who are we to make the judgement call on who gets to live and who doesnt?"

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Dad of teenager with Down's syndrome hits out at Emmerdale story - Bradford Telegraph and Argus

Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, Nov. 23-29. Details and times are subject to change.

BLACK NARCISSUS 8 p.m. on FX. Youd be hard pressed to find a pair of films much more different from each other than Denzel Washingtons 2016 adaptation of the August Wilson play Fences and John Krasinskis 2018 horror blockbuster A Quiet Place. But those movies share at least two common traits: Each has a plot in which a pregnancy poses an existential threat to a family, and each was shot by Charlotte Bruus Christensen, the Danish cinematographer. Christensen takes a seat in the directors chair and further expands her range with her latest project, Black Narcissus, a mini-series adaptation of Rumer Goddens 1939 novel. Set in 1934, the story follows a group of nuns who try to establish a mission at a forlorn palace in the Himalayas. The actresses playing these nuns include two erstwhile Bond girls: Gemma Arterton and Diana Rigg, who appears here in one of the final roles she shot before her death in September.

BELLY OF THE BEAST (2020) 10 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). In her latest documentary, Erika Cohn (The Judge) looks at the forced sterilization of women in California prisons. The first half of the film is anchored by accounts of maltreatment, and also explores the uncomfortable history of eugenics in the United States; the second half looks at the modern-day push for justice. The result, Lovia Gyarkye wrote in her review for The New York Times, is timely and bracing.

AN ANGEL AT MY TABLE (1990) 9:15 p.m. on TCM. The director Jane Campion used autobiographies by the 20th century New Zealand author Janet Frame as the basis for this highly regarded film, which depicts Frame at different stages of her life. In an interview with The Times in 1991, Campion explained that she had wanted to make a film about Frame for years. I read her novel Owls Do Cry, when I was about 13, Campion said. It deals very poetically, lyrically, with the subject of madness in a young girl. I think it rang a note for me because at 13, you feel the potential for madness for the first time in your life.

TOSH.O 10 p.m. on Comedy Central. YouTube was less than 5 years old when the comedian Daniel Tosh started roasting internet celebrities on Tosh.O. The first season, which hit Comedy Central in 2009, included appearances by the stars of early viral videos like Chris Crocker (made famous for imploring the internet to leave Britney alone in 2007) and Jay Maynard (better known as Tron Guy). After more than a decade, Toshs series ends with a final episode on Tuesday night. It airs in a world in which internet celebrity is no longer a novel label.

THE MYSTERY OF D.B. COOPER (2020) 9 p.m. on HBO. Nearly five decades have passed since a man known by the pseudonym D.B. Cooper hijacked a passenger plane over the Pacific Northwest, jumped out and landed in the American imagination. But despite the F.B.I.s best efforts, the mans true identity remains unknown. This documentary from the filmmaker John Dower (My Scientology Movie) revisits the case.

REAR WINDOW (1954) 8 p.m. on TCM. James Stewart plays a news photographer who thinks hes witnessed a murder in this classic from Alfred Hitchcock. (Who is referred to as Nobodys greenhorn, in Bosley Crowthers 1954 review for The Times.) TCM will pair the film with another Hitchcock-Stewart collaboration, THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH (1956), airing at 10 p.m.

JEFF DUNHAMS COMPLETELY UNREHEARSED LAST-MINUTE PANDEMIC HOLIDAY SPECIAL 8 p.m. on Comedy Central. The comic Jeff Dunham has had successes both on television and onstage, but audiences dont exactly show up to see Dunham himself: Hes a ventriloquist, so his primary roles are characters he conjures with his hands. That puts him at an advantage going into this pandemic-era comedy special, where he can perform opposite a cast of characters without having to worry about social distancing.

ILLUMINATION PRESENTS MINIONS HOLIDAY SPECIAL 8:30 p.m. on NBC. This summer was supposed to have seen the release of Minions: The Rise of Gru, the latest film starring the conspicuously marketable cartoon creatures from the Despicable Me franchise. That sequel got pushed to next year because of the pandemic, but children can get a minion-sized new dose of the characters with this holiday themed entracte.

EARTHS GREAT SEASONS 8 p.m. on BBC America. Andrew Scott, the Olivier award winning actor (who also plays a certain attractive clergyman in Fleabag), narrates this four-part BBC nature series, which is built around the four seasons. The Hot Priest cools down on Saturday night, with an episode focused on winter.

MY PSYCHEDELIC LOVE STORY (2020) 9 p.m. on Showtime. In her 2013 memoir, Tripping the Bardo With Timothy Leary: My Psychedelic Love Story, Joanna Harcourt-Smith chronicled her time with the LSD maestro Timothy Leary and the trauma that grew out of it. Harcourt-Smith died this month at 74. That adds a note of finality to this documentary adaptation of her memoir, which was directed by the famed filmmaker Errol Morris.

FARGO 10 p.m. on FX. Noah Hawleys TV adaptation of the Coen Brothers movie Fargo ends its fourth season on Sunday night. The latest season shifted the shows action to 1950s Kansas City, infusing its story with organized crime, a social message and a megastar, Chris Rock. Given how thorough the mix of crime story and social allegory is, Hawley and his crew have done an impressive job of weaving, Mike Hale wrote in his review of the season for The Times. It rarely feels as if were being preached to, even though we are.

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Whats on TV This Week: Black Narcissus and My Psychedelic Love Story - The New York Times

TheG. K. Chesterton Institute for Faith and Cultureannounces Father Boyd's Conference The Return of Eugenics. The Archdiocese of Edmonton Canada is pleased to announce its Annual St. Luke's Guild event in collaboration G. K. Chesterton Institute for Faith & Culture at Seton Hall University. The online conference with Father Ian Boyd on the theme of "The Return of Eugenics."The online event will be streamed online on Sunday, October 18, 2020 from 7-8:30 p.m. (Edmonton time) 5-6:30 p.m.(New York time).

Toattend via Zoom, click here.Meeting ID: 840 5913 4481Passcode: 304204

Father Ian Boyd is the world expert on G. K. Chesterton. In his talk, "The Return of Eugenics,"he will be reflecting on the writings of Chesterton and their message for us in this modern age.

Father Boyd is founder and President Emeritus of the G. K. Chesterton Institute for Faith & Culture at Seton Hall University and Founding Editor of The Chesterton Review.

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Chesterton Institute Hosts Online Conference: "The Return of Eugenics" - Seton Hall University News & Events

Some documentaries take longer to come together than others a lesson Salt Lake City-born filmmaker Erika Cohn learned as it was happening.

Back in 2010, Cohn began work on In Football We Trust, the Emmy-winning documentary she co-directed about young men in Utahs Polynesian community who used football as a way to change their lives. The movie premiered at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, and was seen nationwide in theaters and on PBS.

Also in 2010, she met Cynthia Chandler, the Bay Area activist and attorney whos one of the main figures in Belly of the Beast, which will debut in virtual cinemas including the Salt Lake Film Societys SLFS@Home platform on Friday, before airing on PBS Independent Lens on Nov. 23. (The Utah Film Center, the documentarys fiscal sponsor, will have a free online screening Tuesday at 7 p.m., with a post-screening Q&A with Cohn, moderated by Planned Parenthood of Utah. That screening is limited to 150 tickets.)

Chandler was the first attorney to get an inmate dying in a California prison out on compassionate release, Cohn said in a phone interview. Chandler is also the co-founder of Justice Now, a Bay Area legal group advocating for women in prison, which exposed the multiple ways prisons destroy the human right to family, she said.

One of the most heinous methods used in prisons, Cohn said, was the illegal sterilization of inmates, usually women of color.

When I first found out about that, it just really screamed eugenics to me, Cohn said. As a Jewish woman, the phrase Never again was always in the back of my mind.

Comparisons to the Nazis, and their efforts to wipe out entire groups of people, are not alarmist. One of the facts Cohn presents in the film is that California was so efficient at eugenics more than 20,000 women, mostly Indigenous and Latina, were sterilized between 1909 and 1979 that the Germans visited California in the 1930s to learn their techniques.

More recently, as the film describes, some 1,400 women inmates in California prisons between 1997 and 2013 were sterilized, usually with consent not given or hastily coerced. It was those statistics that Justice Now had documented and was fighting to end.

I knew that I wanted to get involved, Cohn said. Chandler invited Cohn to be a volunteer for Justice Now, first editing campaign videos and later becoming a legal advocate, providing services to more than 150 women inmates in California.

As a volunteer, Cohn had the idea to film Justice Nows work, which was to have inmates members of the groups board of directors teach other inmates how to fill out questionnaires about the sterilization they experienced.

I would be telling the story of how the human rights abuses were being documented, Cohn said.

Thats how Cohn met Kelli Dillon, a paroled inmate, and the story angle really changed, Cohn said. When I first met Kelli, I was just blown away.

Dillon, who served 15 years for killing her abusive husband, was 24 when a doctor found cysts in her uterus. Nine months after her surgery, she began having menopausal symptoms and lost more than 100 pounds. Eventually, she would learn that the surgeon removed not only the cysts but gave her a hysterectomy.

When Cohn met Dillon, the former inmate was focused on community activism, particularly as a domestic violence counselor and a gang interventionist. But she had been working behind the scenes, advising Justice Now on the sterilization issue ultimately working with Chandler to lobby the California Legislature on a bill to end the practice of sterilizing women in that states prisons.

(In her research, Cohn found other states had systems similar to Californias. Utah, on the other hand, is one of six states that responded to Cohens Freedom of Information Act requests by saying they did not perform sterilizations on inmates or had a ban against the practice.)

When the Center for Investigative Reporting broke a story detailing the number of sterilizations at Californias biggest womens prison, Dillon decided at that point that she was, once again, going to dive back into this and be an advocate for others, Cohn said.

That advocacy included going on camera with Cohn. The more I filmed with her, the more I felt like the film really needed to center around her story, Cohn said.

In the film, Dillon describes the pain of having to retell her story again and again and Cohn took pains to not make her dredge up bad memories too often.

She really directed that process in terms she was comfortable with, Cohn said. Because we already had that foundation of friendship and collaboration, before she became the focus of the film, there was already that trust in the relationship established. Kelli felt very comfortable saying, No, I dont want to film right now.

Now, Cohn said, with the film coming out, she doesnt have to tell her story over and over and over again. The film stands alone as an opportunity for people to better understand her story.

Since filming Belly of the Beast, Justice Now has shifted its focus toward working to build a safe, compassionate world without prisons, according to the groups mission statement. Chandler is no longer associated with Justice Now, and is now director of the Bay Area Legal Incubator, which helps fledgling lawyers start practices to serve low- and middle-income communities. And Dillon is continuing her work with domestic violence survivors and gang members.

The reports were so eerily similar to what we uncovered in Belly of the Beast, it was astounding, Cohn said. The Georgia story is not an isolated incident. We have a legacy of forced sterilization in the United States, and this is just one more instance of modern-day eugenics.

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In 'Belly of the Beast,' Utah filmmaker examines modern 'eugenics' in women's prisons - Salt Lake Tribune

Before the Nazis made eugenics synonymous with ethnic cleansing, it was considered a viable tool for managing public health. In the early 20th century, applying eugenic methods such as forced sterilization was a way to improve the human race.

The theory was undesirable traits such as mental disabilities, criminality and promiscuity were hereditary. Adherents believed that removing these traits from the gene pool would better society.

Paul Popenoe was a major supporter. He had little medical training but that didn't stop him from referring to himself as "Dr. Popenoe" after receiving an honorary degree. In his view, anyone with an IQ below 70 should be sterilized, which he estimated was around 6 million people in the U.S.

After the Nazi atrocities of World War II came to light, public opinion turned against compulsory sterilization and American eugenics laws were struck down by courts.

Learn more in Paul Popenoe's papers at UW's UW American Heritage Center.

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Archives On The Air 215: Eugenics And Compulsory SterilizationPaul Popenoe Papers - Wyoming Public Media

(Yasmin Elqutami The Student Life)

Pomona Colleges decision to rename Millikan Laboratory which President G. Gabrielle Starr attributed to its namesakes advocacy of eugenics may not significantly affect students at the moment, especially due to everyone being off campus. Indeed, were it not for present circumstances, it might have gone relatively unnoticed, just one of many similar controversies to occur on college campuses in recent years.

However, in light of 2020s ongoing racial justice protests and subsequent vituperative debates on how (or if) to commemorate individuals who shaped history but also espoused deeply prejudiced ideologies, Pomonas renaming of Millikan Laboratory, the colleges physics building, might indicate a new standard for determining whether to remove a commemoration of an individual with irredeemably problematic views. Perhaps the question we should be asking is not whether a persons achievements outweigh the responsibility to condemn some of their opinions, but rather what the purpose of their commemorative marker is in the particular public environment that it is situated in. In other words, it is a question of the persons position in space, not time.

The building formerly called Millikan Laboratory was initially named for renowned physicist Robert A. Millikan (1868 to 1953), a Nobel laureate best known for his 1909 oil drop experiment, which measured the charge of an electron. Millikan spent most of his career at Caltech and had no special connection to any of the Claremont Colleges.

Separate from his contributions to physics, and in line with much of the American population and intelligentsia in the early 20th century, Millikan was a noted supporter of eugenics the pseudoscientific belief that some people are genetically predetermined to be more intelligent and capable than others, and that the continued reproduction of the genetically unfit poses a societal and economic threat to the population.

After the Supreme Court ruling in Buck v. Bell (1927), many states enacted laws allowing forced sterilization of a broad category of people loosely defined as unfit; California gained a particular reputation for vigorously applying its forced sterilization law. Eugenics combined with widespread racism meant that forced sterilization disproportionately impacted women of color, with litigation relating to involuntary tubal ligations of Hispanic women at Los Angeles hospitals continuing into the 1970s. As a trustee of the eugenicist think tank Human Betterment Foundation, Millikan ardently promoted these laws.

In light of this, Starr wrote in an Oct. 6 email that Millikan Laboratory would be renamed after the parents of Frank Seaver PO 05 (thats 1905, by the way), whose 1958 donation enabled the construction of Millikan and nearby Seaver North and Seaver South.

Starr suggested that the building now officially the Mary Estella and Carlton Seaver Laboratory be called Seaver East in everyday usage, or alternatively Estella after Frank Seavers mother (due to the names association with stars, since the building is devoted to physics and astronomy).

Millikan never taught at the Claremont Colleges; he had no special connection to the environment that the building bearing his name was situated in. As Starr stated in her email, its clear that the name was chosen at the time to represent excellence in the physical sciences. In requesting the building be named Millikan, Frank Seaver just wanted to honor a famous physicist. The building could have been named Newton or Cavendish or Einstein and the effect would have been the same. Renaming the building after the Seaver family, then, makes the building more integrated into Pomonas physical environment, as the building is now named after individuals to whom the college community can feel personally linked.

When people fight over public monuments for controversial individuals, it is really the space they are fighting over, not the memory of that person. Removing a public memorial to someone doesnt mean they are erased from history (we dont put up statues of Hitler or Stalin, after all, and yet no ones forgetting them); it means a community is saying that the persons memory should not be lionized in this particular space. What the person did in life is already done; commemorating a historical individual in public says much more about the community that erected that marker than about the person being commemorated.

One can see how this standard applies to the main flashpoints of this debate. In the case of statues of Confederate generals throughout the United States, the vast majority were not erected because the depicted person had any particular connection to the place where their statue is located. Most Confederate monuments were not put up in the aftermath of the Civil War, but rather during subsequent periods of heightened civil rights activism to intimidate those opposed to white supremacy: during Reconstruction, the consolidation of Jim Crow after Plessy v. Fergusson, and the Civil Rights Movement of the 50s and 60s. (Of course, even in instances where an individual might have had a connection to the place where his statue is, it should still be removed, as those who went to war against their own country so they could retain the ability to own slaves do not deserve any respect.)

This standard gets murkier when it comes to individuals whose memories can be considered relevant to any public place in the entire country in particular, the Founding Fathers who owned slaves. The name and legacy of Thomas Jefferson is obviously inseparable from and integral to places like the Jefferson Memorial or Monticello, so it would not make sense to remove it from there. In other cases, where the legacy of the Founding Fathers has a purpose in a public place only by virtue of that place being in America, it is up to a community to decide exactly how they want to recognize that aspect of the countrys history and whether their recognition should include a public monument or not.

Perhaps the only real guiding principle in such cases is to make sure that the darker aspects of Jeffersons legacy, and how they might have shaped his actions, are included in our conception of who he was. This places the onus on historians and the public at large to ensure a more multifaceted memory of Jefferson, which, ultimately, is inherently a more complete and historically accurate picture. This demonstrates, for example, the importance of the long struggle to make Monticello acknowledge that Jefferson had four children with enslaved person Sally Hemings.

For someone who really did have a close connection to the place where they are being commemorated (like monuments to Millikan at Caltech), perhaps the only applicable standard for whether we should remember this person by memorializing them really is to ask if their accomplishments outweigh their personal prejudices. This further emphasizes the need to ensure that the real-world harms that their views resulted in or contributed to should be part of the broader public memory. However, in almost every case, the present controversy has concerned statues or other markers of people who had no relevant connection to the place where they are being commemorated.

For another example right here at Pomona, look no further than the name of Richard Wagner (along with Chopin, Beethoven, Bach and Schubert) on the facade of the colleges music hall Big Bridges. Wagners contributions to opera notwithstanding, his virulent anti-Semitism (including anti-Semitic tropes in several of his operas) and his ideological influence on Nazism as Hitlers favorite composer is well-documented and inescapable. Like Millikan, and like the other composers commemorated alongside him, Wagner had no connection to Pomona; he died four years before the colleges founding. I see no reason why Wagners name cannot be replaced with literally any other historical composer, as the purpose of the names is simply to list several of the most important figures in music history.

Granted, no one considers the debate about public monuments the biggest problem facing the 5Cs or the country right now. But this debate has become a critical cultural flashpoint and is clearly not going away, so it is worth it to try to find an acceptable standard to objectively ascertain whether a monument should be kept.

And if Pomona is ever looking for someone to name another science building after, Id like to put forward Jennifer Doudna PO 85, pioneer of CRISPR gene editing technology and corecipient of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Ben Reicher PO 22 is from Agoura Hills, California. He joined his high school newspaper in ninth grade because he loved to argue, and hasnt stopped since.

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OPINION: Pomona's renaming of Millikan offers a new standard for ongoing nationwide controversy - The Student Life

Opinion writers weigh in on these public health topics and others.

The Washington Post:The Great Barrington Declarations Herd Immunity Strategy Wont Work To Stop The CoronavirusPresident Trump has long seemed fascinated with the idea that herd immunity could provide an easy end to the coronavirus pandemic, even before his own diagnosis with covid-19 and his blithe declaration after he checked himself out of the hospital that no one should be afraid of getting it. With time, it goes away, he told an ABC News town hall last month. And youll develop youll develop herd like a herd mentality. Its going to be its going to be herd-developed, and thats going to happen. That will all happen. The neuroradiologist he brought in to advise on the pandemic response over the summer, Scott Atlas, has argued that rising case counts will bring the nation to herd immunity faster. (Marc Lipsitch, Gregg Gonsalves, Carlos del Rio and Rochelle P. Walensky, 10/14)

The Lancet:Scientific Consensus On The COVID-19 Pandemic: We Need To Act Now... The arrival of a second wave and the realisation of the challenges ahead has led to renewed interest in a so-called herd immunity approach, which suggests allowing a large uncontrolled outbreak in the low-risk population while protecting the vulnerable. Proponents suggest this would lead to the development of infection-acquired population immunity in the low-risk population, which will eventually protect the vulnerable. This is a dangerous fallacy unsupported by scientific evidence. (10/15)

CNN:White House's New Covid-19 Strategy Is MadnessAs if Donald Trump's irresponsibility was not already a national tragedy, the White House seems now to favor a controversial approach to Covid-19 that threatens to bring nothing less than mass suffering.More than 216,000 Americans have already died. Yet on Tuesday, senior Trump administration officials said that they were receptive to pursuing "herd immunity," an approach touted by a group of scientists who have put out what they call the "Great Barrington Declaration." (Jeffrey Sachs, 10/14)

Los Angeles Times:Eugenics Is Making A Comeback. Stop It In Its TracksPoliticians 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. (Adam Cohen, 10/14)

Stat:The 'Buy American' Executive Order: Opportunities And PitfallsPresident Trumps executive order on essential medicines aims to encourage pharmaceutical companies to bring their manufacturing back to the U.S. But it may also have unintended consequences for both domestic and foreign companies. (Joy Strum, 10/15)

The Hill:The Pandemic's Digital Shadow: Increased SurveillanceGovernments responses to todays pandemic are laying a foundation for tomorrows surveillance state... History has shown that powers acquired during an emergency often outlive the original threat. And governments in democracies as well as authoritarian states are now exploiting the health crisis to digitize, collect, and analyze our most intimate data, thus threatening permanent harm to our privacy. (Adrian Shahbaz and Allie Funk, 10/14)

The New York Times:Amy Coney Barrett On The Supreme Court Could Take Us BackwardVoters cant weigh in on the Barrett nomination, but they can correct this countrys course. Heres the fundamental question: Will voters reward the party that is working to provide more health care, or the party that has painstakingly robbed one million children of insurance? Will voters help tug the United States forward, or will they support the backward thinkers who have been on the side of discrimination, racism, bigotry and voter suppression? At the polls, which side of history will you stand on? (Nicholas Kristof, 10/14)

The Hill:Faith, Gender And Abortion Center Stage At Amy Coney Barrett's ConfirmationOn the surface, American politics appears to be full of paradoxes. In 2016, many women and especially white Christian women voted for Donald Trump over the first woman nominated for U.S. president by a major party. Now, in 2020, confirmation hearings are occurring for a woman, nominated by Trump, who opposes a womans right to choose abortion. How might those women who voted for Trump feel about these hearings that reopen questions about womens autonomy over their own bodies? (Landon Schnabel, 10/14)

New England Journal of Medicine:Health Policy In A Biden AdministrationA Biden administration would aim to address todays critical challenges Covid-19, gaps in health insurance coverage, high costs, and inadequate care for the disabled by means of actionable reforms aimed at the most vulnerable Americans. (Sherry Glied, 10/15)

USA Today:Nick Saban's COVID-19 Positive Is Another Red Flag For Struggling SECThe travesty of the 2020 college football season is now on full display. With the SEC schedule collapsing like a house of cards, the biggest name in the sport, 68-year-old Alabama head coach Nick Saban, has tested positive for COVID-19 and is currently in isolation at home, the university announced Wednesday evening. Thankfully, Saban is not experiencing any symptoms of the coronavirus, he said in a statement. Alabamas athletic director Greg Byrne, 48, also tested positive, the university said. For now, No. 2 Alabamas game with No. 3 Georgia is still on for this weekend, but the same cant be said for two other SEC contests that are no longer on the schedule.LSUs game at Florida was postponed Wednesday when it was announced that 21 Florida players had tested positive, meaning the school would have fewer than 50 scholarship players available when adding in everyone who came into contact with the infected players and isnow in quarantine. (Christine Brennan, 10/14)

Los Angeles Times:Want To Reopen California? Keep Coronavirus Out Of Poor Areasn Monterey County, 26% of the countys COVID-19 cases are in East Salinas, a largely Latino community of farmworkers, service employees and others living in crowded conditions as they work on the pandemic front lines. Its a very different story in the countys wealthy seaside communities, including Monterey, Carmel and Pacific Grove. Combined, these locales have a population that slightly exceeds that of East Salinas but they have only about 2% of the countys coronavirus cases. (Angele Glover Blackwell and Manuel Pastor, 10/14)

Boston Globe:The Affordable Care Act And Coverage For Massachusetts Residents Is At RiskDave was laid off from his hotel job in March due to the coronavirus pandemic, and he lost his health insurance too. A week later, he was rushed to the emergency room with a lung problem. With support from an enrollment assister, he was able to enroll in MassHealth coverage that was made possible because of the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare. He is just one of the hundreds of thousands of Massachusetts residents given a lifeline by the ACA. (Elizabeth Warren, Amy Rosenthal, and Kate Walsh, 10/14)

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Perspectives: Pros, Cons Of Herd Immunity Strategy; Good Genes Or Nonsense Eugenics? - Kaiser Health News

President Trump has alarmed Jewish leaders and others with remarks that appeared to endorse racehorse theory the idea that selective breeding can improve a countrys performance, which American eugenicists and German Nazis used in the last century to buttress their goals of racial purity.

You have good genes, you know that, right? Trump told a mostly white crowd of supporters in Bemidji, Minn., on Sept. 18. You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isnt it? Dont you believe? The racehorse theory. You think were so different? You have good genes in Minnesota.

Rabbi Mark Diamond, a senior lecturer on Jewish studies at Loyola Marymount University, was stunned.

To hear these remarks said at a rally in an election campaign for the presidency is beyond reprehensible, said Diamond, the former executive vice president of the Board of Rabbis of Southern California.

This is at the heart of Nazi ideology This has brought so much tragedy and destruction to the Jewish people and to others. Its actually hard to believe in 2020 we have to revisit these very dangerous theories.

The Trump campaign did not respond to requests for comment.

Trumps remark was not the first time that he has spoken favorably about the racehorse analogy, which has been embraced by white supremacists for decades. But these latest comments come as the country has been roiled over racial injustice and the protests against it. Trump has continued to make inflammatory remarks and his campaign has made blatantly racist appeals.

During the presidential debate Tuesday, he touched upon the genetic theory, returning to a frequent sentiment that ones skills are innate.

You could never have done the job we did, Trump said to former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee. You dont have it in your blood.

Trump has long spoken about his beliefs in the superiority of his genes, dating back to his days as a Manhattan developer; hes talked less frequently of his belief in the racehorse theory, which basically calls for using breeding to encourage desirable traits and eliminate undesirable traits.

Initially used for horses, the theory was ultimately used to justify selective breeding of people, including forced sterilization laws that were on the books in 32 states and used in some of them up through the 1970s.

Scientists who study human intelligence and accomplishment generally agree that while genetics may play some role, the success of individuals is heavily shaped by their environment, including their families and neighborhoods, as well as other factors including mentoring some people receive and simple chance.

Trump views the issue differently.

You can absolutely be taught things. Absolutely. You can get a lot better. But there is something. You know, the racehorse theory, there is something to the genes, Trump told Larry King on CNN in 2007. And I mean, when I say something, I mean a lot.

Three years later, he told CNN that his father was successful and it naturally followed that he would be too: I have a certain gene. Im a gene believer. Hey, when you connect two racehorses, you usually end up with a fast horse. And I really was you know, I had a a good gene pool from the standpoint of that.

He used the phrase again at a 2016 campaign rally in Iowa, and his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., told his fathers biographer that the family believed in the theory.

Like him, Im a big believer in racehorse theory. Hes an incredibly accomplished guy, my mothers incredibly accomplished, shes an Olympian, so Id like to believe genetically Im predisposed to better-than-average, Trump Jr. told Michael DAntonio in a 2014 interview, according to a transcript provided by the author.

DAntonio, now a Trump critic whose scathing biography Never Enough was published in 2015, vividly recalled the interview.

I happened to have done a book on eugenics so I knew exactly what he was talking about, I knew where it came from, said DAntonio, who had written a nonfiction book about the confinement of learning-disabled orphans in Massachusetts. This was something American pseudo-scientists taught the Nazis. It sent a chill through me.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, some mainstream scientists and elected officials in the United States, particularly in California, urged the improvement of the citizenry through eugenics. The concept was often used against people of color, Jewish people and Native Americans, but it was also used against white people who were deemed feeble-minded, delinquent or otherwise damaged.

Eugenics arose in the U.S. as the gains Black people had made during the Reconstruction era came under attack by white people aiming to maintain power, often by murder and mob violence. It was also used to argue against immigration by Italians and others.

Across the U.S., there were two avenues that eugenicists used to exploit what they thought of as the racehorse theory of human development, DAntonio said.

The first was to encourage people deemed to have superior traits to have large families. These efforts were partly encouraged by fitter family competitions at state fairs, where well-nourished white families would be judged on their height, weight, size of their heads and symmetry of their faces alongside the competitions for the heartiest livestock and largest crops. Winners would frequently be recognized in newspapers.

(Nazi Germany ran the Lebensborn program to cultivate Aryan traits. The state provided support to pregnant women mostly unmarried deemed racially pure; many of the babies were given to German couples, often SS officers and their families.)

The second avenue in the U.S. was institutionalization and sterilization. Children, often minorities, who were deemed troubled or labeled with the term imbeciles were confined to institutions. More than 65,000 people were officially sterilized against their will, said Paul Lombardo, a Georgia State University law professor who specializes in bioethics, though he suspects the actual number is far larger.

He said eugenics theory was used to justify forced sterilization laws, as well as immigration restrictions and miscegenation prohibitions. American eugenicists conversed with German leaders in the 1920s and 1930s, and their policies became part of the Nazi playbook. In Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler wrote approvingly about the United States immigration restrictions, Lombardo said.

At the Nuremberg trials, after World War II, Nazi defenders noted that Americans had also forcibly sterilized people and quoted a U.S. Supreme Court ruling from the 1920s that said state laws allowing such procedures did not violate the Constitution, said Lombardo, who has written two books on the history of eugenics in the U.S.

When Trump says at a rally in Minnesota, You have good genes, I believe in the racehorse theory of heredity, he has all of the earmarks of a classic eugenicist, Lombardo said. It has been astounding to me as somebody who has studied this stuff for 40 years that any public figure would be willing to use that kind of language that so clearly echoes the kinds of things we heard from the people who were running the eugenics movement back in the 20s and 30s.

Rob Eshman, the former editor of the Jewish Journal who is now the national editor of the influential Jewish American online newspaper the Forward, said Trumps language was a clear signal to his supporters who harbor racist or anti-Semitic views.

Racehorse theory is basically like a forerunner to eugenics theory, which led to the Nazis final solution, Eshman said after Trumps Minnesota comments. Its one of the least coded messages he has sent.

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Jewish leaders alarmed by Trump's support of 'racehorse theory' - Los Angeles Times