Category Archives: Eugenics

White House senior adviser Stephen Miller and Robert Law, chief of the Office of Policy and Strategy for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), played roles in drafting Trumps order, The New York Times noted on April 21. Both Miller and Law have close connections to anti-immigrant hate groups, helping underscore the influence racist think tanks have had in shaping U.S. policy during the Trump era. Trump signed the order into law on April 22, marking an unprecedented step for restricting immigration into the U.S. in the modern age.

Miller promoted material from the anti-immigrant hate group Center for Immigration Studies (CIS)to conservative website Breitbart News in 2015, prior to becoming Trumps de facto immigration czar. He also shared a link from the white nationalist website VDARE to Breitbart around the same time, and pitched scores of racist stories to their editors, as Hatewatch previously reported. Law is a former lobbyist for the anti-immigrant hate group Federation for American Immigration Reform(FAIR), having served as their lobbying director and director of government relations from 2013 to 2017. He is a Trump-era appointee of USCIS and joined that agency in 2018.

President Donald Trump speaks during the daily briefing of the coronavirus task force at the White House on April 22 in Washington. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

The late John Tanton, a notorious racist and eugenicist, founded FAIR and provided critical support in the creation of CIS. Both are non-profit groups that have gained significant access to influential policymakers during Trumps first term. Each group has also promoted the writing of white nationalists and far-right activists who traffic in debunked pseudoscience purporting to connect race to intelligence in humans. As an example of their often-overlapping worldviews, both CIS and FAIR have argued during the COVID-19 pandemic that immigrants trapped in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention should be kept there, despite threats to their lives and safety caused by the virus.

Trumps order, which is scheduled for 60 days but can be extended, is being executed under the auspices of protecting American workers during COVID-19 pandemic. Despite this claim, the order does not impact foreign-born guest workers entering the U.S., only those applying for green cards. The administration has also blocked asylum seekers during the pandemic. ProPublica reported on April 2that this is the first time asylum seekers have been denied an opportunity to make their case in court in 40 years.

Trump first announced he would be signing the order on the night of April 20 through his Twitter account, and white nationalists and neo-Nazis on that website immediately celebrated the news. Extremists have long trumpeted the notion of a moratorium on immigration as a crucial step towards building a country for white non-Jews only.

Trump should sign the immigration moratorium order at the Statue of Liberty, white nationalist pundit Scott Greer posted to Twitterin the immediate aftermath of Trumps announcement, mocking a favorite cultural target of the racist right.

Hatewatch reached out to the White House for comment about Miller and Laws connection to hate groups but did not immediately receive a response.

Hatewatch obtained more than 900 emails Miller sent to Breitbart News editor Katie McHugh during 2015 and 2016, when he was working as an aide to Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, and later, working as an adviser on Trumps presidential campaign. Miller demonstrated an interest in white nationalist and nativist literature in those emails, as well ramping up deportations of the undocumented, and stopping legal immigration into the U.S. outright.

Miller discussed the subject of stopping legal immigration on Aug. 4, 2015, in an email exchange with Garrett Murch, who also served as an aide to Sessions at that time.

Murch, Aug. 4, 2015, 6:22 p.m. ET: [Talk show host] Mark Levin just said there should be no immigration for several years. Not just cut the number down from the current 1 million green cards per year. For assimilation purposes.

Miller, Aug. 4, 2015, 6:23 p.m. ET: Like [Calvin] Coolidge did. Kellyanne Conway poll says that is exactly what most Americans want after 40 years of non-stop record arrivals.

Miller expressed admiration about President Coolidge in his emails to Breitbart News because he signed into law the 1924 Immigration Act. Based on eugenics, the act placed race-based restrictions on who could immigrate into the U.S. Adolf Hitler also praised the act for this reason in his book Mein Kampf.

Miller emailed to McHugh a link from VDARE, a white nationalist website that has long called for a complete halt to immigration into the U.S. Peter Brimelow, the groups founder, wrote a post on April 21 titled Trump Has Put an Immigration Moratorium In Play. Not Enough But Something, referring to the order. He noted in his commentary that halting immigration in 2012 would have played a role in preserving a white majority in the U.S., a central goal of white nationalists.

And whites known until the 1965 Immigration Act as Americans would have been 68% of the population, instead of 63%, Brimelow wrote, analyzing the imagined impact of what stopping immigration during the tenure of President Obama would have accomplished.

The 1965 Immigration Act, also known as Hart-Celler, put an end to the Coolidge-era racial quota laws that both Miller and Hitler praised. Miller derided Hart-Celler in his emails to Breitbart News and urged that publication to write articles criticizing it.

Prior to joining the Trump administration in 2017, Law served in multiple rolesat FAIR, including as the lobbying director and the director of government relations.

Robert Law of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. (Photo via Western States Center)

FAIR founder John Tanton consistently promoted racist views about immigrants. In a Jan. 26, 1996, letter to Roy Beck of NumbersUSA about Californias immigrant population, Tanton questioned whether minorities could ever run an advanced society. He believed in eugenics, a pseudoscientific practice embraced by Nazi Germany, which purports to instill superior genes in humans through the process of selective breeding. In a letter to the late Robert K. Graham, a California-based multimillionaire and eugenicist, on Sept. 18, 1996, Tanton expressed his belief that less intelligent individuals should logically have fewer children.

From 1985 to 1994, FAIR received approximately $1.2 million in assistance from the Pioneer Fund, a eugenicist organization founded in 1937 for the purpose of pursuing race betterment by promoting the genetic blueprint of white persons who settled in the original thirteen states prior to the adoption of the constitution.

Dan Stein, FAIRs current president, articulated beliefs that mirror those expressed by Tanton. During an Oct. 2, 1997, Wall Street Journal interview with conservative journalist Tucker Carlson about The Intellectual Roots of Nativism, Stein asked, Should we be subsidizing people with low IQs to have as many children as possible and not subsidizing those with high ones?

While Law was employed with FAIR, working under Stein, he lambasted sanctuary cities in a 2017 FAIR legislative update, writing that they allow criminal aliens to be released back into communities, often to recommit crimes. He also harshly criticized the Obama administrations Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy, an executive order implemented to protect from deportation undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children.

[DACA recipients] parents made the choice to bring them here and defy our immigrations laws and just because you have children doesnt mean that you have a human shield that exempts you from any form of enforcement, Law said in a FAIR podcast in 2017, Media Matters reported.

Law co-authored a FAIR report, Immigration Priorities for the 2017 Presidential Transition, in November 2016 that outlinedthe type of anti-immigrant legislative agenda the group wanted to see the Trump administration enact.

[The Trump administration] must lead the nation in formulating an immigration policy that sets and enforces limits on legal immigration; eliminates to the greatest extent possible illegal immigration; and protects American workers, taxpayers, and our most vulnerable citizens, the co-authored report stated.

The report argued for limiting legal immigration into the U.S., including measures targeting the number of immigrants admitted via Temporary Protected Status (TPS), the refugee and asylum programs. TPS is an immigration status given to foreign nationals present in the U.S. who cannot return to their country of origin due to events such as armed conflict or an environmental disaster. In early 2018, the Trump administration took steps to block residents of majority non-white countries from receiving TPS, specifically from Haiti, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua. Haiti is roughly 95% black, according to government statistics. Trump referred to these nations as shithole countries during a closed-door meeting with lawmakers, according to a report in The Washington Post.

In November 2019, Stein remarked on the Trump administrations employment of former FAIR staffers, saying, It certainly is delightful to see folks that weve worked with in the past advance and contribute to the various efforts of the administration, most of which we support.

Historian Carly Goodman wrote in The Washington Post on April 22 that the Trump administration was capitalizing on the COVID-19 pandemic as an opportunity to enact an anti-immigrant agenda.

Why suggest an immigration ban? Goodman wrote in her analysis. Because times of crisis create opportunities for anti-immigration advocates to cast blame on outsiders and transform policy in ways they have long sought, to arrest what they perceive as demographic change and the loss of a white America. Trumps emergency measures therefore could outlive his presidency.

The Trump administration has enacted a flurry of policies targeting immigrants since the COVID-19 pandemic started to unfold, including: suspending all routine visa services at U.S. embassies and consulates on March 20, expelling all asylum seekers at the U.S. border with Mexico as of March 21, temporarily suspending refugee admissions as of March 19, banning undocumented college students from receiving emergency assistance as of April 21, and ordering a 60-day temporary ban of access to green cards for specific groups of people from abroad as of April 22.

Despite the ongoing public health crisis created by COVID-19, the Trump administration is also projectedto issue 340,500 deportation orders in the year ending Sept. 30, 2020, an increase from 215,535 in 2019, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a Syracuse University research group that tracks the impact of government policies.

As with Trumps initial announcement of an immigration order, these policies have been welcomed by far-right extremists.

Photo illustration by SPLC

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Trump's Immigration Order Was Drafted by Officials With Ties to Hate Groups, According to Report - Southern Poverty Law Center

Meanwhile, New Yorks health-care system was sinking into chaos, as COVID-19 cases swamped hospitals. That day, there were more 911 calls than there had been on September 11, 2001. Some Fokkers, however, felt that it was important not to get swept up in apocalyptic tales or media reports, or to fall for the Chicken Littles. They mocked Jim Cramer, the host of the market program Mad Money, on CNBC, for predicting a great depression and wondering if anyone would ever board an airplane again. Anecdotes, hyperbole: the talking chuckleheads sowing and selling fear.

As in epidemiology, the basis of the financial markets, and of arguments about them, is numbersdata and their deployments. Reliable data about COVID-19 have been scarce, mainly because, in the shameful absence of widespread testing, no one knows how many people have or have had the virus, which would determine the rate of infection and, most crucially, the fatality rate. The numerator (how many have died) is known, more or less, but its the denominator (how many have caught it) that has been the object of such speculation. If I had a roll of toilet paper for every finance guys analysis of the death rate Ive been asked to read, Id have toilet paper. Most of these calculations, it seems, are arguments for why the rate is likely to be much, much lower than the medical experts have concluded. The less lethal it is, the better the comparison to the flu, and therefore the easier it is to chide everyone for getting so worked up over it. As Lawrence White, a professor of economics at George Mason University, tweeted, Almost everyone talking about the #coronavirus is displaying strong confirmation bias. Which only goes to prove what Ive always said.

Still, its hard for a coldhearted capitalist to know just how cold the heart must go. Public-health professionals make a cost-benefit calculation, too, with different weightings. Whats the trade-off? How many deaths are tolerable? Zero? Tens of thousands, as with the flu? Or whatever number it is that will keep us from slipping into a global depression? The public-health hazards of deepening unemployment and povertymental illness, suicide, addiction, malnutritionare uncounted.

Financial people love to come at you with numbers, to cluck over the innumeracy of the populace and the press, to cite the tyranny of the anecdote and the superior risk-assessment calculus of the guy who has an understanding of stochastic volatility and some skin in the gameeven when that skin is other peoples. But while risk and price are intertwined, value and values are something else entirely. It can be hard to find the right math for those.

In the months following the first tidings of COVID-19 from China, Trump played down its potential impactattempting to jawbone a virus, or at least the perception of it. But a virus, unlike a President, doesnt care how its perceived. It gets penetration, whether you believe in it or not. By the time, later in March, that he acknowledged the scale of the pandemic (and sought to convince those who hadnt been paying attention that hed been paying attention all along, except to the extent that hed been distracted), it had long been abundantly clear that he cared more about the economic damageeven if it was only in relation to his relection prospects, or to the fate of his hotel and golf-resort businessesthan about any particular threshold regarding loss of life or the greater good. Others, perhaps on his behalf, have tried to expand his position. For a few days, the message, reinforced by the likes of Glenn Beck (Id rather die than kill the country) and Dan Patrick, the soon-to-be-seventy lieutenant governor of Texas (If thats the exchange, Im all in), was that we might have to sacrifice our elders for the sake of the economy. The politics of it were perverse. Many of the same people who had cited death panels in the fight against Obamacare were now essentially arguing the opposite. One mans cost controls are another mans eugenics.

For Trump, the economy is basically the stock market. Hes obsessed with it, much the way he fixates on television ratings. The stock market is, among other things, a great mood indicator. But it isnt the economynot even close. As were now discovering, to more horror than surprise, the cessation of commercial activitytravel, tourism, entertainment, restaurants, sports, construction, conferences, or really any transactions, in significant volume, be they in lawyering, accounting, book sales, or sparkplugsmeans no revenue, no ability to make payroll or rent, mass layoffs, steep declines in both supply and demand, and reverberations, up and down the food chain, of defaults on debt. Thats the economy.

This brutal shock is attacking a body that was already vulnerable. In the event of a global depression, a postmortem might identify COVID-19 as the cause of death, but, as with so many of the viruss victims, the economy had a prexisting conditiondebt, instead of pulmonary disease. Corporate debt, high-yield debt, distressed debt, student debt, consumer debt, mortgage debt, sovereign debt. Its as if the virus is almost beside the point, a trader I know told me. This was all set up to happen.

The trader was one of those guys who had been muttering about a financial collapse for a decade. The 2008 bailout, with the politically motivated and, at best, capricious sorting of winners and losers, rankled, as did the ongoing collusion among the big banks, the Federal Reserve, and politicians of both parties. Hed heard that the smart money, like the giant asset-management firms Blackstone and the Carlyle Group, was now telling companies to draw down their bank lines, and borrow as much as they could, in case the lenders went out of business or found ways to say no. Sure enough, by Marchs end, corporations had reportedly tapped a record two hundred and eight billion dollars from their revolving-credit linesa revolver frenzy, as the financial blog Zero Hedge put it, in publishing a list of the companies that managed to get their money in time. Corporate America had hit up the pawnshop, en masse. In a world where we talk, suddenly, of trillions, two hundred billion may not seem like a lot, but it is: in 2007, the subprime-mortgage lender Countrywide Financial, in drawing down just $11.5 billion, helped bring the system to its knees.

It is hard to navigate out of the debt trap. Creditors can forgive debtors, but that process, especially at this level, would be almost impossibly laborious and fraught. Meanwhile, defaults flood the market with collateral, be it buildings, stocks, or aircraft. The price of that collateral collapseshaircuts for baldheadsleading to more defaults. The market in distressed debt has already ballooned to about a trillion dollars.

As April arrived, businesses, large and small, decided not to pay rent, either because they didnt have the cash on hand or because, with a recession looming, they wanted to preserve what cash they had. Furloughed or fired employees, meanwhile, faced similar decisions, as landlords sent threatening reminders. Would property owners, without their monthly nut, be able to finance their own debts? And what of the banks, with all the bad paper? In the last week of March, an additional 6.6 million Americans filed jobless claims, doubling the previous weeks record. In New York State, where nearly half a million new claims had been filed in two weeks, the unemployment-insurance trust began to teeter toward insolvency. Come summer, there would be no money left to pay unemployment benefits.

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The Price of the Coronavirus Pandemic - The New Yorker

You're already on CBS All Access streaming The Good Fightand Star Trek:Discovery-- among other original series and binge-worthy staplesfrom yesteryear -- but have you dipped a toe into the streamer's film selection yet?

Navigate on over to the movies tab and you'll find an eclectic slate including superhero movies, Academy Award honorees, occult favorites and true classics among classics. Below, ET's guide to the best of the best, highlighting the CBS All Access streaming selections that could turn your quarantine into a film festival all your own.

The Big Chill -- about college friends who reunite following a funeral-- is a classic for a reason, if only because it casts everyone from Glenn Close andJeff Goldblum toKevin Kline, Mary Kay Place and Tom Berenger.

If you haven't already -- and certainly before the remake hits theaters -- get thee to All Access and watch the film that inspired an entire generation of girls to dabble in witchcraftery.

There's escapism, and then there's watching Julia Roberts indulging in pizza and pasta in Italy, mastering the practice of meditation in India and getting it on with Javier Bardem in Indonesia.

This is how you become an icon: Barbra Streisand's first-ever film role was this beloved musical about Fanny Brice, for which she became a first-time Oscar nominee AND winner.

Smart sci-fi is de rigueur these days, and yet Gattaca -- which starsEthan Hawke and Uma Thurmanin a dystopian drama about eugenics -- remains a staple of the genre.

You only need an hour and 45 minutes for this early '90s favorite starring youngAnna Chlumsky and Macaulay Culkin, but make sure to block out the entire rest of the day to just cry.

Anne Hathawaymay have won her Oscar for Les Mis, but her first nomination -- and arguably superior performance -- was for this. In director Jonathan Demme's drama, she plays a woman on leave from her rehab center to attend her sister's wedding.

Neither Tom Holland nor Andrew Garfield's runs as the friendly neighborhood wall crawlerare currently streaming for free, but if you want to revisit the OG, the first installment in the Tobey Maguire-starring Spider-Man trilogy is on All Access.

An at-the-peak-of-their-prime Casper Van Dien and Denise Richards stars in director Paul Verhoeven's sci-fi cult satire about alien bugs attacking Earth. Come for the late-'90s special effects, stay to watch THAT shower scene on loop.

If you want a reminder of just how damn good Cameron Diaz is -- followed by a wave of sadness that she's now retired -- look no further. Christina Applegate, Selma Blair and Diaz maybe the best onscreen trio ever assembled.

Last year'sDouble Tapproved hit or miss with fans, but maybe that's just because the original zom-com -- starring Woody Harrelson, Emma Stone, Jesse Eisenberg and Abigail Breslin -- still kills.

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The Best Movies on CBS All Access - WFAA.com

"Invisibilia" co-creator, "Radiolab" contributor, and NPR reporter Lulu Miller had her first existential crisis at age 7 when she asked her father about the meaning of life. Her world was forever rearranged by his cheery, but to her,bleak response: "Nothing!"

Perhaps armed with this outlook, Miller has continued to seek something that would offer hope or understanding of howothers navigatethe world. Through her reporting, she'soften delved intoscience todecode aspects of human nature, but it took an almost unbelievable story to inspire her first non-fiction book, "Why Fish Don't Exist: A Tale of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life" (April 14, Simon & Schuster).This is no ordinary fish tale, but instead relates the real-life story of a 19th-century American ichthyologist, a possible murder cover-up, and the horrifying reality of eugenics in America.

David Starr Jordan had spent his life discovering new species of fish, which he then threw in a jar along with a tin tag giving all necessary identifying information. These jars were stacked high at Stanford University when the 1906 earthquake hit, bringing his catch of the decades to a shattering end. Or it would have been for a lesser man. Undaunted, Jordan took needle and thread and began to stitch the tin tags directly onto as many fish as his memory could match.

Was it a Herculean task or a Sisyphean one? Miller found herself intrigued with this fishy folly and began to trace Jordan's life to see if she could unlock the mysteries of what could make such a man impervious to even the greatest setbacks. Whence came his unshakeable faith that he could succeed in the face of overwhelming disaster? Did this man of science know of a meaning other than "Nothing"?

What she discovered at first was charming an intellectual obsessed with learning the names of stars, wildflowers, and later as an adult, marine life. Jordan also experienced multiple tragedies of losing family members close to him, but always remained unfazed. He eventually became the first president of Stanford University and a vocal leader of the eugenics movement, even writing publications about genetic cleansing.

It's a wild ride, with Miller imbuing suspense into this story from a bygone era as each revelation about Jordan becomes more appalling than the last.

Along the way, Miller also shares her own personal journey from attempting suicide, and losing and rediscovering love, to finding somesense in her own life through a surprising fish-inspired philosophy(fish-losophy?) that resulted from her research.How she makes peace with the idea of a man who haddone both marvelous and monstrousthings involves the book'scoup de grce that upends our idea of what fish (and we)are in the grand scheme of things.

In a wide-ranging interview with Salon, Miller discussed it all, from the aquatic to the existential. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

I was unfamiliar with David Starr Jordan. When you were looking into him, was it purely because you found this person interesting or did you know all along that there was some sort of story there?

I truly knew nothing. I had heard this little anecdote about the earthquake and how after the earthquake, whoever was in charge of the fish started sewing the label on. So I just knew that someone reacted to destruction in this really confident, almost brazen way. I had no idea who that person was.

And then I literally just wanted to write a pristine little one-page essay of like, man versus chaos, a battle of the little guy against all of chaos. I imagined it would just be a parable like, what was his end? Did he end well? Or did he end poorly? It was an almost foolishly simple question. And then I started to learn about him, and pretty early on just from Google I could see, oh, okay, he became a eugenicist. But I didn't know the extent. I think there's kind of this narrative of, "Well many a decent scientist became a eugenicist in that era. It was just an accident of science, you know, like a misstep." I was like, okay, there's definitely some darkness and some folly but it didn't show the hand of how passionately he was a eugenicist and how much he did for the movement. Then I had no clue about the murder involvement whatever, I had no clue about how interpersonally violent he could get, so those were truly surprises that came the more and more I read about him.

Yeah, that's a lot.

It really spiraled when I saw his fat, giant memoir. Just for me reading it, I started out charmed. I was like, totally he's a loner, he loves nature, he's getting taunted ... and ugh, I love him. And then it was just, like, ugh just dark. It just got so bad.

Jordan's instructor Louis Agassiz, the renowned naturalist, as soon as I started reading his ladder hierarchy theory, it started making me cringe that idea that there's a moral component,a moral hierarchy to the natural world and even among humans. Of course this leads eventually to various ideas of eugenics that people like Jordan was embracing. Was it obvious, this connection of even how they were talking about the value of marine life that it also relates to the waypeople are classified and treated today?

Right, I think what happened for me was I realized, "Oh, wow, this guy was involved in eugenics." I got to learn about the eugenics movement, and how it really got going here. That was the next discovery, of how much a part of American history that was and how popular it was and how the Nazis were putting up posters that said, "We don't stand alone," with an American flag on it because we passed the [eugenics] laws first. So then I had my mini like, "Oh my God, we are dirty with this history. Why did I not know that?!"

And then, I still had the sense that this is past, that we've moved past those policies. But I was living in Charlottesville for almost 10 years, and and we're very close to the park where the Unite the Right rally went down. That morning, short buses full of these young and it wasn't old people young men with Nazi flags and the swastikas on shields, were parking in our lawn. Literally they are saying, "It's just a matter of science that certain races are better." They're using the same argument.

To not see that you'd have to be blind, but then just all the insidious ways and even the reporting on the coronavirus when it was just happening in Wuhan. No one cared about the effects of the isolation on the people living there. These aren't people with the same emotional lives to investigate how they're impacted. It was seen only as this blight, just this disease that's being either handled or not. Or today how people who are disabled are in many states . . . they are being just casually, soberly considered to have less valuable lives, that they shouldn't be the ones getting ventilators.

We think we're passing in the hierarchy, the moral hierarchy, but we're not. There are these decisions everywhere, left and right. You hear it in the news, you see it in policy every day where we're still making this failure of logic, where we still believe there are little moral hierarchies. It's so alive. And that's what's been really astounding to me.

The title of the book, while I know it's very irritating to people in certain ways what do you mean, fish don't exist? the point is "fish" is symptomatic of a false hierarchy, a lower rung that I'm saying doesn't exist. And that is the kind of slip of language and slip of logic that we're making all the time with people. It's cartoonish and easier to talk about in fish, but . . . we're not past it and it really could be dangerous.

You explain it fairly simply in the book, but how did you get to the point of revelation that "fish" doesn't exist as a category of animal, of understanding what the cladists were proposing? It was a radical idea that upset over a century of how we viewed the natural order of the world, and honestly how many people still think. Fish are fish, or so we assume.

Mostly the way in was Carol Yoon's beautiful book, which is "Naming Nature." She was the perfect person to explain it because she lived through the revolution in science. She was literally a biology major and then the cladists came into her classroom, pointing out these truths, like the fact that fish don't exist. And so I just remember reading that book, right as I was learning about David Starr Jordan and kind of seeing his story darken. I thought, "Oh my god, this is such a cool poetic justice for the universe to take away his fish." I remember having this little part of me that still craves meaning, like the little girl on the deck with my dad, that still wants cosmic justice for a bad guy, to watch science itself do him in. There was something that felt like really thrilling and important to me, in a way that I still have trouble articulating, but it felt like, "Oh my god, every now and then, chaos itself spits out a parable for heathens. Every now and then we actually get moral instruction that's even about our rules; it's about chaos. There was something that just felt like, "Oh my god I've stumbled onto the coolest, epic parable for heathens." I felt really thrilled.

But then to truly understand it, took me years, andI had all these, moments of like, "But then what are they?" It took a lot of clumsy conversations with scientists and a lot of doodles on folders of me trying to draw and just make it simpler. It took a lot of slow unscrewing of my own logic, and that was slow. It was slow to get there but but it is cool. I see. Like, do you think do you believe fish as a category doesn't exist?

Oh, yes I wish there was a way to still say "fish" but acknowledge that is not a category like, "phish," but unfortunately, there's already a band named Phish that starts with a "P." But "phish"would stand for "phony fish." It would be helpful.

Oh my god I love that. I love that. Maybe we could just call it that. PETA suggested calling them sea kittens. I like "phony fish." I might borrow that from you and credit you. But it's like, "Sure, you can still call [fish]that. It's just not scientifically accurate. But of course, you can call them that."

You weave in your own personal experiences and trying to find meaning in the book. There's something that I really identified with, which was having this sort of existential crisis when you're in childhood. . . . You pinpoint when your father told you that nothing matters in life. It's all meaningless. It's the worst epiphany ever. Do you recall what your life was like before that moment? How you viewed life before that conversation?

That felt like a shock to me. I must have just intuitively thought that there was meaning or purpose to life . . . just like I marched off to nursery school each morning; we must be marching into life with a purpose. I do remember the Church of the Latter Day Saints commercials that were big in the '80s. It was like, cute little mishap and then at the end, some sort of smile and coming together and then it would be like, "Join the church of Latter Day Saints that discovered the purpose of life." It was like each of them ended with this promise that if you joined, you'd get it.

I think I pictured the meaning or the purpose of life like this little fortune cookie fortune that if you ask the right person or were in the right place, you would learn it and then you'd be okay. You'd be armed with this magical thing to warm all the confusion. I definitelyhad this sense that there was a meaning that was maybe hard to articulate or hard to find out but that it was there. And so for my dad to just so nakedly and completely saying no, and that everyone else who tells you there is, is lying or trying to comfort themselves. It did feel like a blow. I must have thought that there was some huge universal point to it all.

I could see any other number of children going through this conversation with their father and not taking it in like you did. Their illusions wouldn't be shattered despite what an authority was telling them. David Starr Jordan, he had this way of viewing life with these illusions that he embraced and allowed him to forge ahead. What is it in people that you think are make them able to embrace illusions versus people who believe otherwise?

I think a lot goes into it. I do believe that most of us do believe that evolution hasgiven all of us that"gift" of some degree of delusion. Because I do think, with consciousness, if we didn't get a little dash of that with awareness, without some sense of optimism or delusion, we would just be completely paralyzed. So I do think like, we all have that ability just to get through our day, just to even block out the fact that we're all going to die. Like, how else do put on our pajamas or make the coffee?

I don't know, but I think that there's just a scale of how much we let ourselves give in and probably all kinds of things go into how much we let ourselves give in. So probably for me being surrounded by a parent, who is joyfully, devilishly wanting, forcing me to look at the bleakness every morning probably has reared me as someone who's more looking at a darker, more accurate worldview. Whereas if you're constantly sunny and things work out for you, and that optimism, that delusion keeps working for you, you're probably going to keep doing it. Whereas I can imagine if you embrace some form of delusion in yourself or how things work, and then you got humiliated by it, you might be wary of it.

Maybe that's too wishy-washy, but I do think it's like we all have a little [delusion]. And then our life determines how much we're going to hold onto it. And I do think there are some people who are just intuitively more self-deluded. Like David Starr Jordan even talks about how he always had a shield of optimism, and it was so strange and noticeable that people commented on it all throughout his life. So I think maybe he was just spat out that way. Yeah. And being like a white man, relatively well-connected white man, and in the 1800s probably helped reinforce that vision.

Do you think that he might be a sociopath because of that and how easily he lies about everything?There are hints and strong suspicions of murder and there's the violence Jordan advocates.

I didn't go that far because the way he behaves I see as far more common. But he did seem to have a shockingly small amount of remorse. Remorse was utterly un-findable in his autobiography. Every hint of self-deprecation is a backdoor brag, like, "I lost the prize because I was I was so ethical," or because "I was so magnanimous, I wanted a poorer student to win the money." Maybe that that goes as far as a sociopath but I feel like I've encountered people like him who don't care much about the effect that they may have on other people. Why should they if there's not cosmic justice? Why not?

You see a lot of people sometimes getting ahead and have never been really punished for their sins because maybe actually karma and cosmic justice don't really exist, and that unfortunately is the truth of our world. We have all these religions telling us it does exist to spook us into being better. Actually, I think that's one of the great purposes of religion.

Returning to your part, what were the challenges of doing such a personal story for yourself? You go over experiences and actions that most people keep under wraps, not just in the book, but then you recorded an audiobook. So you had to narrate these secrets in your own life out loud.

There's two engineers there's the producer on the phone and then the sound guy at the studio here in Chicago where I was recording it and I'm reading the most naked five paragraphs about myself in the third chapter where I'm like, "Ah, yes, here's my depression, suicide, bullied sister, cheating," really all in three pages.

And it was like, "Wow, I'm just doing it. I'm putting this out there." The cheating and also the suicide, those aren't things I really talk about with that many people. It is a little scary.

In the process of writing and editing, you have to revisit the same ideas over and over and over again to refine them. So in some ways, did that make it more comfortable for you after a while because you're owning it?

Yeah, actually, I do think time helps. In the original pitch of this book, I had no idea I was going into this stuff . . . but my editor was just like, "This is interesting material but why do you care about this guy?" So I did some real crappy free-writing around it, and then all this stuff came out. It was years of work.

Also, in my work, a lot of the interviews I do is asking people to share huge parts of themselves and I think that I'm healed by that. I know listeners are healed by people being that vulnerable, so maybe it's time for me to do it too. But it is scary. It's given me new compassion for people that I just call up and have them feel really dark stuff.

I love Kate Samworth's scratchboard illustrations that she does with, of all things, a sewing needle. So when did you decide that you wanted this visual component for each chapter? How did that collaboration come about?

From the moment I set out to write what I thought was an essay, in my head I had this picture of man versus chaos man holding a sewing needle toa tornado of chaos. I wanted readers to see that because I wanted them to understand how I was seeing his story as this almost like Odysseus putting the stakes in the giant, that kind of battle. It just was always in my head that readers might need the visual so they could understand metaphorically what what I was seeing in this otherwise seemingly arcane tale.

When I pitched the book, I wanted her to do it. I've known her work for a long time and she works in all forms these wild oil paints, stop animation, and watercolor. But I'd seen on her Instagram these little scratch drawings and they just reminded me of fairy tale books and where each story gets one drawing. You fall into it as a little kid at the beginning and you don't know why there's like a key and a lion, but you want to read it to find out. Then you go back [to look at the picture]. I saw his story as an epic and I wanted to heighten that quality . . . and to play up the parable quality.

You've been doing a lot of publicity for this book, but in your regular everyday life, do you think about David Starr Jordan or fish not being fish?

I do think about fish not being fish a lot, a lot with reporting, just in terms of like, "Who am I going to? Who's my first impulse of who to include in the story? Who am I putting on the hierarchy towards the top as experts? Do I need to immediately rethink that? Do I need to include a different kind of voice? Do I have a bias?" I can't really see it because that's the problem with a blind spot or with an assumption; it's so basic you don't even think it's a bias you need to question but I think it's something that increasingly, my ears are pricked to what categories are people asserting.

This is a small example, but the Lynchburg facility, the colony where Carrie Buck was sterilized was in operation until exactly a week ago. Over 100 years later, the last person finally left because COVID hastened it. At first I was like, "Oh, this is such a happy story. This bad place, finally, no one has to live there, the epicenter of eugenics." But then I thought, "But where are they going? Is a group home better? What is the freedom?" So just to even think about like the category of freedom or a better place. Is it really? That's maybe too convoluted, but yeah, I think "Are fish, fish?" is something that has made me hopefully a better reporter, a little more a little more skeptical and just having curiosity about about the truth of categories and about the people who are stuck in them.

As for David Starr Jordan, I think he's complicated. I think about him in this moment, actually, because he'd be the kind of person who would probably react with creativity. He was good at that, even though he used it for evil. He was really creative in the face of utter destruction. He didn't spend a lot of time looking back. And so I think like, Are there parts of him that I actually do want to be more like? Are there parts of him to emulate?

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"Why Fish Don't Exist" explores eugenics in the US, a Hawaiian murder plot, and the meaning of life - Salon

Toward the end of the 19th century, the superintendent of Georgias State Asylum, T.O. Powell, developed a theory to explain rising numbers of tuberculosis and insanity cases among the states African American population. The problem, he asserted, was that Emancipation eliminated the slave systems healthful effects a remarkably ahistorical claim that ignored not only slaverys brutality but also a similar post-war epidemic in white people.

As his racist ideas informed public-health efforts, the consequences reached far beyond the dangers to his charges at the asylum. Today, as the world faces the COVID-19 pandemic, Powells story is a cautionary tale about the consequences of allowing prejudice to override the lessons of science. In an era when essential workers of color are among the least paid and protected, when many of Americas national leaders declare viruses foreign (feeding a spike in anti-Asian violence), and when shocking recent data shows that African Americans are disproportionately dying from the epidemic (making up more than 70% of Chicagos deaths, for example), Powells choices should strike us as frighteningly familiar.

Heres how it played out in Georgia. After making his pro-slavery claims about African Americans health, Powell went on to boost his antebellum-inspired ideas with a simplistic understanding of heredity, which he credited with creating 90% of the cases of insanity within asylums. At a southern professional meeting in 1895, Powell and his fellow superintendents asked themselves: Has Emancipation Been Prejudicial to the Negro? and answered this remarkable query with a resounding YES!!! Two years later, Powell was elected President of the American Medico-Psychological Association, giving him a national platform to spread his attitudes. Powell would soon ally these fatal ideas with new eugenics technologies, including sterilization of his female patients, who were deemed morally unfit.

Crucially, Powells eugenic ideals left him ill-equipped to handle the public-health emergencies raging within his own institution. In his fascination with heredity, he ignored the medical revolution ushered in by the germ theory of disease, particularly Edward Kochs discovery of the tubercle bacillus in 1882a lethal, willful ignorance. Powells yearly reports documented a range of diseases in his asylum that had far less to do with heredity and far more to do with the epidemic conditions created there by his own policies. TB spread rapidly through the air especially in the Colored Building with its 900 black patients. The crowded conditions that allowed that spread were his primary responsibility in a job that he himself called lunacy administration. His patients were also suffering from pellagra from their starvation diet, as the U.S. Public Health Service would later prove.

Adding insult to injury, Powells writing boosted the idea that mental illnesses and TB were the result of degenerate populations too morally depraved or unmanly to survive. When Powell died in 1907, he was proclaimed Georgias greatest philanthropist.

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Fed by a triumphant Jim Crow and a new wave of imperialism, white supremacists continued to promote racist theories of tuberculosis. These grew quickly into such deadly libels as Powell had espoused. Frederick Hoffmans Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro and Rudolph Matas The Surgical Peculiarities of the American Negro (both published in 1896) became standard medical texts in the new century. In the early 20th century, the American eugenics movement also fed these racist libels from its base at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island, funded by the Carnegie Institution and supported by major American universities in the years before Hitlers Nazi Party made the consequences of eugenics all too clear in its program of mass extermination.

Comparing Powells story to the novel coronavirus might sound extreme. But 1.5 million people (as of the end of 2017), disproportionately people of color, are incarcerated in crowded cells in U.S. jails and prisons and an average of more than 50,000 people per day are detained in immigration centers. The virus has already begun its spread for inmates and detainees in conditions of forced proximity with little sanitation. Meanwhile, New Yorks Governor and New York Citys Mayor are left pleading the federal government for help against the rising death rates in the multicultural and international metropolis; even within the city, the areas hit hardest are those with high immigrant, Hispanic and African American populations. And we havent yet seen the virus really hit those countries underdeveloped for centuries by conquest and colonialism.

Allowing these forces to play themselves out is one choice. It is called eugenics, fed by both historic racist animosities and willed ignorance. But there are always better options. On the side of public health in Georgia, African Americans in Atlanta in the early 20th century declared that germs have no color line and tracked TB through neighborhoods, traced contacts, opened clinics, and educated their people on prevention and treatment.

Surely today we should chose the second set of practices over the first. But will we?

Mab Segrest is the author of ADMINISTRATIONS OF LUNACY: Racism and the Haunting of American Psychiatry at the Milledgeville Asylum, available now from the New Press.

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History Shows That When Prejudice Overrides Science, Public Health Is at Risk - TIME

Bold thinking is an essential part of Dukes approach to scholarship, and three ongoing projects show the unexpected results.

Adriane Lentz-Smith, Gabriel Rosenberg, and Aarthi Vadde have been named 202021 National Humanities Center Fellows. They will spend a year away from their regular teaching duties as resident scholars at the Research Triangle Parkbased center, researching and writing new books. Chosen from 673 applicants, they join 30 other humanists from the U.S. and four foreign countries working in 18 different disciplines.

Here are the books theyre working on.

In 1985, a Black San Diego resident named Sagon Penn was pulled over by the police. The encounter quickly turned violent. Fearing for his life, Penn shot and killed one officer while wounding another and a civilian who was riding with them.

Penn was charged with murder, and his trial highlighted the rampant racial tensions of 1980s southern California, which would explode with the assault of Rodney King six years later. Though he was eventually acquitted, Penns life deteriorated. He was later arrested on charges of domestic abuse, among other things, and, in 2002, he committed suicide.

Adriane Lentz-Smith, associate professor of History

The basic story itself is riveting and heartbreaking, said Adriane Lentz-Smith, whose project, The Slow Death of Sagon Penn: State Violence and the Twilight of Civil Rights, centers around the case. It has you think about the ways in which state violence becomes more personalized types of violence and travels throughout a community, touching all kinds of folks.

By writing about Penns life in the era of Black Lives Matter, Lentz-Smith, an associate professor of History, hopes to provide historical context to now familiar debates about policing and racism. The Civil Rights Movement didnt begin with Brown vs. Board nor end with the Voting Rights Act, she said. She will use Penns experience to connect individual victims of state violence to the national history of policing, border policies and white supremacy, showing how the struggles of the Civil Rights Movement continue today.

Approaching the topic this way also allows Lentz-Smith to humanize the issues. When you make it not an abstract debate, but a life that we see destroyed, that takes his loved ones and his children with it to see it as tragedy, and not just an individual tragedy but Americas that seems significant, she said.

Gabriel Rosenberg, associate professor of Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies

According to Gabriel Rosenberg, associate professor of Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies, if you want to understand why eugenics and race science were widely popular in the United States in the early 20th century, you cant just look at intellectual debates over the theorys scientific merits (or lack thereof). The actual answer, he says, can only be found on farms.

There are really intriguing and interesting institutional ties between eugenic organizations and the livestock breeding industry, Rosenberg explained. This is a well-known empirical fact about the history of eugenics, but its often sidelined as a peculiarity.

Rosenberg aims to make it central, because thats what it was at the time. In the early 1900s, most Americans lived in rural areas, surrounded by farm animals. In fact, in 1900, the nations livestock was worth more than the countrys railroads combined. The only asset worth more at the time was land.

As a result, eugenics the practice of selectively mating people with specific hereditary traits was a familiar idea, Rosenberg argues. Many accepted the theory because it mirrored the way they bred their livestock. All that was needed was to apply the same logic to humans with horrific consequences.

By placing farming practices into the history of eugenics, Rosenberg is also making broader arguments about the forces shaping our world. The practice of making meat at these truly world historical levels is reformulating human social relations with each other, fundamentally restructuring human societies, he said. Were creating a new ecology that confines and conditions our own social relations. In other words, the supply chains and husbandry practices that define how we treat animals and nature also define how we treat ourselves.

Is fan fiction a form of literary criticism? Should people who love literature care about self-published novels, Instagram poetry or the millions of words written, read and shared on digital platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr or Reddit?

Aarthi Vadde, associate professor of English

By turning to popular digital forms of writing, associate professor of English Aarthi Vadde is taking questions typically asked by scholars of Internet culture and examining them with a literary lens. The new perspective raises the very question of what makes writing literary, asking what impact its form and venue of publication have even the device on which its read.

Vadde points out that while curling up with a good book is still many readers ideal way to consume literature, its not the predominant mode of reading in the 21st century. I didnt feel like enough people were talking about the actual sociological circumstances of the way literature is consumed today, Vadde said. You cant assume that people are reading the physical book. And if they are reading the physical book, you still have to take into account the ecology that the book exists in.

That ecology is defined by the Internet. We spend most of our reading time on digital devices, reading not just news articles and e-books, but social media posts, reviews and other kinds of everyday writing. And writing them ourselves. Writing is eclipsing reading as a literacy skill, Vadde said. Its so important to write in all areas of work and play these days. Thats something that is very different than the old idea of the reader and writer having a very clear boundary between them.

Titled We the Platform: Contemporary Literature after Web 2.0, Vaddes project examines how the social web is changing the relationship between literature and literacy, or the broader understanding of how people read and write today. She will examine works of literature that probe the conditions of reading and writing, make creative use of digital platforms and reflect upon the computing technologies shaping our interaction with all kinds of art, including Teju Coles Twitter fiction, Jarett Kobeks self-published satire I Hate the Internet and more.

In doing so, Vadde will analyze how the principles and rhetoric of Web 2.0, alongside its tech, influence the form and circulation of literature.

Learning to use digital tools is not enough, she said. Humanists should more pointedly address the philosophies behind those tools. We the Platform will show how literary works and humanistic criticism can play key roles in the dialogue on responsible computing.

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The Police State, Livestock Breeding and Web 2.0: Research by 3 Duke Professors - Duke Today

Part 1 of The Gene: An Intimate History is available to stream until May 5. Episode 2 airs April 14 at 8 p.m. on WTTW.

A new two-part, four-hour documentary tracks the history of the study of genetics, as well as the implications both good and bad for modern-day experiments with the human genome.

Executive produced by Ken Burns, The Gene: An Intimate History is based on a book of the same name by Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee. His first book, Cancer: The Emperor of Maladies, won the Pulitzer Prize and was also developed into a 2015 Ken Burns documentary.

The film is set against the backdrop of a scientific community wrestling with the ethics of new genetic technologies that have both promising and dangerous outcomes.

These revolutionary discoveries highlight the awesome responsibility we have to make wise decisions, not just for people alive today, but for generations to come, said Dr. Mukherjee in a press release. At this pivotal moment when scientists find themselves in a new era in which theyre able to control and change the human genome, The Gene offers a nuanced understanding of how we arrived at this point and how genetics will continue to influence our fates.

The film chronicles the history of genetics, from Gregor Mendels pea plant studies in the 1800s, to the disturbing use of eugenics in Nazi Germany, to modern-day discoveries since the 1970s. It also weaves in personal stories, examining people who live with genetic diseases, such as sickle cell and spinal muscular atrophy, who may benefit from recent discoveries in gene editing.

But the documentary also examines the ethical implications and unintended consequences of gene-editing technology, such as using it to modify DNA to enhance preferable traits, or the 2018 story in which a Chinese researcher announced he had created the first genetically edited babies twin girls born in China which was a medically unnecessary procedure.

In addition to the four-hour documentary, there is also a series of digital animated shorts that unravel the mystery of genes.

Part 1 of the series is available to stream until May 5. You can watch part 2 on Tuesday, April 14 at 8 p.m. on WTTW.

Excerpt from:

Tracing the 'Intimate History' of the Gene - WTTW News

It was 75 years ago today that the US forces liberated Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany. The 6th US Armoured Division reached the main camp, which was at the centre of a maze of sub-camps, making up the largest concentration camp on German soil.

What they found was a staggering array of utter evil, with scenes so shocking they made battle-hardened soldiers physically sick. Corpses were strewn everywhere and many of the inmates were so starving and emaciated that they died of the food given to them by the Americans.

Later estimates gained from the Nazis obsession with keeping records showed that more than 250,000 people were imprisoned at Buchenwald over an eight-year period, starting with political prisoners communists, mostly who were jailed by the Nazis before the war even started.

Dachau was the first such camp, opening in 1933, but Buchenwald was the largest in area, with some 56,000 people dying there.

WAS IT THE FIRST CONCENTRATION CAMP TO BE LIBERATED?

Holocaust historians now accept that there was a difference between concentration camps, where prisoners carried out forced labour, and extermination camps such as Auschwitz which existed mostly to carry out Adolf Hitlers Aryan racist mass murders, particularly the Nazis Final Solution which brought about the murder of six million Jews.

Another 11 million people are estimated to have died in Nazi extermination and concentration camps, including Soviet prisoners of war, Roma, Poles, Serbs and all those deemed to be non-Aryan such as homosexuals, people with disabilities Hitler was a strong believer in eugenics clergy and criminals. Jehovahs Witnesses were also put into the camps while some other prisoners of war, including captured British commandos, were also murdered.

The Soviet Red Army over-ran Majdanek camp in German-occupied Poland on July 22, 1944, and that provided the first evidence of mass extermination. The Soviets liberated Auschwitz in January, 1945 and found evidence a million people had died in its gas chambers. It was one of Buchenwalds sub-camps, Ohrdruf, which was the first to be liberated by the Allies coming from the west.

WHAT HAPPENED AT OHRDRUF?

Situated near the town of Gotha, Orhdruf was a forced labour camp built as late as November, 1944. The inmates were supposed to work on a railway, but it was never built due to the rapid advance of the Allies in early 1945.

At the start of April the SS forced most of the camps 12,000 inmates to march to Buchenwald 50 miles away, resulting in the deaths of many prisoners. The SS guards shot the remaining inmates and the American troops discovered piles of bodies, some covered with lime to accelerate putrefaction, and others partially incinerated on wooden pyres.

WHAT DID EISENHOWER DO?

Allied Supreme Commander, and later US President, General Dwight D Eisenhower insisted on seeing the camp for himself. He interviewed three inmates that had managed to escape, and wrote to General George C Marshall, head of the joint chiefs of staff in Washington: The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to propaganda.

Buchenwald was much bigger and Eisenhower made it his duty to get the press there. He also forced 1,000 German citizens to visit the camp and its mass graves. Four days later, the British liberated Bergen-Belsen, accompanied by newsreel cameras. The truth was out.

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Remembering the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp - The National

David Starr Jordan was the first president of Stanford University. He was also one of the most influential eugenicists of the early 20th century.

Over the past few months, my Eugenics on the Farm series has dealt with various eugenicists associated with Stanford University and examined their relationship with eugenics, the racist and ableist scientific belief in the improvement of the human race through restricting the reproduction of the unfit, typically disabled people and people of color. For Jordan, however, Im going to do something a bit different.

Ive written extensively on Jordans role in the American Eugenics Movement elsewhere, including in a request to rename Jordan Hall. To summarize, David Starr Jordan founded and worked with many of the most influential eugenic organizations in the United States: the Eugenic Research Organization, the Human Betterment Foundation and the Committee of Eugenics the first eugenic organization in the United States. He popularized eugenics in talks, textbooks and books for general audiences, such as his 1911 Hereditary of Richard Roe, and he promoted the forced sterilization of disabled people. Jordan was the kingpin of early American eugenics, creating networks and organizations deeply influential to the success of eugenic policies in the United States and abroad.

I am not going to write about any of that here. Instead, I am going to focus on Jordans complexities, because Jordan was certainly a complex man. He is still often praised for many aspects of his life: his research as an ichthyologist (fish researcher), his activism in various peace movements, etc. However, at the same time, it is impossible to separate his promotion of eugenics from any of these parts of his life. Eugenics was not a mere footnote in Jordans life; it was a central aspect.

The piece has a practical point, too. The prominent psychology corner on the right side of the front of Main Quad, one of the first things one sees as they walk up from the Oval, is named after Jordan. When we see that, despite Jordans complexities, a central legacy of his has been one of deep harm, it becomes clear why Jordan Hall should be renamed.

Jordan was a passionate anti-war activist. He participated in many anti-war campaigns, such as the World Peace Congress and the World Peace Foundations. Jordan supported other prominent peace campaigns, such as Jane Addams Womens Peace Party and Henry Fords Peace Ship. As an anti-war campaigner, Jordan fought adamantly against the participation of the United States in World War I, a position that cost him many friends and earned him many enemies.

While pacifism is certainly a noble position, Jordans anti-war beliefs stemmed in large part from eugenic theory. Jordans main contribution to eugenic research was on the impact of war on racial health. After studying various historical and contemporary wars, Jordan concluded that war, through the deaths of the brave and survival of the cowardly, reduced the overall ability of the race. In his 1915 book War and the Breed, for instance, he wrote that war involves what real students of this subject call reversed selection in which the best are chosen to be killed, and the worst are preserved to be the fathers of the future. Jordans opposition to war was in the name of eugenics in order to prevent the degradation of the race.

Jordan was also an adamant anti-imperialist and fought against the expansion of the American empire. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, American imperialism was on the rise, the most famous example being the Spanish-American War of 1898. During and after the war, the question of turning the Philippines (previously a Spanish colony) into an U.S. colony was on the mind of many Americans. Jordan, though, fought against the expansion of American imperialism and called for the removal of American forces from the island.

His reason was neither benevolence nor belief in the self-determination of indigenous Filipinos, however. Jordan, a believer in the supremacy of white races, simply did not think the inferior Filipino races could comprehend governance. In his 1901 Imperial Democracy, Jordan wrote that Filipinos were as capable of self-government or of any other government as so many monkeys. Jordans racism was the foundation of his anti-imperialist stances.

Jordan donated to and supported a few Black colleges. During his life, he donated a considerable amount to the Tuskegee Institute, a historically Black university founded in part by Booker T. Washington. Jordan was a fan of the institute, though in a rather paternalistic way. In his autobiography, he wrote that he enjoyed the universitys primative yet delightful negro spirituals.

Beneath that support, however, was intense racist reasoning. Jordans motivation behind supporting Black universities was his belief in the racial inferiority of Black people. In The Heredity of Richard Roe, Jordan argued that citizenship required a foundation of intelligence and claimed that Black Americans lacked that foundation. Because of this, he called Black suffrage an evil. Jordan thought that Black universities could, if barely, alleviate this dilemma: In a 1910 speech to the London Eugenics Education Society, Jordan lectured that education could help alleviate the negro problem. And for Jordan, there was a clear negro problem: his textbooks and writings regularly portray Black people as evolutionarily closer to apes than their white peers: blue gum negroes, blue gum apes, one read. Despite sending money to a Black university, Jordan only did so based on racist logic, and he actively taught and spreadracist ideologies, framing Black people as a problem to be solved.

Jordans best known academic legacy, besides Stanford, was his research on fish. Many ichthyologists today can trace their academic lineage back to Jordan. Jordan collected fish from across the world, and over 30 fish are named after him. He was especially fascinated with the evolution of fish: his 1923 A Classification of Fishes sought to place all fish species on a linear evolutionary line, tracing their evolutionary progression.

Even this, however, is difficult to separate from his eugenic beliefs. Many scientists of this era applied their studies to human eugenics: for instance Luther Burbank, a botanist and acquaintance of Jordan, similarly applied his botanical research to the eugenic breeding of humans. Jordan, too drew connections between his research on fish and eugenics. Jordans fascination with fish was a fascination with taxonomies and evolutionary progress: creating categories and sorting fish into them, labeling and studying the qualities of each fish, and tracing the path of evolution. Jordans eugenic research was no different: creating eugenic taxonomies of human value, ranking and categorizing human lives, to improve the human race and manufacture evolution. Jordans ichthyology research, like that of many scientists of his time, was inseparable from his eugenics research and taxonomization of humans.

In our current moment, we are living in a pandemic that has, in many ways, revealed obfuscated aspects of our society. Again, just as in Jordans time, the lives of disabled people are being portrayed as fundamentally less. Again, disabled people are living under the threat of being denied medical care due to their disabilities. Again, certain races are demonized as diseased and unfit. Again, eugenics and its hierarchies of human lives are rearing their ugly heads. Eugenics and the ideologies it perpetuates are being again brought to the forefront in this time of social crisis. It is more important than ever to reject eugenics and to bring attention to its harmful history.

Jordan was clearly a complex man with complex beliefs. Like I wrote in the introduction to this series, I do not believe it is useful to rashly judge figures such as Jordan and paint them in simple strokes.This pandemic, among other things, has shown that eugenics is not a mere historical artefact it is something to be actively confronted. Jordans eugenicist and racist ideologies undeniably permeated through all of his work in ways both obvious and subtle. If the role of the historian is to learn from the past (and it certainly is), historians must also judge the past and recognize the harmful influences of such ideologies. That starts by renaming Jordan Hall, by recognizing that Jordans legacy is that of deep harm. And there is nothing complex about that.

Contact Ben Maldonado at bmaldona at stanford.edu.

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Eugenics on the Farm: David Starr Jordan - The Stanford Daily

This essay contains discussions of scientific racism, forced sterilisation, and racist reproductive violences against people of color.

By Adrie Rose

There is nothing new about eugenics. Its certainly undergone rebranding, PR campaigns, re-naming, and re-working to give it a shiny new, gilded patina, but whether its called the social hygiene movement, the racial hygiene movement, or population controlits eugenics. Its an attempt to stop the socially illthe poor, the mentally ill, the houseless, drug users, and people of colour from procreating and outnumbering the inbred upper-/middle-class, well-educated white masses.

With walking, talking, moldy ham steaks like Richard Dawkins extolling the virtues of eugenics, its no surprise that this racist, pseudoscientific backwater is considered, almost solely, the domain of men. In fact, it feels like a concerted effort on behalf of white women to ignore and outright deny the racist history of feminismwhite feminism, specifically. And while there is a certain ostrich-like quality inherent to white feminism, the denial cannot continue. Although the truth of the past has been partially buried, the roots of that evil have continued to grow, tripping up and grabbing at the bodies of unsuspecting Black and brown people simply trying to survive. The past, and how it informs the present, must be acknowledged and confronted head-on if we are to end the violent legacy of reproductive interference in the global southmost specifically Aboriginal Australia, Africa, and Southern Asia.

In 1926, the Racial Hygiene Association of New South Wales (now the Family Planning Association) was founded by Lillie Goodisson and Ruby Rich of the Womens Reform League. Until 1928, the association was known as the Racial Improvement Society. During their tenure, Gooddisson and Rich advocated for selective breeding of future generations with particular emphasis on the elimination of hereditary defectsincluding mental illness, venereal disease, syphilis, a predisposition to criminal behaviour, and non-whiteness. Thanks to their literary propaganda, Australia passed legislation designed to sterilise Aboriginal and Indigenous people across the continent without their consent or knowledge. The Sexual Sterilisation Act of Alberta (1928) and the Sexual Sterilisation Act of British Columbia (1933) allowed for the forced sterilisation of all manner of social outcasts, leading the United Nations to condemn the country and its legislature for continued violations of human rights law. The Alberta act was repealed in 1972 after more than 4,000 people (most women and children of Eastern European, First Nations, and Metis descent) were surgically and permanently sterilised without their consent. The British Columbia act was repealed in 1973 after the formation of a Board of Eugenics was formed to unilaterally strip bodily autonomy from any person it deemed to have a tendency to serious mental disease or mental deficiencylargely Aboriginal people.

In January 2012, reports surfaced that Project Prevention, a United States-based organisation that pays drug users to use long-term, implantable birth control, was paying women in Mbita, Kenya with HIV to have IUDs implanted and had been since at least May 2011. A report detailing these allegations tells the story of women being told to sign consent forms for tubal ligation while in labour, women whose husbands signed consent forms for what they thought was a cesarean section but actually gave permission for them to be sterilised without their knowledge or consent, and women whose mothers were told that their disabilities and HIV+ would make them bad mothers, despite having already given birth. Women in their early and mid-20s whose husbands left them, sometimes taking the children, after learning that they could no longer fulfill their duties, women who were berated and shamed for their HIV status by doctors and nurses that refused to aid them unless they agreed to sterilisation, and women who signed documents in confusion because doctors and nurses would only speak to them in English.

In December 2014, five Kenyan women sued the Kenyan Health Ministry, Medecins sans Frontieres, the French arm of Doctors Without Borders, and Marie Stopes International for sterilising them without their consent. Marie Stopes founded the Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress to fund her building of birth control clinics across the United Kingdom. After Stopes death, these clinics coalesced under the umbrella known as Marie Stopes International. The first overseas location for MSI was established in New Delhi, India, carrying the dark cloud of its prior mission to furnish security from conception to those who are racially diseased, already overburdened with children, or in any specific way unfitted for parenthood.

In her writings, Stopes espoused a particular hatred for mixed-race (half-caste) people and advocated for their sterilisation at birth (Sorry mum and dad, I guess youll only have cats for grandchildren if these folks get their hands on me). Stopes was contemporaries with women like Gertrude Davenport, who argued that allowing no less than 5% of the population to be incompetent thru [sic] such bad heredity as imbecility, criminality, and disease cost American taxpayers around $100 million annually. Stopes and Davenport shared similar ideas as Rita Hauschild who conducted Bastard Research in the Caribbean between 1936 and 1937, studying Chinese-Negro, Chinese-Indian, and Indian-Negro hybrids in Trinidad and Venezuela. Hauschilds work on racial identification of embryos was a particular favourite of Nazi scientists and doctors in World War II-era Germany.

An ocean away in India, the United Kingdoms Department for International Development was funneling at least 166 million ($215,995,615) to rural clinics for the purposes of birth control, despite complaints that the money would be used for forced sterilisation. Both men and women in India alleged being dragged off the street and into clinics where they were operated on by torchlight. Reports of deaths from horribly botched operations, patients thrown out onto the street still bleeding, and people miscarrying or suffering stillbirths after being ignored when they told doctors that they were pregnant. Some clinics claimed to be incentivised with promises of 1500 (rupees) for each completed sterilisation with a bonus of 500 per patient for performing more than 30 operations in a day.

Do I think white women are actively forming organisations and non-profits with the clear aim of furthering eugenics in some dystopian plot to eradicate brown people? Not intentionally. But I think its very likely that white women and their supporters have internalised centuries-old ideas of white purity and the white (wo)mans burden. To be fair, white women are not, nor have they been the sole arbiters of eugenic thought and action in the global south. The transnational movement to eradicate Black and brown bodies is nothing new, nor was it solely the domain of German Nazis as parroted in liberal circles. Buck v. Bell, a 1927 United States Supreme Court case that has never been overturned, allowed for the compulsory sterilization of the unfit in the interest of protecting the state. But why this enduring ragethis disdain for the reproduction of visibly non-white bodies? What engenders such a visceral reaction that the Center for Investigative Reporting found 150 cases of Latinx and Black women being sterilised in California prisons without consent? Its fear. The fear is two-fold, but plain and simple, fear drives and has driven the need to cease population growth by any means necessary.

Look to the narrative of King Kong for that fear made visual. In his earliest incarnation, Kong is a slavering beast, nothing more and nothing less. He is every fear of Black male aggression come to life. Given the era of its production, its not surprising that the film never approaches more than a modern-day PG rating, but I always expect to see some grotesquely oversized depiction of vaguely human genitalia as Kong thrashes about. Well-endowed, blessed with endless energy, lacking the genteel restraint of their civilised white counterparts. Even the smallest display of sexual agency or interest from a Black person, real or imagined, is immediately twisted into a vile, perverse display of animalistic lust. Its evidence of our complete lack of humanity, no matter how well-bred we are. In the 1930s, the fear stoked by Birth of a Nation (1915) was still alive and well. Dark-skinned men, literally lurking in shadows, were a scourgestalking white women and stealing their purity away, supplanting it with literal and figurative darkness.

The fear of the hulking beast of Black sexuality is somewhat farcical, I suppose. But less comical, easier to visualise, more deeply ingrained is a very real concern that white domination will soon be usurped by the growing numbers of non-white bodies across the globe. White people are the global minority, not just in places like Asia and Africa, but in America and Europe as well. 20 years ago, non-Latinx whites were just 49.8% of the California population. The US Census Bureau predicts that the rest of the United States will follow suit in another 20 years. And white people are terrified at becoming the minority in a world they built to fulfill their needs, wants, and desires at the expense of Black and brown bodies. That terror is less associated with the horror of seeing more non-white faces in a crowd. To be sure, there is a sick fascination in white communities with rooting out those who dont belong, those immediately identifiable as outsiders by virtue of their skin. But more than that, eugenic obsession is fueled by the idea that white people will become the minority and subsequently, the victims of retribution.

To picture white women carrying the mantle of eugenic discourse and violent action, little suspension of disbelief is required. In a world where white femininity is rewarded, coddled, and purified its not actually difficult to envision the beneficiaries of the same internalising the racist baggage that comes with pink pussy hats. The same world where haphazard monuments dedicated to the memory of Susan B. Anthony are erected in a mad dash to immortalise a woman prostrate before the altar of the eradication of foreign Black and brown people. Eugenic thought and action can go through a name change and a spit shine, but there will always be a fuck it, mask off moment where the truth will out. White women continue to unironically champion the cause of ethnic cleansing by shouldering the white womans burden, even though no one asked, because it is both their historical prerogative and unspoken objective.

Further Reading:

Adrie is a Sociology grad student and freelancer living in Pittsburgh. She primarily writes about sex work, social media, race, and gender. When shes not writing or grading, Adrie works as an artist and photographer. Her great loves include the glitter accent nail, Bojack Horseman, Disenchantment, and her two cats: Misty (15) and Oscar (5).

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Sterilisation and Eugenics In The Global South Are Championed By White Women - Wear Your Voice