I’ve been reading some more of the works of eugenicists while thinking about the state of education about this ideology. Yes, “Eugenics” is a dirty word nowadays; in my opinion, it’s not nearly dirty enough.
Here’s a fact to make your head spin: Eugenics wasn’t about killing people. Yes, it ended up killing people, and if you examine the way eugenics has influenced the world, you realize it still does kill people, but the architects of eugenics weren’t leading with, “My fellow countrymen, we should On Purpose Kill People.”
The reason that’s important is, people keep coming up with ideas labeled (by their critics) “uncomfortably similar to eugenics”— ideas for a compassionate, scientifically-grounded way of improving humanity by understanding the heredity of good and bad traits and influencing the fertility rates of people with different genetic traits.
There is already a word for this kind of idea. That word is: eugenics. It is silly to set yourself apart from eugenicists by explicitly repudiating killing people or forcibly sterilizing them, when many founding eugenicists also explicitly repudiated killing people or forcibly sterilizing them.
Here is an Internet Archive link to “Heredity in relation to eugenics,” a work by Charles Benedict Davenport, an early eugenicist. Please read at least the first four pages.
I’m afraid that his brief introduction to eugenics could sound, to the layperson, surprisingly less scary and disgusting than expected. Mister Davenport’s word choices may provide a “red flag” to the reader: he refers to human babies as a “valuable crop,” to marriage between people as “mating.” The disquiet these word choices cause is because they dehumanize the subjects. Humans, from Davenport’s perspective, are essentially the same as agricultural plants or animals, which in turn are assets, sources of economic gain—they are things.
Davenport articulates the contribution of a human being to the United States: “…forming a united, altruistic, God-serving, law-abiding, effective and productive nation.” However, relatively few people are “fully effective” at this purpose, because a proportion of society is “non-productive”—either criminals or disabled, or among the people required to care for and control criminals and the disabled.
After you read the introduction of Davenport’s book, read his wikipedia page. He was a Nazi. He was a Nazi until the day he died. He was rabidly and repugnantly racist, so much so that his later scientific works fudged together garbage conclusions that contradicted his actual data in order to prop up his racist beliefs. He lobbied Congress to restrict immigration into the USA, out of the belief that the immigrants would poison the blood of our country with inferior genetics.
Overwhelmingly, eugenicists were concerned with disability. They believed that disability would normally be eliminated by natural selection, and that caring for the disabled and allowing them to grow up and to have children would cause a steady increase in the proportion of society made up of disabled people—who were, as Davenport puts it, a “burden” on society.
Eugenicists were also concerned with race. They wanted to gather data that demonstrated what they already believed: that race was a biological reality, a reality that could only appear unclear or malleable because of harmful, aberrant, unnatural scenarios, namely miscegenation or race mixing. Basically, race was both a natural reality, and in need of enforcement.
But eugenicist ideology was not just about the inferiority of disabled people or people of color. Eugenicists thought of their ideas as a science and thought of themselves as scientists, and they broadly addressed virtually everything we would now consider a matter of “public health.” Eugenicist writings almost universally address crime, and often don’t recognize a clear distinction between crime and mental disability, or between either of those things and poverty. Criminals, disabled people and poor people were basically the same; they had something wrong with their genes that made them that way.
“Sexual deviance” is generally included in this, and Davenport explicitly references this in his introduction, where he says that “normal” people are not likely to have the kind of sex that leads to the transmission of STIs.
For many proponents (including Davenport), the key dogma of eugenics was that genes predetermined everything about a person. Tuberculosis was a huge problem at the time, and eugenicists were insisting that, although the disease was known to be bacterial, susceptibility to the disease was genetic, and therefore people who became sick with tuberculosis were genetically defective. Likewise if a child developed epilepsy after a head injury, the injury did not cause the epilepsy but instead revealed an inherent genetic weakness that was already there. This implied that spending resources on healing or rehabilitating anybody was a waste of time.
If you read more of Davenport’s book, you will see that he makes some WILD statements—he asserts that artistic talent is a Mendelian trait controlled by a single gene, basically that you are either born an artist or you aren’t. This seems absolutely absurd but, there is a good amount of popular belief in inherent aptitudes for art or music or math or what have you.
Eugenics isn’t just about named prejudices like racism or ableism, it is even bigger than that, it is a set of beliefs encompassing how the potential and value of human beings is determined and how society should care for its members as a result of that.
isn’t dissimilar to how mainstream media & governments talk about covid rn! they don’t call it “genetic” but they use the same implication— that there’s ALREADY something wrong with people who die from covid or get disabled long covid.
like disabled people, high risk people, immunocompromised people, anyone with a “pre-existing condition”—they’re just an expected & unpreventable casualty
