Tag: Eugenics

Not Much New Under The Immigration Sun

When Donald Trump rode down the golden staircase from heaven and announced his candidacy for the presidency we were about to set sail on the “way back” machine.

In those dark days we learned just what his whole candidacy would be about…..immigration and the demonization of those people trying to enter into the US…these people are criminals, disease carriers, weak and imperfect…..in making these statements he is resurrecting a century’s old evil….that of Eugenics.

What the Hell is Eugenics anyway?

Eugenics is the philosophy and social movement that argues it is possible to improve the human race and society by encouraging reproduction by people or populations with “desirable” traits (termed “positive” eugenics) and discouraging reproduction by people with “undesirable” qualities (termed “negative” eugenics). The eugenics movement began in the United States in the early part of the 20th century; the United States was the first country to have a systematic program for performing sterilizations on individuals without their knowledge or against their will. It was supported and encouraged by a wide swath of people, including politicians, scientists, social reformers, prominent business leaders and other influential individuals who shared a goal of reducing the “burden” on society. The majority of people targeted for sterilization were deemed of inferior intelligence, particularly poor people and eventually people of color

Does that sound vaguely familiar?  Say the rhetoric of some madman in the 1930s Europe, perhaps.

Well the idea of eugenics was not some wrapped idea from the  mind of a dictator but rather the mind of learned men in the US….let’s right…the program that lead to genocide was an American innovation.

We Americans passed laws that made eugenics possible.

The eugenics movement began in the U.S. in the late 19th century. However, unlike in Britain, eugenicists in the U.S. focused on efforts to stop the transmission of negative or “undesirable” traits from generation to generation. In response to these ideas, some US leaders, private citizens, and corporations started funding eugenical studies.  This lead to the 1911 establishment of The Eugenics Records Office (ERO) in Cold Spring Harbor, New York. The ERO spent time tracking family histories and concluded that people deemed to be unfit more often came from families that were poor, low in social standing, immigrant, and/or minority. Further, ERO researchers “demonstrated” that the undesirable traits in these families, such as pauperism, were due to genetics, and not lack of resources.

Committees were convened to offer solutions to the problem of the growing number of “undesirables” in the U.S. population. Stricter immigration rules were enacted, but the most ominous resolution was a plan to sterilize “unfit” individuals to prevent them from passing on their negative traits. During the 20th century, a total of 33 states had sterilization programs in place. While at first sterilization efforts targeted mentally ill people exclusively, later the traits deemed serious enough to warrant sterilization included alcoholism, criminality chronic poverty, blindness, deafness, feeble-mindedness, and promiscuity. It was also not uncommon for African American women to be sterilized during other medical procedures without consent.  Most people subjected to these sterilizations had no choice, and because the program was run by the government, they had little chance of escaping the procedure.  It is thought that around 65,000 Americans were sterilized during this time period.

Introduction to Eugenics

Does the history of eugenics sound at all familiar?  I am guessing that if you are a screaming racist then the answer would be no….but to the rest of us it sounds all too familiar…..

“We cannot build a wall high enough to keep out the wrong sorts of humans”…..that was not Donald Trump but rather an American statesman in the early 1900s Charles Davenport.

Even a founder of the NAACP WEB DuBois thought that eugenics was a good idea with African-Americans….think not?

https://www.aaihs.org/colorism-as-racism-garvey-du-bois-and-the-other-color-line/

Or this……

https://www.blackagendareport.com/black_eugenics_sterilization_black_poor

And you thought we had a handle on the race thing……HA!

If you have thoughts then now is a good time……

Be Smart!

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“Lego Ergo Scribo”

Horrific American Roots

History is such a great teacher that I try to inject as much as I can into my blog, In Saner Thought…….we Americans having given the world many things since World War One…..many things and some are not so appealing.

Anyone with half a brain knows of the horrific situations within the Nazi concentration camps…..Ever thought about asking their eugenics programs were barbaric but where did such ideas coming from?

Hitler and his henchmen victimized an entire continent and exterminated millions in his quest for a co-called “Master Race.”

But the concept of a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed master Nordic race didn’t originate with Hitler. The idea was created in the United States, and cultivated in California, decades before Hitler came to power. California eugenicists played an important, although little known, role in the American eugenics movement’s campaign for ethnic cleansing.

Eugenics was the racist pseudoscience determined to wipe away all human beings deemed “unfit,” preserving only those who conformed to a Nordic stereotype. Elements of the philosophy were enshrined as national policy by forced sterilization and segregation laws, as well as marriage restrictions, enacted in twenty-seven states. In 1909, California became the third state to adopt such laws. Ultimately, eugenics practitioners coercively sterilized some 60,000 Americans, barred the marriage of thousands, forcibly segregated thousands in “colonies,” and persecuted untold numbers in ways we are just learning. Before World War II, nearly half of coercive sterilizations were done in California, and even after the war, the state accounted for a third of all such surgeries.

https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/1796

We Americans are experts at removing anything that we do not like to remember from our history.  This is something that needs to be remembered so that we would NEVER do it again.