Excerpt from book:
“In the United States, as elsewhere, eugenics was a racialized movement. What made African-Americans especially worrisome to the eugenicists was the latter’s belief in an extraordinary black tendency of uncontrolled s*xual activity. Davenport, echoing the view of fellow eugenicists, wrote that African Americans have “a strong s*x instinct, without corresponding self-control.” The link between eugenics and serialization in this discourse was manifest in the manner in which crime was sometimes punished. Black men, in particular, were subject to judicial and extrajudicial castration. As Roberts notes, “The idea of imposing sterilization as a solution for antisocial behavior originated in the castration of black men as a punishment for crime.”
[...]
Under the rhetoric of stemming the hereditary passing of criminal and antisocial behavior, eugenicists and legislators argued for the compulsory sterilization of prison inmates, and by 1913, “twenty-four states and the District of Columbia had enacted laws forbidding epileptics, imbeciles, paupers, drunkards, criminals, and the feeble-minded,” from reproducing. Even President Theodore Roosevelt would endorse the call for sterilization as a means of preventing “racial suicide.”
[...]
…Robert writes, “The eugenics movement was also energized by issues of race. In the 1930′s, it turned its attention from the influx of undesirable immigrants to the black population in the South.” Just as Herrnstein and Murray would do in The Bell Curve more than seven decades later, eugenicists of the teens and 1920s blended class and racial characteristics, seeing them both as biological and immutable, as when the Harvard geneticist Edward East argued for ending prenatal care for the poor because it prevented the “natural elimination of the unfit.” Thurman B. Rice, a prominent eugenicist and author of Racial Hygiene, wrote, “the colored races are pressing the white race most urgently and this pressure may be expected to increase.”
Posted By: DAVID JOHNSON
Monday, October 15th 2012 at 6:16PM
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