Eugenics, the selection of desired heritable characteristics in order to improve future generations, typically in reference to humans. The term eugenics was coined in 1883 by British explorer and natural scientist Francis Galton, who, influenced by Charles Darwins theory of natural selection, advocated a system that would allow the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable. Social Darwinism, the popular theory in the late 19th century that life for humans in society was ruled by survival of the fittest, helped advance eugenics into serious scientific study in the early 1900s. By World War I many scientific authorities and political leaders supported eugenics. However, it ultimately failed as a science in the 1930s and 40s, when the assumptions of eugenicists became heavily criticized and the Nazis used eugenics to support the extermination of entire races.

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Who first identified individual genes by studying the giant chromosomes in the salivary gland cells of fruit flies?

Although eugenics as understood today dates from the late 19th century, efforts to select matings in order to secure offspring with desirable traits date from ancient times. Platos Republic (c. 378 bce) depicts a society where efforts are undertaken to improve human beings through selective breeding. Later, Italian philosopher and poet Tommaso Campanella, in City of the Sun (1623), described a utopian community in which only the socially elite are allowed to procreate. Galton, in Hereditary Genius (1869), proposed that a system of arranged marriages between men of distinction and women of wealth would eventually produce a gifted race. In 1865 the basic laws of heredity were discovered by the father of modern genetics, Gregor Mendel. His experiments with peas demonstrated that each physical trait was the result of a combination of two units (now known as genes) and could be passed from one generation to another. However, his work was largely ignored until its rediscovery in 1900. This fundamental knowledge of heredity provided eugenicistsincluding Galton, who influenced his cousin Charles Darwinwith scientific evidence to support the improvement of humans through selective breeding.

The advancement of eugenics was concurrent with an increasing appreciation of Darwins account for change or evolution within societywhat contemporaries referred to as social Darwinism. Darwin had concluded his explanations of evolution by arguing that the greatest step humans could make in their own history would occur when they realized that they were not completely guided by instinct. Rather, humans, through selective reproduction, had the ability to control their own future evolution. A language pertaining to reproduction and eugenics developed, leading to terms such as positive eugenics, defined as promoting the proliferation of good stock, and negative eugenics, defined as prohibiting marriage and breeding between defective stock. For eugenicists, nature was far more contributory than nurture in shaping humanity.

During the early 1900s eugenics became a serious scientific study pursued by both biologists and social scientists. They sought to determine the extent to which human characteristics of social importance were inherited. Among their greatest concerns were the predictability of intelligence and certain deviant behaviours. Eugenics, however, was not confined to scientific laboratories and academic institutions. It began to pervade cultural thought around the globe, including the Scandinavian countries, most other European countries, North America, Latin America, Japan, China, and Russia. In the United States the eugenics movement began during the Progressive Era and remained active through 1940. It gained considerable support from leading scientific authorities such as zoologist Charles B. Davenport, plant geneticist Edward M. East, and geneticist and Nobel Prize laureate Hermann J. Muller. Political leaders in favour of eugenics included U.S. Pres. Theodore Roosevelt, Secretary of State Elihu Root, and Associate Justice of the Supreme Court John Marshall Harlan. Internationally, there were many individuals whose work supported eugenic aims, including British scientists J.B.S. Haldane and Julian Huxley and Russian scientists Nikolay K. Koltsov and Yury A. Filipchenko.

Galton had endowed a research fellowship in eugenics in 1904 and, in his will, provided funds for a chair of eugenics at University College, London. The fellowship and later the chair were occupied by Karl Pearson, a brilliant mathematician who helped to create the science of biometry, the statistical aspects of biology. Pearson was a controversial figure who believed that environment had little to do with the development of mental or emotional qualities. He felt that the high birth rate of the poor was a threat to civilization and that the higher races must supplant the lower. His views gave countenance to those who believed in racial and class superiority. Thus, Pearson shares the blame for the discredit later brought on eugenics.

In the United States, the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) was opened at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, New York, in 1910 with financial support from the legacy of railroad magnate Edward Henry Harriman. Whereas ERO efforts were officially overseen by Charles B. Davenport, director of the Station for Experimental Study of Evolution (one of the biology research stations at Cold Spring Harbor), ERO activities were directly superintended by Harry H. Laughlin, a professor from Kirksville, Missouri. The ERO was organized around a series of missions. These missions included serving as the national repository and clearinghouse for eugenics information, compiling an index of traits in American families, training fieldworkers to gather data throughout the United States, supporting investigations into the inheritance patterns of particular human traits and diseases, advising on the eugenic fitness of proposed marriages, and communicating all eugenic findings through a series of publications. To accomplish these goals, further funding was secured from the Carnegie Institution of Washington, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the Battle Creek Race Betterment Foundation, and the Human Betterment Foundation.

Prior to the founding of the ERO, eugenics work in the United States was overseen by a standing committee of the American Breeders Association (eugenics section established in 1906), chaired by ichthyologist and Stanford University president David Starr Jordan. Research from around the globe was featured at three international congresses, held in 1912, 1921, and 1932. In addition, eugenics education was monitored in Britain by the English Eugenics Society (founded by Galton in 1907 as the Eugenics Education Society) and in the United States by the American Eugenics Society.

Following World War I, the United States gained status as a world power. A concomitant fear arose that if the healthy stock of the American people became diluted with socially undesirable traits, the countrys political and economic strength would begin to crumble. The maintenance of world peace by fostering democracy, capitalism, and, at times, eugenics-based schemes was central to the activities of the Internationalists, a group of prominent American leaders in business, education, publishing, and government. One core member of this group, the New York lawyer Madison Grant, aroused considerable pro-eugenic interest through his best-selling book The Passing of the Great Race (1916). Beginning in 1920, a series of congressional hearings was held to identify problems that immigrants were causing the United States. As the countrys eugenics expert, Harry Laughlin provided tabulations showing that certain immigrants, particularly those from Italy, Greece, and Eastern Europe, were significantly overrepresented in American prisons and institutions for the feebleminded. Further data were construed to suggest that these groups were contributing too many genetically and socially inferior people. Laughlins classification of these individuals included the feebleminded, the insane, the criminalistic, the epileptic, the inebriate, the diseasedincluding those with tuberculosis, leprosy, and syphilisthe blind, the deaf, the deformed, the dependent, chronic recipients of charity, paupers, and neer-do-wells. Racial overtones also pervaded much of the British and American eugenics literature. In 1923 Laughlin was sent by the U.S. secretary of labour as an immigration agent to Europe to investigate the chief emigrant-exporting nations. Laughlin sought to determine the feasibility of a plan whereby every prospective immigrant would be interviewed before embarking to the United States. He provided testimony before Congress that ultimately led to a new immigration law in 1924 that severely restricted the annual immigration of individuals from countries previously claimed to have contributed excessively to the dilution of American good stock.

Immigration control was but one method to control eugenically the reproductive stock of a country. Laughlin appeared at the centre of other U.S. efforts to provide eugenicists greater reproductive control over the nation. He approached state legislators with a model law to control the reproduction of institutionalized populations. By 1920, two years before the publication of Laughlins influential Eugenical Sterilization in the United States (1922), 3,200 individuals across the country were reported to have been involuntarily sterilized. That number tripled by 1929, and by 1938 more than 30,000 people were claimed to have met this fate. More than half of the states adopted Laughlins law, with California, Virginia, and Michigan leading the sterilization campaign. Laughlins efforts secured staunch judicial support in 1927. In the precedent-setting case of Buck v. Bell, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., upheld the Virginia statute and claimed, It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.

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eugenics | Description, History, & Modern Eugenics ...

Introduction to Eugenics

Eugenics is a movement that is aimed at improving the genetic composition of the human race. Historically, eugenicists advocated selective breeding to achieve these goals. Today we have technologies that make it possible to more directly alter the genetic composition of an individual. However, people differ in their views on how to best (and ethically) use this technology.

History of Eugenics

Logo of the Second International Congress of Eugenics, 1921. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

In 1883, Sir Francis Galton, a respected British scholar and cousin of Charles Darwin,first used the term eugenics, meaning well-born. Galton believed that the human race could help direct its future by selectively breeding individuals who have desired traits. This idea was based on Galtons study of upper class Britain. Following these studies, Galton concluded that an elite position in society was due to a good genetic makeup. While Galtons plans to improve the human race through selective breeding never came to fruition in Britain, they eventually took sinister turns in other countries.

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.

The eugenics movement in the U.S. slowly lost favor over time and was waning by the start of World War II. When the horrors of Nazi Germany became apparent, as well as Hitlers use of eugenic principles to justify the atrocities, eugenics lost all credibility as a field of study or even an ideal that should be pursued.

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Introduction to Eugenics - Genetics Generation

It was with some astonishment that I learned several days ago that Planned Parenthood of Manhattan had decided to remove the name Margaret Sanger from its headquarters and had encouraged other Planned Parenthood affiliates to do the same. The authorities cited Sangers eugenicism and racism as the motives for this dethronement of the iconic founder of the Birth Control League and its successor, Planned Parenthood. Until recently, anyone who criticized Sanger in print would be swiftly rebutted by Planned Parenthood apologists, who insisted that the charges of eugenicism and racism were false. But stubborn facts and our nations new scrutiny of our racial history have eroded the mythology of Sanger and laid bare her eugenics project in its racist, coercive details.

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As we demythologize Sanger, it is important to recognize how extreme her brand of eugenics was. Her much-republished My Way to Peace (1932) presents Sangers essential eugenics platform. It argues that to preserve racial hygiene, the government should enact three coercive measures. First, it should sterilize those with mental and physical disabilities, including morons, mental defectives, epileptics. Second, it should segregate on state-run concentration farms a much broader public of impoverished and criminal citizens, including paupers, prostitutes, drug addicts, illiterates and the unemployed. If the second group reformed its behavior and accepted sterilization, it could return to mainstream society. By Sangers own estimate, 15 million to 20 million citizens would live under this regime of segregation and sterilization. The third initiative would be obligatory birth-control training for mothers with serious diseases, such as heart disease, in an effort to persuade them to renounce any future childbearing. This program was not about choice.

Sangers eugenics program made relatively modest gains during her lifetime. But she and her associates succeeded in one area: compulsory sterilization. More than 30 states passed laws authorizing agencies to sterilize forcibly those considered unfit for childbearing. The statutes targeted the mentally disabled and prisoners.

The sterilization controversy reached a climax in the Buck v. Bell decision (1927) by the U.S. Supreme Court. The state of Virginia had targeted Carrie Buck, an 18-year-old resident of a state institution, for forced sterilization on the grounds that she was feeble-minded (with a mental age of 8), immoral (she became pregnant as a teenager) and incorrigible. Writing for the 8-to-1 majority, Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. declared the sterilization statute and the imminent operation constitutional on the ground that the state had the right to protect itself against those who burdened it economically. He famously concluded, Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

In succeeding years, the particular injustice of the Buck case became apparent. Carrie Buck had received average grades in school (so much for feeble-mindedness) and had received As and Bs for comportment (so much for incorrigibility). She had indeed given birth to her daughter Vivian out of wedlock, but this pregnancy was the result of her being raped by the nephew of her foster parents. Until her death at the age of 8 from measles, Vivian was an average student (not the third-generational imbecile predicted by Holmes). Carrie Buck happily married twice, supported herself through domestic work, and in her later years only regretted she could not have more children.

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At least 70,000 people in the United States were forcibly sterilized under the laws promoted by Sanger and her associates. Far more, especially women prisoners and women on welfare, were surreptitiously sterilized.

Race was never far from Sangers brand of eugenics. One of Sangers most cherished initiatives was the Negro Project, which targeted predominantly black neighborhoods for birth control programs and recruited African-American leaders to persuade minority populations of the value of contraception and sterilization. In a 1939 letter to Clarence Gamble, Sanger revealed the racial underpinnings of her delicate project: We dont want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the [African-American] minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.

Defenders of Sanger argued that such passages are not in fact racist, but few observers have been fooled. The African-American scholar and activist Angela Davis dissected the racism in Sangers version of birth control: When Margaret Sanger[built] an independent birth control campaign, she and her followers became more susceptible than ever before to the anti-Black and anti-immigrant propaganda of the times. Like their predecessors, who had been deceived by the race suicide propaganda, the advocates of birth control began to embrace that prevailing racist ideology. Davis shrewdly concludes that with Sanger, birth control (based on individual freedom) degenerated into population control (engineered by a coercive state). And there was no question as to the color of the populations to be targeted.

Sangers racist eugenics is not idiosyncratic. She reflects the triumphant eugenics elite that included presidents (Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson), jurists (Holmes) and philanthropists (John D. Rockefeller). They embody the country-club ethics of exclusion turned lethal. As we demythologize Sanger, we should canonize the victims of eugenicist hysteria. There is no finer candidate than Corrie Buck, the victim of eugenicist fear and deceit. Perhaps we could build a statue of her. And place it on the front steps of the Supreme Courtright next to a statue of Dred Scott.

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Margaret Sanger's extreme brand of eugenics - America Magazine

(Editors Note: This is the first of two articles discussing human rights violations against Chinas Uyghur population. The second article, by Connor OSteen, considers what steps the international community could take in efforts to halt and redress these violations.)

As new evidence emerges of the Chinese governments forcible sterilization of Uyghur women, communities around the world are sure to recognize elements of a familiar pattern. Official measures to control the Uyghur population in Chinas Xinjiang region reportedly aim for nearly no population growth, through a combination of sterilization and long-term birth control measures. Plans are said to include subject[ing] at least 80 percent of women of childbearing age to intrusive birth prevention surgeries and punishing birth control violations by internment in training camps. At the same time, there has been a dramatic increase in the population growth of the Han community, Chinas majority ethnic group, in Xinjiang.

Adrian Zenz, the author of the new report on these measures, describes his findings as rais[ing] concerns that Beijing is doubling down on a policy of Han settler colonialism and provid[ing] the strongest evidence yet that China is carrying out a genocide of the Uyghur population.

Heartbreakingly, forced sterilization is a practice that has persisted into this century and overwhelmingly targets Indigenous women and members of other minority groups, transgender people, persons with disabilities, and intersex people. Failures to eradicate these practices and provide redress for previous eras population control measures have helped permit involuntary sterilization to continue in many places. In some countries and circumstances, sterilization is mandated or carried out under color of law, while in others it may be illegal but goes unpunished. The body of international law identifying forced sterilization as both an atrocity crime and a human rights violation has expanded to address the many current-day iterations of this form of eugenics, though the challenge of compliance remains.

Troubling Similarities

Though the abuses in Xinjiang may be of a different scale than other recent examples of enforced sterilization practices (possible exceptions include Indias sterilization camps), the methods and the aims remain familiar. Chinese policies in Xinjiang bring to mind compulsory or coercive sterilization campaigns in other countries. In the United States, as many as 25% of Native American women and 35% of Puerto Rican women of childbearing age were sterilized in the 1960s and 1970s, and 20,000 disproportionately Latinx Californians were sterilized in the first half of the century. In Peru, authorities sterilized more than 200,000 mostly rural women between 1996 and 2001. In Uzbekistan, Romani women have been the primary victims of enforced sterilization by the State.

These horrifying campaigns have echoes in the more insidious targeting for sterilization of women in prison (or facing incarceration) in the United States, Indigenous women in Canada and other countries, Romani women in Eastern Europe, and women living with HIV in East and Southern Africa. In addition to pressure and misinformation, a common tactic is threatening to withdraw access to public assistance for women who do not agree to sterilization, as has happened in Kenya, or threatening to terminate parental rights. Many governments are still, or were until recently, requiring trans people to undergo sterilization or genital surgery in order to have their gender identity recognized.

Other human rights violations common to settler colonialism are evident in Xinjiang, too. Chinese re-education camps and boarding schools for Uyghurs recall the residential schools designed to forcibly break the familial, linguistic, and cultural ties of Indigenous children in Canada, the United States, and elsewhere in the last century and earlier. The many abuses against the Uyghur population have the apparent aims of controlling, culturally assimilating, and repressing these communities or, in the alternative, eradicating them. The government may also stand to benefit from increased natural resource extraction and the profits of forced labor.

Impunity and Lack of Redress

Domestic redress has been limited. In Peru, advocates continue to seek accountability for Fujimori-era forced sterilizations, despite setbacks. Peru has yet to fully fulfill the terms of a 2003 friendly settlement agreement before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, pursuant to which it committed to conducting administrative and criminal investigations into those responsible for the forced sterilization, and resulting death, of Mara Mamrita Mestanza Chvez, one of the victims of Perus mass sterilization campaign. Victims of discriminatory and coercive sterilization programs in the United States have long sought reparation including through legislative initiatives to compensate victims, such as in California, North Carolina, and Virginia with mixed results.

In the absence of national reckoning, some victims have sought redress at the international level. Dealing mostly with individual allegations and not alleged patterns or systemic practices human rights oversight bodies have condemned forced sterilization, whether officially sanctioned or not, in a growing body of jurisprudence on informed consent, bodily autonomy, gender-based violence, and discrimination. Their decisions add to the earlier recognition of forced sterilization as an international crime.

International Criminal Law and Its Domestication

The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court explicitly recognizes forced sterilization as both a war crime and crime against humanity of sexual violence. Although not explicitly referenced in the Charter of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, the Tribunal found the Third Reichs forced sterilization programs to constitute a war crime with regard to sterilization experiments in concentration camps, during the Doctors Trial.

The Rome Statute also recognizes imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group as an act of genocide, when committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. This language mirrors that of the Genocide Convention and the statutes of the international criminal tribunals for Rwanda and Yugoslavia, and it has been interpreted to include sterilization and forced birth control.

Relatedly, the history of the coerced sterilization of Indigenous women in Canada, combined with many other types of State action and inaction, led the National Inquiry on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls to conclude there were serious reasons to believe Canada is responsible for committing genocide against Indigenous peoples.

Many States have codified atrocity crimes in their domestic criminal codes, including in their assertion of universal jurisdiction over crimes committed elsewhere. For example, the Follow-up Mechanism to the Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment, and Eradication of Violence against Women (Convention of Belm do Par) has assessed and encouraged national criminalization of forced sterilization as a common crime and as a crime against humanity, war crime, or act of genocide among its State parties.

Developments in International Human Rights Law

Human rights law defines forced sterilization as any sterilization procedure carried out in the absence of the persons full, free, prior, and informed consent. Consent is not valid unless the person has adequate and accurate information about the procedure and its consequences, as well as time to deliberate, without any coercion or inducement. In 1999, United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women Radhika Coomaraswamy published a report that first addressed forced sterilization as a violation of multiple human rights and as a means of violating the prohibition against torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment (though, limited to instances involving physical force or detention). Coomaraswamy identified a State obligation to act with due diligence to prevent, investigate, and punish violations in this context.

Regional and U.N. human rights bodies have since widely and repeatedly confirmed that forced sterilization practices violate multiple human rights, including the right to be free from torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. Many of the relevant statements are referenced in an extensive 2014 U.N. inter-agency report on forced sterilization. Forced sterilization was also expressly prohibited by an international human rights treaty for the first time in 2014, with the entry into force of the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence (known as the Istanbul Convention). More recent developments include the Inter-American Court of Human Rights judgment in I.V. v. Bolivia, which concluded that the failure to obtain proper consent for a tubal ligation from a woman in labor violated her rights to physical integrity, humane treatment, personal liberty and security, respect for honor and dignity, respect for private and family life, freedom of expression (with respect to access to information), and freedom to raise a family.

In view of the specific circumstances or treaty, human rights bodies may find other violations as well, including of the rights to sexual and reproductive health and to decide the number and spacing of children. In many contexts, the rights to non-discrimination and equality are also at issue.

Human rights bodies have made clear that States obligations go beyond refraining from forcibly sterilizing people, to protecting against forced sterilization by monitoring and regulating healthcare providers, establishing domestic informed consent standards, investigating allegations, and providing effective remedies to victims.

Importantly, however, human rights bodies decisions have generally involved individual victims often women sterilized after being admitted to the hospital to give birth. This focus on individual instances has led to a tendency not to assess whether such individual allegations fit a larger discriminatory pattern or prior history, particularly where the State denies any policy or characterizes a forced sterilization as lapse of judgment on the part of individual doctors. While human rights bodies have urged States to investigate sterilizations that are alleged to be part of a systemic practice, none of these bodies have really grappled with how to dismantle the systems allowing sterilization practices to happen in the first place, or to provide widescale redress.

Accountability in Xinjiang

The international prohibitions on forced sterilization are clear, and they provide multiple avenues for clarifying the facts, pressuring the Chinese government to stop the abuses against Uyghur women, and seeking accountability. They are, however, limited.

The path to individual criminal liability for mass forced sterilizations in China is not straightforward. The Chinese government has reportedly neglected to prosecute even forced sterilizations that it deemed prohibited by law in the past, and attempts to hold Chinese authorities accountable in foreign courts for torture and other crimes have not succeeded. China is not a party to Rome Statute, although there are other possible avenues to the International Criminal Courts jurisdiction, including the argument that the court has competence because the abuses against Uyghurs involved Cambodia and Tajikistan, which are parties to the Rome Statute.

With regard to the States accountability in relation to such crimes, China has not accepted the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) over inter-State disputes arising under the Genocide Convention and multiple human rights treaties. If China were to agree to the ICJs jurisdiction over a particular dispute, a useful precedent is unfolding. In an ongoing case before the ICJ, Gambia alleges Myanmar has violated the Genocide Convention in its treatment of the Rohingya, including through measures to prevent births within the group. Among other policies, authorities have limited the number and spacing of Rohingya children. An obstacle to enforcing any possible ICJ judgment with regard to China, however, is that it could veto Security Council resolutions calling for its compliance, as the United States has done.

Separately, international human rights oversight of China is robust, though constrained. Like approximately 20 percent of States, China is not subject to the jurisdiction of an independent regional human rights body. However, it is a party to several U.N. human rights treaties, including the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), and Convention against Torture (CAT), and Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). Each of these treaties has been interpreted to prohibit forced sterilization. China has not accepted any individual complaint proceedings under these treaties, meaning that oversight of its human rights practices is conducted wholly through periodic reviews by treaty bodies, the Universal Periodic Review (UPR), and the visits and other commentary of special procedure mandate holders. Each of these processes depends on information and engagement from civil society organizations, who are essential in uncovering abuses and creating the conditions for accountability; this work is made more difficult by governmental repression and retaliation.

Despite the challenges, a number of U.N. human rights bodies have repeatedly urged China to stop and prevent involuntary sterilizations for decades. For example, in her 1999 report, Coomaraswamy specifically called out China, indicating that despite the assurances by the State Family Planning Commission that coercion is not permitted, there has been no indication of sanctions being taken against officials who perpetrate such violations. In 2016, the U.N. Committee against Torture called on China to ensure the effective prevention and punishment of coerced sterilization and forced abortion and to ensure all such allegations would be investigated, those responsible held accountable, and redress provided to victims. While such recommendations were not specific to Xinjiang or the Uyghur population, the Committee did separately address the custodial deaths, disappearances, allegations of torture and ill-treatment and reported use of excessive force in Xinjiang. Other treaty bodies have similarly asked China to address the prevalence of forced sterilization throughout the country, as a consequence of a common preference for sons and family planning policies, including the former one-child policy.

U.N. bodies have also repeatedly raised their concerns with regard to abuses against Uyghurs in Xinjiang. The engagement of U.N. experts with China, some of which is summarized in a November 2019 letter to the government and a June 2020 press release, has addressed a broad range of issues in the region. In response, however, China has criticized the experts, rather than addressed their concerns. Change in Xinjiang will, it seems, require sustained oversight and more pressure than human rights bodies alone can bring to bear.

As Connor OSteen discusses in an upcoming companion piece on Just Security, the United States and other governments have unilateral and multilateral options to promote accountability and put pressure on Chinese authorities to end these abuses. On the multilateral side, this could include pushing for a specialized U.N. inquiry, such as through a mechanism like the new Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar.

For now, the full scale of forced sterilization in China and around the world is unknown, in part because of governments failure to collect or share relevant data, authorities failure to adequately investigate allegations, the stigma and trauma that may prevent victims from coming forward, and justified mistrust of law enforcement or governmental authorities among affected communities. While the human rights standards are clear, there is no existing roadmap for remedying mass forced sterilizations and preventing their insidious recurrence. It has not yet been done.

(Authors note: The authors organization, the International Justice Resource Center, has been part of human rights advocacy concerning forced sterilization, including with regard to Canada. The views expressed in this article are those of the author, writing in a personal capacity.)

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China's Forced Sterilization of Uyghur Women Violates Clear International Law - Just Security

Des Moines, Iowa (RI) The Iowa chapter of the environmentalist group The Sierra Club is calling for a climate adaptation plan and other policies to overhaul the states agricultural economy.

The group calls for changes to make farming more environmentally sustainable while still being profitable. Chapter director Pam Mackey-Taylor says to create a climate adaptation plan, they want farmers, state officials, consumers, and environmentalists to meet and address key questions.

(As above) How do you sustain farm incomes in the future? Mackey-Taylor says. What kinds of things do we need to do to adapt? and how do we make sure that agriculture remains a part of our economy for the future?

Mackey-Taylor says the state could invest economic development dollars in small meat processors and in creating new markets so farmers can expand beyond the standard two-crop rotation. The chapter is also backing the national organization in distancing itself from founder John Muir. In recent weeks, Muirs ties to eugenics and white supremacy have prompted the nations oldest environmental organization to call for a reckoning with its founders and past attitudes. Mackey-Taylor says many people and groups are reconsidering their actions and language around race.

(As above) Mackey-Taylor says, It makes sense for Sierra Club to do that close look and to mend the hurts and the harms that weve done and to move forward after that.

Across the country, the environmental movement is confronting its lack of diversity as some of the few activists and staffers who are not white have quit or called for organizational overhauls.

Meanwhile, the Planned Parenthood affiliate that includes Iowa issued a statement last week denouncing what it called the problematic positions of the organizations founder. The group said Margaret Sangers advocacy of racist ideas was wrong and repugnant.

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Environmental Group Calls For Overhaul Of Iowa's Ag Economy, Better Race Relations - KIWARadio.com

Lewis and Clark, of course, had encountered nothing like a wilderness and they would never have claimed such a thing. Nor would Jefferson. On the contrary, Jefferson knew that west of the Mississippi, Native people were in charge. In fact, it was, according to Jefferson, the immense power of the Sioux, particularly the Lakota, that would be the biggest barrier to American trade and settlement.5 The wilderness that Armistead Gordon imagined in 1919 at the unveiling of the Lewis and Clark statue was in fact a region in which Sioux population and power would only increase in the decades after Lewis and Clark passed through.

In the early 1920s, in America and Virginia, worshipping those who settled the American landscape and erasing the presence in the past and the present of those who were here first, was commonplace. This manifested in several ways.

For one, in the decades surrounding World War I, the number of statues memorializing the settlement of the West exploded. The frontier had officially closed as of the 1890 census. No longer was the West considered unsettled. Frederick Jackson Turner, in his famous 1893 essay, The Significance of the Frontier in American History, claimed that the frontier was a place of rugged individualism, where societies could be formed anew. But with the closing of the frontier and Americas increasing urbanization, a key piece of Americas identity disappeared. When it did, a newfound interest in the countrys pioneer past emerged.

At the same time, Indians had come to be considered a vanishing race, doomed to extinction. Fueling this notion was a proliferation of expert opinion regarding what they argued was the vanishingly low Native population prior to contact with Europeans an argument used to justify denying Native peoples legal rights to land.6

Finally, the American West was reimagined as having been a wilderness, a land uninhabited and free for the taking. The American past was rewritten and Indians were erased. There was no place to recognize, for example, the immense power Jefferson knew the Sioux possessed over a huge swath of the Northern Plains. The West, in this new historical narrative, was empty. The statues dedicated to Lewis and Clark and George Rogers Clark reinforced this historical narrative.

The myth-building about the vanishing Indian would not only be advanced by monuments. More devastatingly, actual laws harmed Native people and exacerbated discrimination against them for decades.

In 1924, when the General Assembly passed the notorious Racial Integrity Act, Virginia added racial purity to this already toxic mix of ideas. The act redefined racial classification in Virginia. Now, there were two: white and black. The categories were strictly defined and meticulously policed by the Bureau of Vital Statistics. Being Indian was no longer possible.

Native people in Virginia began to disappear from official records such as the census. After all, they no longer existed. By the 1940s, the Racial Integrity Act had greatly diminished the number of official Native people in Virginia. Walter Plecker, the State Registrar of Vital Statistics, was relentless in his pursuit of racial purity. He chased down individuals claiming to be Indian.7

In 1940, when explaining why he returned one mans birth certificate, he wrote the following: We have learned that none of the native-born individuals in Virginia claiming to be Indian are free from negro mixture, and under the law of Virginia every person with any ascertainable degree of negro blood is to be classed as a negro or colored person not as an Indian. To another person claiming to be Indian, he wrote: We do not recognize any native-born Indian as of pure Indian descent unmixed with negro blood. According to the law of Virginia any ascertainable degree of negro blood constitutes the individual a colored person. Finally, after assiduous research in 1943 he claimed: Public records in the office of the Bureau of Vital Statistics, and in the State Library, indicate that there does not exist today a descendant of the Virginia ancestors claiming to be an Indian who is unmixed with negro blood.8 Therefore, there were no Indians in Virginia.

As the national historical narrative erased Indians, so, too, did Virginias Racial Integrity Act.

The impulse to pass laws like the Racial Integrity Act emerged out of the then-flourishing science of eugenics. Eugenics was based on the notion that, through selective breeding, superior racial stock would emerge. By forbidding the races to inter-marry, racial purity, and thus white racial supremacy, could be maintained. Eugenics, explored previously in this series, flourished at the University during the first decades of the 20th century.

During the 1920s, in addition to hiring professors who promoted eugenics, UVA also hired sociologist Floyd House. House got his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, studying under Robert Park. He arrived at UVA the same year as Ivan McDougle and Arthur Estabrook published Mongrel Virginians: The Win Tribe. Win stood for white, Indian, negro, and the book was presented as an ethnographic-like case study of the nearly apocalyptic consequences that resulted when the races mixed. The community Mongrel Virginians depicted largely self-identified as Indian.

But not everyone believed in the racist logic of eugenics. Jeff Hantman, professor emeritus of anthropology at UVA and an expert on the Monacan Nation, has been doing research on House and the history of anthropology at UVA. Hantmans research revealed a fascinating 1928 UVA masters thesis by Bertha Wailes, one of Houses students. Backward Virginias: A Further Study of the Win Tribe was in many respects a rebuttal to Mongrel Virginians. Wailes knew the community well and argued that while they were indeed backward, their place in the social hierarchy could not be explained by their race. In fact, if race played a role in their social position, it was due to the racial prejudice of their neighbors and not any inherent racial characteristics the so-called Win Tribe possessed.

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UVA and the History of Race: The George Rogers Clark Statue and Native Americans - UVA Today

Out of Contextis a 10-part series that addresses the topic of cultural appropriation as it intersects with both Western European-based classical music and the broader social landscape.Commissioned by American Composers Forum and I CARE IF YOU LISTEN, the goal of the series is to offer information and diverse perspectives to those seeking to acknowledge historical context, honor cultural traditions that are not their own, and expand their sphere of knowledge with awareness and respect. A culminating collection of these articles and other resources will be shared for continued learning and dialogue.

I am a black woman as much as I try to break free and push against the stereotypes and expectations that accompany that definition of a human a black woman. Yet within that visual stamp of black woman, I have an extremely varied history of cultures, including those of white people. This is not a unique reality for black people in the United States. Slaves were property, and they were treated as property, and that included sexual property. In Africa, white barbarism parading as supremacy led to the construction of a racist belief system in which blacks were seen as less human and more beastly than white people. All of this subjugation resulted in black women frequently being raped by white men and the birth of babies who struggled to find a place in the world in between the white lie of race.

In the present reality where people rail against the concept that BLACK LIVES MATTER with the response that All Lives Matter, we must have the unpleasant but necessary conversation about why it is impossible for black humans to appropriate the culture and artistic traditions of white people. Appropriation is a facet of exploitation whereby aspects of identity are stolen and used by someone outside of that identity, often in an attempt to make the thief seem more interesting. We frequently associate this practice with white people taking hair styles from black people (see: Kardashians wearing cornrows), but it can also happen when artists co-opt the styles of other artists practices. White composers who use African-American spirituals or attempt to access black trauma to appear relevant to the zeitgeist are glaring examples of current trends in musical appropriation.

Photo by Julio Rionaldo on Unsplash

When oppressors move in and take over a cultureor participate in human trafficking and the assimilation of captives into a foreign land for further exploitationthe oppressed humans survive by adapting to the cultural whims of their oppressors. My enslaved ancestors learned to play instruments that were wholly foreign to them to please their oppressors, and they learned to play the music that would hopefully cause their captors to brutalise them less. Through years of adaptation for survival, these tendencies become embedded in cellular memory, and white cultural predilections become a part of the lexicon that black artists refer to in improvisation and the creation of new work. Its never appropriationits survival that becomes second nature.

The truth that white genes are embedded in the cells of present day black people has even been used by whites to substantiate racist eugenics theories that black intelligence is only the product of their genetic ties to white ancestors. (These theories are particularly apparent in the work of William Shockley, head scientist at Bell Labs, one of the founders of Silicon Valley, and author of Shockley on Eugenics and Race: The Application of Science to the Solution of Human Problems). Whilst this eugenic theory is a farce, black artists do have an ownership to white culture genetically as much as they do through the hundreds of years of cultural suppression and the impression of white culture on black bodies.

Yet theres a difficulty and inner struggle that comes with perpetuating survival tactics and the white barbarism of a notated musical tradition reaching back to the castles and churches of Europethere is still the tinge of oppression. This constant fight with what has become organic to some degree is actually intrinsically problematic. In my own practice, I have struggled with my output under the oppression of music school and industry rules and aesthetics that fetishise systems and works by old dead white dudes as the pinnacle of artistic creation.

Elizabeth A. BakerPhoto courtesy of the artist

Those black artists that are able to continue writing within the iron boundaries of the white mans music theory rules are praised for their ability to create harmony with their backgrounds. Examples include talented artists like Carlos Simon and Courtney Bryan, who have found success with large ensembles and orchestras because their works retain language that is accessible to those conservative-leaning communities. Focusing on the abilities of black artists to create within the boxes of militant music theory rules and white aesthetics of beauty and high art is akin to the problematic act of saying that a black person speaks so well, which inherently means that black people are illiterate and incapable of articulating their points whilst putting emphasis on white speech patterns as the supreme form of communication.

Beyond the identity and oppression tumult going on inwardly is the mountain of common practice, a standardisation of white communication in the musical medium. Due to the fact that academia and music education are built on white domination principles, most musicians believe that the ways of Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Wagner, Schoenberg, Verdi, Stravinsky, and rotating cast of other dead white dudes are the greatest expression of mankinds understanding of music. And so, somehow and very illogically, the functional harmony rules and compositional aesthetic founded in the 1600s with adaptations through the 1940s have prejudicial bearing on the proceedings of modern music-making practices.

Music theory is taught as dogma, and this creates a culture where the prevailing body of performers today are not equipped, or in many cases willing, to deviate from the white communication methods that theyve been brainwashed to consider high art and proper technique. Because this hierarchy still exists, as much as black artists may seek to shed the oppressive jail of lines and spaces, they are in many ways forced to comply with the regulations set by performing ensembles and organisations, which are particularly conservative and stringent in America. Here we (black artists) are in modern times, surviving by putting on another coat similar to our ancestors on the plantations of the South, in the meeting tents of the Americas, and in the courts of European royalty that fetishised our quick adaptability to white musical traditions.

Photo by Elizabeth A. Baker

Oppressors taking the culture of those that they oppress continues to be nothing more than exploitationin the same way that white composers using black trauma to further their names and wallets is the exploitation of black tragedy. Appropriation in music is nothing more than a new way for whites to mine the resources and expressions of black and brown people. Amplifying and appreciating black voices does not mean co-opting our identities to make your own white works more appealing thats appropriation thats exploitation

Oppressed people have ownership to the language of their oppressors because in survival, our identity becomes warped and hewn and imbued with the qualities of our surroundings and our behaviours that help us to walk out alive. A black artists incorporation and use of white culture in their work is a statement on the oppression that has been felt in our bones, in our cellular memory from our ancestors. A black artists use of white culture in their work is assimilation for the purpose of survival in a system of inequalities and injustice. A black artists use of white culture in their art is an act of resistance in a world where racism constantly acts as a distraction from black creation, black life, black love, black passion, black joy A black artist has a world of expression at their fingertips because the world has battered and stolen and warped their identities such that all manner of cellular memories and techniques should be available for them to communicate the incredibly complex amalgamation of being black in a world that is still violently unjust agains black bodies and black thought and black creation and black joy.

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Out of Context #7: Owning the Language of our Oppressors - I CARE IF YOU LISTEN