UCL renames three facilities that honoured prominent eugenicists – The Guardian

UCL has renamed two lecture theatres and a building that honoured the prominent eugenicists Francis Galton and Karl Pearson.

The university said on Friday that the Galton lecture theatre had been renamed lecture theatre 115, the Pearson lecture theatre changed to lecture theatre G22 and the Pearson building to the north-west wing.

Galton coined the term eugenics in 1883 and endowed UCL with his personal collection and archive along with a bequest for the countrys first professorial chair of eugenics of which Pearson was the first holder, the university said.

It said that signs on the building and lecture theatres would be taken down with immediate effect. Other changes to the names on maps and signposts would be made as soon as practicable.

UCLs president and provost, Prof Michael Arthur, said the move was an important first step for the university as it acknowledged and addressed its historical links with the eugenics movement.

This problematic history has, and continues, to cause significant concern for many in our community and has a profound impact on the sense of belonging that we want all of our staff and students to have, he said.

Although UCL is a very different place than it was in the 19th century, any suggestion that we celebrate these ideas or the figures behind them creates an unwelcoming environment for many in our community.

I am also clear that this decision is just one step in a journey and we need to go much further by listening to our community and taking practical and targeted steps to address racism and inequality.

Eugenics was the study of the selective breeding of humans to increase the occurrence of heritable characteristics regarded as desirable.

The decision was made by Arthur and ratified by the universitys council following a recommendation from its buildings naming and renaming committee.

The committee, made up of staff, students, and equality, diversity and inclusion representatives, will also oversee any future renaming of the areas, UCL said.

Ijeoma Uchegbu, a professor of pharmaceutical nanoscience and the provosts envoy for race equality, said: I cannot begin to express my joy at this decision. Our buildings and spaces are places of learning and aspiration and should never have been named after eugenicists.

Today UCL has done the right thing.

The renaming follows a series of recommendations made by members of the inquiry into the history of eugenics at UCL, which reported back earlier this year.

A response group of senior UCL representatives, including academic staff, equality experts and the Students Union, is being formed to consider all the recommendations from the inquiry.

The group will look at action such as funding new scholarships to study race and racism, a commitment to ensure UCL staff and students learn about the history and legacy of eugenics, and the creation of a research post to further examine the universitys history of eugenics.

It will draw up an implementation plan for consideration by the academic board and approval by UCLs council.

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UCL renames three facilities that honoured prominent eugenicists - The Guardian

Podcast: The dark connection between cancer research and the eugenics movement – Genetic Literacy Project

Geneticist Dr. Kat Arney explores the stories of two women one a scientist fascinated by dancing mice, the other a seamstress with a deadly family legacy who made significant contributions to our understanding of cancer as a disease driven by genetic changes. Yet while their work paved the way for lifesaving screening programs for families, it was used by some as justification for eugenics the idea of removing genetic defectives from the population.

Born in Minnesota in 1879, Maud Slye was a cancer pathologist who dedicated her career to studying patterns of cancer inheritance in more than 150,000 mice. But as well as being a dedicated scientist (as well as a part-time poet), she was also wedded to eugenic ideas, suggesting that If we had records for human beings comparable to those for mice, we could stamp out cancer in a generation. At present, we take no account at all of the laws of heredity in the making of human young. Do not worry about romance. Romance will take care of itself. But knowledge can be applied even to romance.

While her ideas were controversial, Slyes work earned her a gold medal from the American Medical Society in 1914 and from the American Radiological Association in 1922. She was also awarded the Ricketts Prize from the University of Chicago in 1915 and an honorary doctorate from Brown University in 1937. She was even nominated for a Nobel prize in 1923.

Over the decades since Slyes death in 1954, weve come to understand that the hereditary aspects of cancer susceptibility are much more complicated than she originally suggested, although her work was vital in establishing inherited gene variations as an essential thread of cancer research.

Running parallel to Slyes work in mice was the research carried out by Aldred Warthin, a doctor working at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. One day in 1895, a chance meeting between Warthin and a local seamstress, Pauline Gross, set the two of them off on a 25-year-long quest to understand why so many members of Paulines family had died from cancer at a young age.

Pauline spent years compiling detailed family histories, enabling Warthin to trace the pattern of inheritance through Family G, as it became known. Like Slye, Warthin was a fan of eugenic ideas, describing Paulines family as an example of progressive degenerative inheritance the running-out of a family line through the gradual development of an inferior stock.

He was also quoted as saying in a 1922 lecture: Today it is recognized that all men are not born equal. We are not equal so far as the value of our bodily cells is concerned.

Perhaps as a direct result of growing public concern about eugenics, Warthins work fell out of favor. Paulines detailed genealogy lay undisturbed in a closet in the university until the 1960s, when American doctor Henry Lynch and social worker Anne Krush rediscovered her work and continued extending and investigating Family G.

Nearly a decade on from that first meeting between Pauline and Warthin, researchers finally pinned down the underlying genetic cause of this deadly legacy: an inherited variant of the MSH2 gene, which normally repairs mismatched DNA strands. Today, members of Family G and others around the world carrying dangerous variants in mismatch repair genes can undergo genetic testing, with a range of preventative and screening options available.

The story of Pauline and Family G, and the impact that their genetic legacy has had on the family down the generations, is beautifully told in the book Daughter of Family G, a memoir by Ami McKay.

Full transcript, links and references available online atGeneticsUnzipped.com

Genetics Unzippedis the podcast from the UKGenetics Society,presented by award-winning science communicator and biologistKat Arneyand produced byFirst Create the Media.Follow Kat on Twitter@Kat_Arney,Genetics Unzipped@geneticsunzip,and the Genetics Society at@GenSocUK

Listen to Genetics Unzipped onApple Podcasts(iTunes)Google Play,Spotify,orwherever you get your podcasts

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Podcast: The dark connection between cancer research and the eugenics movement - Genetic Literacy Project

University College London changes names of three buildings that were named in honour of eugenicists – Telegraph.co.uk

University College London has denamed buildings which honour eugenicists as a step towards addressing its historic links with the movement.

Lecture theatres and a building named after prominent eugenicists Francis Galton and Karl Pearson have been given new names, the university announced.

The Galton Lecture Theatre has been renamed Lecture Theatre 115, the Pearson Lecture Theatre changed to Lecture Theatre G22 and the Pearson Building to the North-West Wing.

Victorian scientist Francis Galton coined the term eugenics and endowed UCL with his personal collection and archive along with a bequest for the country's first professorial chair of eugenics of which Karl Pearson was the first holder, the university said.

It said that signs on the building and lecture theatres will be taken down with immediate effect while other changes to the names on maps and signposts will take place as soon as "practicable".

UCL president and provost Professor Michael Arthur said he was "delighted" that the decision to "dename" the lecture theatres and buildings has been ratified by the university's council.

He said the move was an "important first step" for the university as it acknowledges and addresses its historic links with the eugenics movement.

"This problematic history has, and continues, to cause significant concern for many in our community and has a profound impact on the sense of belonging that we want all of our staff and students to have," he said.

"Although UCL is a very different place than it was in the 19th century, any suggestion that we celebrate these ideas or the figures behind them creates an unwelcoming environment for many in our community.

"I am also clear that this decision is just one step in a journey and we need to go much further by listening to our community and taking practical and targeted steps to address racism and inequality."

The decision was made by Prof Arthur and ratified by the university's council following a recommendation from its buildings naming and renaming committee.

The committee, made up of staff, students, and equality, diversity and inclusion representatives, will also oversee any future renaming of the areas, UCL said.

Professor of pharmaceutical nanoscience Ijeoma Uchegbu, the provost's envoy for race equality, said: "I cannot begin to express my joy at this decision.

"Our buildings and spaces are places of learning and aspiration and should never have been named after eugenicists. Today UCL has done the right thing."

The renaming follows a series of recommendations made by members of the inquiry into the history of eugenics at UCL, which reported back earlier this year.

A response group of senior UCL representatives, including academic staff, equality experts and the Students' Union, is being formed to consider all the recommendations from the inquiry.

The group will look at action such as funding new scholarships to study race and racism, a commitment to ensure UCL staff and students learn about the history and legacy of eugenics, and the creation of a research post to further examine the university's history of eugenics.

It will draw up implementation plan for consideration by the academic board and approval by UCL's council.

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University College London changes names of three buildings that were named in honour of eugenicists - Telegraph.co.uk

More protests over eugenics, this time at Michigan State – BioEdge

Stephen Hsu / Michigan State University

Away from the main battlegrounds of the war on racism and on the unresolved legacy of slavery in the United States, there are bitter skirmishes over eugenics.

This week Michigan State University's senior vice president of research and innovation Stephen Hsu walked the plank after vehement criticism of his views on inherited IQ. He will remain as a tenured professor of theoretical physics.

I believe this is what is best for our university to continue our progress forward," MSU President Samuel Stanley Jr explained. "The exchange of ideas is essential to higher education, and I fully support our faculty and their academic freedom to address the most difficult and controversial issues.But when senior administrators at MSU choose to speak out on any issue, they are viewed as speaking for the university as a whole.Their statements should not leave any room for doubt about their, or our, commitment to the success of faculty, staff and students.

The controversy has become so heated that it is difficult to assess what it is all about. However, Dr Hsu has worked with BGI, a Chinese genome-sequencing company which is trying to market genome-sequencing for parents who want babies with high IQs.

In 2017, he co-founded a company called Genomic Prediction, which provides advanced genetic testing for IVF. According to its website its technology identifies candidate embryos for implantation which are genetically normal screening for Down syndrome, for instance, which no one at MSU objected to.

What was controversial was Hsus suggestion that his company might be able to spot embryos with genes that make a high IQ more likely.

He has also defended the notion that people with higher intelligence are more useful to society. "If you study the history of science or technology, you're going to inevitably come to the conclusion that it's people who are of above average ability who make these breakthroughs and generate a disproportionate amount of value for humanity," he told the Lansing State Journal in 2012.

Views like this were enough for critics on Twitter and elsewhere to tag his work as promoting scientific racism, sexism, eugenicist research and conflicts of interest.

Petitions for and against Hsu circulated on the internet. Harvards Professor Steven Pinker and about 1500 others argued that

The charges of racism and sexism against Dr. Hsu are unequivocally false and the purported evidence supporting these charges ranges from innuendo and rumor to outright lies. We highlight that there is zero concrete evidence that Hsu has performed his duties as VP in an unfair or biased manner. Therefore, removing Hsu from his post as VP would be to capitulate to rumor and character assassination.

But, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests and his association with eugenics, Hsu was doomed. The #ShutDownSTEM and #ShutDownAcademia movement was influential on the MSU campus and its activists appear to have forced his resignation. (It argues that Academia and STEM are global endeavors that sustain a racist system, where Black people are murdered.)

Michael Cook is editor of BioEdge

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More protests over eugenics, this time at Michigan State - BioEdge

Winston Churchill was many things but ‘racist’ was not one of them | TheHill – The Hill

It is a sign of these times that a statue to the man who made it possible for people around the world to protest police brutality and racism has been boarded up to protect it from these very same protesters.

Anticipating further demonstrations, authorities in London have put a barrier around the statue to Winston Churchill in Parliament Square. Why? Because, as protesters spray-painted on the statue last week, Churchill was a racist.

This accusation crossed the Atlantic when Aliyah Hasinah of Black Lives Matter U.K. was a guest on National Public Radios 1A program. According to Hasinah, every statue to Britains wartime leader should be torn down because Churchill gave Hitler his ideas and therefore had ideologically started World War II.

Hasinahs complaint centered on Churchills brief support of eugenics, the idea that undesirable traits could be bred out of the human race. Eugenics, and the racial undertones that accompanied it, sprang from Social Darwinism. Its adherents included the novelist H.G. Wells, the economist John Maynard Keynes and, on this side of the Atlantic, Theodore Roosevelt and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

They werent alone. NAACP founder W.E.B. DuBois was a eugenicist. So were two of the worlds foremost campaigners for womens reproductive rights: Marie Stopes in Britain and Margaret Sanger in the United States.

Would anyone seriously claim that Keynes or DuBois or Sanger were ideologically responsible for Nazism and the horrors of World War II?

Charges of racism against Churchill go beyond his brief affiliation with the eugenics movement. To quell an Arab uprising in newly acquired lands after World War I, but without the troops to do the job, Churchill then Britains secretary for war and for air power suggested that the Royal Air Force drop gas bombs on rebel towns. To this day, it is unclear how far Churchill was willing to take what he called this experimental work. In his own words, his aim was to use gas bombs that would cause great inconvenience and would spread a lively terror and yet would leave no serious permanent effects on most of those afflicted.

There is no way to justify this policy. But Churchills willingness to use poison gas hardly can be called racist when it is remembered that, as prime minister, he was fully prepared to unleash his countrys most lethal chemical weapons against the Germans, had they invaded Britain in 1940. The fact that the Nazi assault came to nothing doesnt detract from this point.

On the other side of the ledger, when British soldiers massacred nearly 400 people during a protest at Amritsar in India in 1919, Churchill, as war secretary, sacked the commanding officer, Reginald Dyer, and, in the House of Commons, condemned the use of military force against peaceful demonstrators for what it was and still is: terrorism.

India also is the place where Churchills critics accuse him not only of racism but of genocide. In 1943-44 a terrible famine hit the state of Bengal. Official estimates put the death toll at 1.5 million men, women and children; unofficial estimates put the figure at least twice as high.

What these critics conveniently forget when attacking the British response to this catastrophe is that a world war was taking place.

The Bengal famine resulted from a combination of poor harvests in India made worse by a major cyclone the year before. Previous food shortages had been alleviated by importing rice from Burma a recourse made impossible because the entire region was occupied by the Japanese army, which still aimed to conquer India.

Should more have been done to aid the Bengalis? Certainly. Could more have been done? That question isnt so easily answered. Throughout World War II, the Allies were confronted with a global shortage of shipping. Nowhere was this more acute than on the Southeast Asian battlefront, a theater of war that was as overlooked then as it is forgotten now. Hunger and starvation were twin features of this conflict in far too many places. To accuse Churchill of using this disaster to commit mass murder is a grotesque distortion of history.

It is easy to cherry-pick Churchills words to paint him in the worst possible light. His views often were controversial and they were public. Over the course of a very active life, he wrote 37 books, a record, according to one recent biographer, that surpasses the works of William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens combined. Separately, his speeches fill another eight volumes. Add to that more than 700 magazine and newspaper articles.

But the fact remains that when the world was confronted with fascism, the most deadly incarnation of racism ever known, he stood against it. While he was not alone, even his political opponents recognized that he was the indispensable man. During the Munich Crisis, one Labour parliamentarian told him: You, or God, will have to help if this country is to be saved.

Britain and, eventually the world, was saved.

Leaders of the current protests around the world are reminding everyone that we need to remember the past as it really was. True enough. But they also ought to follow their own advice.

Kevin Matthews is a professor of modern European history at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. He is the author of Fatal Influence: The Impact of Ireland on British Politics, 1920-1925. He is writing a book about Winston Churchill and Ireland.

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Winston Churchill was many things but 'racist' was not one of them | TheHill - The Hill

Eugenics Yesterday and Today (5): The Great Parenthesis of the Christian Era – FSSPX.News

Jacques Testart, the father of the first test-tube baby in France, in his book, Le dsir du gne(1992), wrote: With Christian evangelization the elimination of unwanted children disappeared, at least officially, until the Renaissance. This author is most unlikely to be suspected of benevolence towards the Church. He says of himself: When, as a militant Trotskyist, I deepened the principles of the permanent revolution... [Luf transparent]. It is one of the characteristics of evangelization to have been able to impose respect for enfants on peoples won over to the cause of eugenics in all its formsapart from the Jewish people who are custodians of the Old Testament, and to have defended them [enfants] against the crimes of which they were the object.

This defense of the little ones is both positive, encouraging the procreation and education of children, and negative, by banning infanticide and its substitutes.

From the first century, the Didache (around A.D.70) testified to an absolute prohibition: do not murder a child by abortion or kill a newborn (2,2). Shortly after, an author wrote (around A.D. 130): Thou shalt not murder a child by abortion, nor again shalt thou kill it when it is born (Epistle to Barnabas, 19:5). This warning came up very often in the following centuries, due to the entrenchment of barbaric habits among pagan nations which were converted only little by little.

St. Justin Martyr states (around A.D. 150): But as for us, we have been taught that to expose newly-born children is the part ofwickedmen. He gives several reasons: and this we have been taught lest we should do any one an injury, and lest we shouldsinagainstGod. But there is another reason, which reveals a terrible reality: first, because we see that almost all so exposed (not only the girls, but also the males) are brought up to prostitution so now we see you rear children only for this shameful use; And any one who uses suchpersons, besides the godless andinfamousand impure intercourse, may possibly be having intercourse with his own child, or relative, or brother (First Apology, chp. 27).

This is explained by the fate that often awaited abandoned children in Rome. When they were collected, they were sometimes adopted. But more often than not they fell into the worst abjection; these alumni (the name given to these abandoned and taken in children) became pleasure slaves, who were delivered to prostitution. Saint Justin is not the only one to note this fact.

Clement of Alexandria (150-215) writes: Besides, the wretchesknownot how many tragedies the uncertainty of intercourse produces. For fathers, unmindful of children of theirs that have been exposed, often without theirknowledge, have intercourse with a son that has debauched himself, and daughters that are prostitutes (The Instructor, Bk. 3, ch. 3). When you expose your children, adds Tertullian (155-220) in his Apology, counting on the compassion of others to collect them and give them better parents than you, do you forget the risks of incest, the awful chances that you make them run? Minucius Flix (died around 250) also says: You often expose the children born in your homes to the mercy of others; then you happen to be pushed towards them by a blind passion, to sin without knowing it towards your sons; so you prepare without being aware of the vicissitudes of an incestuous tragedy. Finally Lactantius (250-325): who is ignorant what things may happen, or are accustomed to happen, in the case of each sex, even through error? For this is shown by the example of dipus alone, confused with twofold guilt (The Divine Institutes, Bk.VI, ch. 20).

Christian charity intervened very early to save these unfortunates from their fate. The Apostolic Constitutions, at the beginning of the 4th century, warn the faithful that if When any Christian becomes an orphan, whether it be a young man or a maid, it is good that some one of the brethren who is without a child should take the young man, and esteem him in the place of a son (Bk.IV, #1). But charity did not extend only to Christian children, since Tertullian calls out the persecutors thus: our compassion spends more in the streets than yours does in the temples (Apology, ch. 42). And St. Augustine adds: sometimes foundlings which heartless parents have exposed in order to their being cared for by any passer-by, are picked up by holy virgins, and are presented for baptism by these persons (Letter 98).

Athenagoras (133-190) joins the prohibition of abortion to that of the exhibition: And when we say that those women who use drugs to bring on abortion commit murder, and will have to give an account to God for the abortion, on what principle should we commit murder? For it does not belong to the same person to regard the very fetus in the womb as a created being, and therefore an object of God's care, and when it has passed into life, to kill it (A Plea for the Christians, ch. 35). Take note of the vigorous affirmation of the humanity of the fetus and its intangibility, which contrasts with contemporary thought.

Tertullian also noted the crime of the pagans, and taking advantage of the accusation of the Thyestian Feast[1] launched against the Christians, he made this scathing retort: how many even of your rulers, notable for their justice to you and for their severe measures against us, may I charge in their own consciences with the sin of putting their offspring to death?

As to any difference in the kind of murder, it is certainly the more cruel way to kill by drowning, or by exposure to cold and hunger and dogs... In our case, murder being once for all forbidden, we may not destroy even the fetus in the womb, To hinder a birth is merely a speedier man-killing; nor does it matter whether you take away a life that is born, or destroy one that is coming to the birth. That is a man which is going to be one; you have the fruit already in its seed (op cit ch. 9).

Minucius Flix also opposes this accusation: And now I should wish to meet him who says or believes that we are initiated by the slaughter and blood of an infant. Think you that it can be possible for so tender, so little a body to receive those fatal wounds; for any one to shed, pour forth, and drain that new blood of a youngling, and of a man scarcely come into existence? No one can believe this, except one who can dare to do it. And I see that you at one time expose your begotten children to wild beasts and to birds; at another, that you crush them when strangled with a miserable kind of death. There are some women who, by drinking medical preparations, extinguish the source of the future man in their very bowels, and thus commit a parricide before they bring forth. It is from your gods that this barbaric use comes (op. cit. c. XXX).

Lactantius who influenced Constantine, sums up the arguments of the previous centuries: Therefore let no one imagine that even this is allowed, to strangle newly-born children, which is the greatest impiety; for God breathes into their souls for life, and not for death. But men, that there may be no crime with which they may not pollute their hands, deprive souls as yet innocent and simple of the light which they themselves have not givenWhat are they whom a false piety compels to expose their children? Can they be considered innocent who expose their own offspring as a prey to dogs, and as far as it depends upon themselves, kill them in a more cruel manner than if they had strangled them?... It is therefore as wicked to expose as it is to kill (op.cit.).

St. Jerome does not fail to castigate these abominable practices which alas! were also found among Christians: Some go so far as to take potionsand thus murder human beings almost before their conception. Some, when they find themselves with child through their sin, use drugs to procure abortion, and when (as often happens) they die with their offspring, they enter the lower world laden with the guilt not only of adultery against Christ but also of suicide and child murder (Letter 22:13).

St. Augustine sends a terrible warning to the prevaricators: Those who, either by bad will or by criminal action, seek to obstruct the generation of children, although called by the name of spouses, are really not such; they retain no vestige of true matrimony, but pretend the honorable designation as a cloak for criminal conduct. Having also proceeded so far, they are betrayed into exposing their children, which are born against their will. They hate to nourish and retain those whom they were afraid they would beget Well, if both parties alike are so flagitious, they are not husband and wife; and if such were their character from the beginning, they have not come together by wedlock but by debauchery (On Marriage and Concupiscence, Bk. I, ch. XV).

The Fathers also encourage two positive and complementary aspects to fidelity between spouses and to dignified and responsible procreation. St. Justin writes: But whether we marry, it is only that we may bring up children; or whether we decline marriage, we live continently (op. cit., ch. 29). We find the same doctrine in Athenagoras: Therefore, having the hope ofeternallife, we despise the things of this life, even to the pleasures of thesoul, each of us reckoning her his wife whom he has married according to thelawslaid down by us, and that only for the purpose of having children (op. cit., ch. 33).

[1] Thyeste, a mythological person, seduced his brothers wife; his brother then found out about his wife's affair with Thyeste and decided to take revenge. He killed all of his brother's sons, cooked them and served them to Thyeste as revenge. People accused the first Christians of this practice during the mysteries.

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BELLY OF THE BEAST Director, Erika Cohn, Talks Eugenics & The Sterilization of Women Prisoners on Tom Needham’s SOUNDS OF FILM – Broadway World

Emmy Award-winning director/producer, Erika Cohn, joins Tom Needham for a shocking conversation about BELLY OF THE BEAST, a film about the mass sterilization of women of color in California's prison system on this Thursday's SOUNDS OF FILM.

When a courageous young woman and a radical lawyer discover a pattern of illegal involuntary sterilizations in California's women's prison system, they take to the courtroom to wage a near-impossible battle against the Department of Corrections. With a growing team of investigators inside prison working with colleagues on the outside, they uncover a series of statewide crimes - from dangerously inadequate health care to sexual assault to coercive sterilizations - primarily targeting women of color. But no one believes them. This shocking legal drama captured over seven years features extraordinary access and intimate accounts from currently and formerly incarcerated women, demanding our attention to a shameful and ongoing legacy of eugenics and reproductive injustice in the United States.

Tom Needham's SOUNDS OF FILM is the nation's longest running film and music themed radio show. For the past 30 years, the program has delivered a popular mix of interviews and music to listeners all over Long Island, parts of Connecticut and streaming live worldwide on the internet. Past people interviewed for the show include Kenneth Lonergan, Mike Leigh, Wallace Shawn, William H. Macy, Peter Yarrow, Melanie, Dionne Warwick, and Don McLean.

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BELLY OF THE BEAST Director, Erika Cohn, Talks Eugenics & The Sterilization of Women Prisoners on Tom Needham's SOUNDS OF FILM - Broadway World

IU to review all named buildings on its nine campuses – IndyStar

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Michael McRobbie has been IU's president since 2007.(Photo: Matt Detrich/IndyStar)

BLOOMINGTON In the wake of its decision to rename an on-campus recreational facility that once honored a segregationist for Bill Garrett, its first Black basketball player, IU plans an in-depth review of all named buildings and structures across its nine campuses.

Among those: a Bloomington lecture hall named for former university president David Starr Jordan, an ichthyologist who was a prominent academic supporter of eugenics.

Speaking at the June 12virtual board of trustees meeting, IU president Michael McRobbie applauded the board for its decision to approve the renaming of the building once known as the Ora L. Wildermuth Intramural Center to the Bill Garrett Fieldhouse. The decision ended years of controversy surrounding the name of the building, after a 2007 Indiana Daily Student story revealed Wildermuth himself an IU trustee supported segregation.

Jordan Hall on the IU campus(Photo: Zach Osterman/IndyStar)

As the resolution I present today suggests, we have, in recent years, taken a thoughtful approach to the names of buildings on campus, McRobbie said in remarks delivered to the board on June 12. However, recent events in our country have demonstrated once again the awful weight that racial discrimination has placed on our citizens, and how that legacy can be perpetuated through those we choose to honor, in our public art, our icons, and the names we put on buildings.

He continued: "Indiana University holds fast to the fundamental values of equity and inclusion. We cannot, in any way, be part of perpetuating this legacy."

McRobbie will have the naming committee review all buildings on the nine IU campuses and remove names of anyone whose statements and writings are judged unworthy of the recognition.

In those same remarks, McRobbie specifically references Jordan, who was inaugurated as the universitys seventh president on Jan. 1, 1885.

Just 34 years old when he assumed the universitys highest office, Jordan was the first layperson to serve in the position and the youngest university president in the country.

He oversaw IUs move to its present-day campus, then situated in an area of Bloomington known as Dunns Woods. And he introduced the major department system within the university structure that laid the foundation for a more modern liberal arts curriculum.

But Jordan also believed firmly in eugenics, the practice or advocacy of controlled selective breeding of human populations (as by sterilization) to improve the population's genetic composition, according to Merriam-Webster.

In his writing, The Blood of the Nation: A Study of the Decay of Races through the Survival of the Unfit, Jordan articulated a belief that humanity would thrive only if the fittest were promoted. He assigned the downfall of past civilizations to the corruption of that process.

David Starr Jordan, 7th president of Indiana University from 18841891(Photo: Moffett Studios)

McRobbies remarks last week mentioned Jordan by name, while empowering IUs naming committee to create whatever apparatus needed for its system-wide review.

We should not delude ourselves that this process can be carried out quickly or easily," McRobbie said. "There are hundreds of named buildings and structures across all the campuses of the university.Some of the historical figures for whom they are named, such as David Starr Jordan, are well known and currently being scrutinized closely. Others are obscure, and often all but unknown.

Jordan left IU in 1891 to become the first president of Stanford. He died in 1931.

His legacy is written across more than just Jordan Hall, which houses IUs biology department and includes its greenhouse.

Jordan Avenue, one of the Bloomington campuss primary north-south arteries, is named for him. So too is the Jordan River, a creek that runs through IUs campus. Jordan Field, IUs first football field, was named in his honor. Indiana University also helped endow the David Starr Jordan Prize, along with Stanford and Cornell, awarded approximately every three years to a young scientist who is making novel innovative contributions likely to redirect the principal focus of her/his field in one or more of Jordan's areas of interest: evolution, ecology, population, and organismal biology.

A California school board elected in 2018 to remove Jordans name from a middle school, citing his controversial beliefs.

Some will argue that weighing the views such figures may have sincerely held 100 years ago by the standards and values of the present is unfair, and that there may well be views that we think of as timeless and universal now that will likewise be poorly regarded 100 years hence, McRobbie said at the conclusion of his remarks on building names. Against this argument, however, are the claims of our faculty, staff, and students of color indeed, of us all who at this public university should be free to enter any public building without concern that it honors someone who would have held them in contempt on account of their race."

Follow IndyStar reporter Zach Osterman on Twitter: @ZachOsterman.

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Roosevelt Statue to Be Removed From Museum of Natural History – The New York Times

The bronze statue of Theodore Roosevelt, on horseback and flanked by a Native American man and an African man, which has presided over the entrance to the American Museum of Natural History in New York since 1940, is coming down.

The decision, proposed by the museum and agreed to by New York City, which owns the building and property, came after years of objections from activists and at a time when the killing of George Floyd has initiated an urgent nationwide conversation about racism.

For many, the Equestrian statue at the museums Central Park West entrance had come to symbolize a painful legacy of colonial expansion and racial discrimination.

Over the last few weeks, our museum community has been profoundly moved by the ever-widening movement for racial justice that has emerged after the killing of George Floyd, the museums president, Ellen V. Futter, said in an interview. We have watched as the attention of the world and the country has increasingly turned to statues as powerful and hurtful symbols of systemic racism.

Simply put, she added, the time has come to move it.

The museum took action amid a heated national debate over the appropriateness of statues or monuments that first focused on Confederate symbols like Robert E. Lee and has now moved on to a wider arc of figures, from Christopher Columbus to Thomas Jefferson.

Last week alone, a crowd set fire to a statue of George Washington in Portland, Ore., before pulling it to the ground. Gunfire broke out during a protest in Albuquerque to demand the removal of a statue of Juan de Oate, the despotic conquistador of New Mexico. And New York City Council members demanded that a statue of Thomas Jefferson be removed from City Hall.

In many of those cases, the calls for removal were made by protesters who say the images are too offensive to stand as monuments to American history. The decision about the Roosevelt statue is different, made by a museum that, like others, had previously defended and preserved such portraits as relics of their time and that however objectionable, could perhaps serve to educate. It was then seconded by the city, which had the final say.

The American Museum of Natural History has asked to remove the Theodore Roosevelt statue because it explicitly depicts Black and Indigenous people as subjugated and racially inferior, Mayor Bill de Blasio said in a statement. The City supports the Museums request. It is the right decision and the right time to remove this problematic statue.

When the monument will be taken down, where it will go and what, if anything, will replace it, remain undetermined, officials said.

A Roosevelt family member, who is a trustee of the museum, released a statement approving of the removal.

The world does not need statues, relics of another age, that reflect neither the values of the person they intend to honor nor the values of equality and justice, said Theodore Roosevelt IV, a great-grandson of the 26th president and a member of the museums board of trustees. The composition of the Equestrian Statue does not reflect Theodore Roosevelts legacy. It is time to move the statue and move forward.

To be sure, the Roosevelt family did get something in return; the museum is naming its Hall of Biodiversity for Roosevelt in recognition of his conservation legacy, Ms. Futter said.

Ms. Futter also made a point of saying that the museum was only taking issue with the statue itself, not with Roosevelt overall, with whom the institution has a long history.

His father was a founding member of the institution; its charter was signed in his home. Roosevelts childhood excavations were among the museums first artifacts. The museum was chosen by New Yorks state legislature for Roosevelts memorial in 1920.

The museum already has several spaces named after Roosevelt, including Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Hall, the Theodore Roosevelt Rotunda and Theodore Roosevelt Park outside.

Its very important to note that our request is based on the statue, that is the hierarchical composition thats depicted in it, Ms. Futter said. It is not about Theodore Roosevelt who served as Governor of New York before becoming the 26th president of the United States and was a pioneering conservationist.

Critics, though, have pointed to President Roosevelts opinions about racial hierarchy and eugenics and his pivotal role in the Spanish-American War.

The statue created by James Earle Fraser was one of four memorials in New York that a city commission reconsidered in 2017, ultimately deciding after a split decision to leave the statue in place and to add context.

The museum tried to add that context with an exhibition last year, Addressing the Statue, which explored its design and installation, the inclusion of the figures walking beside Roosevelt and Roosevelts racism. The museum also examined its own potential complicity, in particular its exhibitions on eugenics in the early 20th century.

The exhibition was partly a response to the defacing of the statue by protesters, who in 2017 splashed red liquid representing blood over the statues base. The protesters, who identified themselves as members of the Monument Removal Brigade, later published a statement on the internet calling for its removal as an emblem of patriarchy, white supremacy and settler-colonialism.

Now the statue is bleeding, the statement said. We did not make it bleed. It is bloody at its very foundation.

The group also said the museum should rethink its cultural halls regarding the colonial mentality behind them.

At the time, the museum said complaints should be channeled through Mayor de Blasios commission to review city monuments and that the museum was planning to update its exhibits. The institution has since undertaken a renovation of its North West Coast Hall in consultation with native nations from the North West Coast of Canada and Alaska.

In January, the museum also moved the Northwest Coast Great Canoe from its 77th Street entrance into that hall, to better contextualize it. The museums Old New York diorama, which includes a stereotypical depiction of Lenape leaders, now has captions explaining why the display is offensive.

Mayor de Blasio has made a point of rethinking public monuments to honor more women and people of color an undertaking led largely by his wife, Chirlane McCray, and the She Built NYC commission. But these efforts have also been controversial, given complaints about the transparency of the process and the public figures who have been excluded, namely Mother Cabrini, a patron saint of immigrants who had drawn the most nominations in a survey of New Yorkers.

On Friday, the Mayor announced that Ms. McCray would lead a Racial Justice and Reconciliation Commission whose brief would include reviewing the citys potentially racist monuments.

Though the debates over many of these statues have been marked by rancor, the Natural History Museum seems unconflicted about removing the Roosevelt monument that has greeted its visitors for so long.

We believe that moving the statue can be a symbol of progress in our commitment to build and sustain an inclusive and equitable society, Ms. Futter said. Our view has been evolving. This moment crystallized our thinking and galvanized us to action.

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Roosevelt Statue to Be Removed From Museum of Natural History - The New York Times

#ShutDownSTEM strike was a start, but real action on racism is needed – New Scientist News

By Layal Liverpool

Christopher Dilts/SIPA USA/PA Images

Thousands of scientists participated in a strike against racism in science and academia on 10 June, with prominent academic institutions and scientific journals pledging their support. While these statements have been welcomed, many are keen for institutions to go further. People are tired of seeing organisations that have released statements, but with no action plan in place, says Jasmine Roberts at The Ohio State University.

Black scientists who spoke to NewScientist had a number of suggestions for further action by scientific journals that supported thestrike, such as inviting more Black academics to write review articles, peer review scientific papers and serve on editorial boards.

There are currently no Black editors on the Nature journal, says Natures editor-in-chief Magdalena Skipper. The implications of the lackof Black representation in our editorial staff are not lost on us. Cell, another scientific journal, published astatement acknowledging that none of its editors are Black.

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Journals cant solve this problem alone, however. Several universities have released statements condemning racism, but many were criticised for their failure to explicitly mention Black people or to lay out plans for addressing inequalities.

There is mounting pressure for universities to acknowledge their racist histories and incorporate this into their curricula. An inquiry into thehistory of eugenics at University College London (UCL), for example, was criticised earlier this year for failing to investigate the issue in sufficient depth.

On 11 June, UCL announced it would immediately start reviewing the names of spaces and buildings that were named after two prominent eugenicists, Francis Galton and Karl Pearson.

But UCL is just one of many institutions worldwide that have buildings, lecture theatres or statues dedicated to scientists or other historical figures who held racist views or participated in racist acts. Universities should stop celebrating individuals that are known to be racist, says Cassandre Coles at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

To tackle racial bias and discrimination, academic institutions should penalise academics who make racist comments or exhibit racist behaviour, says Amber Lenon at Syracuse University in New York.

Universities should also be more deliberate about increasing their representation of Black people. Fewer than 1 per cent of university professors in the UK are Black, according to recent figures from theUKs Higher Education Statistics Agency. In the US, less than 5 per cent of full professors are Black.

Allocating more funding towards equality, diversity and inclusion work is an important starting point, says Madina Wane at Imperial College London. Currently, much of this work is performed, with little recognition, by underrepresented groups in addition to their actual contracted work, she says.

Overall, many Black scientists see the 10 June strike as the start of a process. No one group has a monopoly on intelligence, creativity and ideas, says Nira Chamberlain, president of the UKs Institute of Mathematics and its Applications. As a scientific community, we must work much harder to create a more diverse workforce from the top to the bottom.

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#ShutDownSTEM strike was a start, but real action on racism is needed - New Scientist News

Letter to the editor: BLM a cover for marxists, anarchists – Canton Repository

SaturdayJun20,2020at9:00AM

It is troubling to witness how many companies and celebrities are kowtowing to pressure from people and organizations that want to ruin our country and our way of life.

They are useful idiots for Black Lives Matter, which is nothing but a "sympathetic" cover for marxists/anarchists who want the overthrow of capitalism. No thinking person condones the police killing an unarmed person black, red, yellow or white, but the protests regarding this crime are just an excuse to destabilize the country and improve socialists' chances of winning in November.

No, life is not perfect here and there will always be bad people, but all of the associated talk about white privilege and the horrible injustice in America is nothing more than sophistry being used to divide and conquer us. If black lives really mattered to this organization it would be protesting black murders in places like Chicago (of which there have been 30 in the last 12 days) or the racial genocide perpetrated by Planned Parenthood, an organization founded by a self admitted eugenicist, that aborts black babies at three times the rate of the black percentage of population. These are facts that can be easily confirmed by those who want to know the truth.

Any arcane nugget of rumor that is believed to possibly be defamatory to President Trump is pursued by reporters as if it were the Holy Grail. Wouldn't it be nice if the media would actually expose the truth about this issue and would stop condoning the ongoing destruction of The United States.

EDWARD GAYHART, LAKE TOWNSHIP

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Letter to the editor: BLM a cover for marxists, anarchists - Canton Repository

Ethnicity, eugenics, and the SAT the way forward – Christian Post

By Richard D. Land, Christian Post Executive Editor | Friday, May 29, 2020 (Photo: The Christian Post/Katherine T. Phan)

Editor's Note: This op-ed will substitute for the weekly "Ask Dr. Land" column this week.

Last week the University of California systems trustee board, which provides oversight to some of the USAs very best colleges (UC Berkeley, UCLA, Caltech, etc.) voted to completely phase out using the famous (or infamous, depending on your perspective) Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) completely in its admissions process by 2025. Why? The board said that the SAT was very unfair to ethnic minorities. They made this decision to abandon the SAT in spite of the fact that their own task force found that SAT scores were a better indicator of college success than high school grade point averages and that the standardized tests actually give a leg up to black, Latino, and low income students.

This real ambiguity expressed by the University of California system reflects the fact that there is actually not an open and shut case either for or against the SAT. For example, The New York Timesop-ed, "Will the Coronavirus Kill College Admissions Tests?" and the Los Angeles Times' "Editorial:Despite complaints about bias, the University of California shouldnt dump the SAT and ACT".

At this point, in the interest of full transparency, I need to disclose my own somewhat ambivalent relationship with the SAT. The SAT is a flawed barometer of human intelligence. It measures a particular kind of linear, left-brained intelligence, one that is particularly valued by graduate and professional schools that grant MDs, MBAs, and PhDs. However, whenever I acknowledge that fact, I feel like a terrible ingrate because the SAT has been very, very good to me. When in 1964, as the son of a blue collar family in a largely working class and lower middle class high school, I scored an almost perfect score on the verbal half of the test, and ranked among the top percentiles over all, and it literally change the course of my life. My SAT performance enabled me to attend Princeton University on a full academic scholarship. I have no illusions that I would have ever been admitted to Princeton without my SAT scores, despite the fact that I was in the top 3% of my graduating class, graduating summa sum laude and was named Outstanding Senior Boy.

When I enrolled at Princeton in September 1965, I was part of the first class in the universitys history to have more public than private school students. Freshman year the preppies did better academically than we proles as we called ourselves (i.e., proletariat). They had been better educated in their elite prep schools than we had been, and just as importantly, they were used to being away from home while many of us suffered from excruciating home-sickness, at least until our first Christmas.

We public school boys also had to cope with the psychological adjustment referred to by President Goheen in our first assembly as a class in the first week on campus. The president looked us over and said, Boys, most of you are used to being the smartest boy in class. Here you are just one of the boys! (Princeton did not go coed until the year after we graduated in 1969.)

After our freshman year, however, we generally did better academically than our prep school classmates. And, we had to score higher on the SAT in order to get in because our high school academic class standing meant less to the admissions committee than the preppies diploma from elite boarding schools did.

Now, having paid due homage to the SATs role in my life, I can now reiterate the fact that the SAT is a flawed evaluative tool. The question is how flawed is it, and should it be abandoned unless we have something more useful and objective to replace it?

The SAT does have rank racism and elitism in its family tree. The SATs founder, a young Princeton psychology professor named Carl Brigham, who developed the SAT in the 1920s, was an avid eugenicist who, along with significant numbers of fellow eugenicists, believed in the intellectual superiority of the Nordic race (Endiya Griffan, Teen Vogues).

Sadly, eugenics was very popular in America in the 1920s and 1930s. Eugenics was the so-called science of seeking to improve the human race through selective breeding. Eugenics was largely invented and popularized by Francis Galton (1822-1911), the English statistician, anthropologist, and proto-geneticist. He was deeply influenced by his cousin Charles Darwins On the Origin of the Species (1859), and this led to the publication of Galtons Hereditary Genius in 1869.

Eugenics was the Frankenstein monster offspring of Darwins theory of evolutionary origins being mated with Galtons racially-tinged genetics. In their outrageous hubris, they thought they could selectively breed bigger and better human beings the way you would breed animals, and the definition of bigger and better were contaminated by racism and by their faulty and sinful definition and understanding of these terms. (More about this hugely popular and influential de-humanizing movement and its current scientific manifestations next week.)

Certainly the SAT has for many years done its best to eliminate the overt racism in which it was birthed. However, its critics assert that the SAT is still racially and economically discriminating in effect, if no longer in intent.

The proof, the SATs critics say, is shown by the SATs ethnic disparity in testing outcomes. For example, in 2019, for the percentages of test-takers who scored at least 1200 (out of a possible 1600 and a score that would get you into many competitive colleges just below the Ivy League level), the results were as follows: Asian American (55%), Caucasian Americans (45%), Hispanic Americans (12%), and Blacks (9%).

However, the question must be asked, do those scores reflect bias in the SATs testing procedures, or is it more a reflection of existing socio-economic conditions among the various ethnic groups in current American society? It does, for instance, almost perfectly reflect the current percentage of stable family formation of these various comparative ethnic groups. Could it be the SATs results, rather than revealing bias, instead unmask the catastrophic impact of fatherlessness and divorce on the current generation of high school students? (And it is impossible to separate fatherlessness from significantly worse economic circumstances, which impacts the quality of the public schools students attend. Eliminating the SAT will not ameliorate those negative social forces and the impact they have on the education of our nations children.

If you assume, as I do, that the human race is one race (Eve is the mother of living) and that genius and academic prowess are evenly distributed by our Heavenly Father among the various human ethnic groups, then the measurable differences in academic prowess are functions of socio-economic factors, and the SAT helps to distillate them out for examination and remediation.

As I said earlier, I attended a large (3,600 students), urban, public high school in a working and lower middle class neighborhoods of Houston, Texas. I was given an education in that public school (and the elementary and junior high school that preceded it) which allowed me to compete successfully for a full academic scholarship to Princeton and prepared me to make the Deans List my sophomore, junior, and senior years and to graduate magna cum laude.

When I attended my 50th high school reunion in 2015, at least a couple dozen of us were talking about how fortunate we were to go to high school back then. Goodness knows, none of us grew up in affluence. The vast majority of us were disproportionately oldest children since our dads came home from WWII in 1945 and 1946, and we were the first children of the historic baby boom. Most of our dads went to work with their names on their shirts and showered when they got home from work like my dad the welder did. However, none of us grew up in a broken home. Our parents worked hard, stayed married, and held high aspirations for their children to study hard and go to college (and about 85% of us did). I do not believe you can overestimate how that home environment impacted each member of the class of 1965 in terms of positive academic performance. It sounds like a lost world, doesnt it?

Yet, it doesnt have to be. I am not nave enough to believe that all of our parents had happy and fulfilling marriages. However, they had made promises and commitments, and they focused on fulfilling their responsibilities and keeping their commitments rather than giving priority to their desires and wishes. God bless them. We, the children, benefited greatly from their commitments and personal sacrifices.

I personally believe that the two greatest tragedies in current American civilization today are first, the millions of babies we throw away every year through abortions. God had a plan and a productive purpose for every one of these precious future fellow citizens. Second, is the millions of young people, disproportionately brown and black, who are being systematically under-educated by our nations school systems K-12 and as a consequence, their vast human potential is being wasted, underdeveloped thrown away.

If we truly want to address and seek to eliminate inequities in our nations educational system, focusing on eliminating the SAT is focusing on the wrong end of the problem. Yes, try to find ways to improve the SAT and other evaluative tests. But if we really want to address the problem, we need to focus on K-5 education and the social and familial breakdowns that are so ravaging to our nations children and their future prospects.

I admit its a lot easier to just banish and exile a messenger like the SAT, but if we truly want to rescue millions of our children who are failing through no fault of their own, we must address the systemic inequalities in our society which are grievously exacerbated by the social and familial breakdown we have witnessed at all levels of American society since the 1960s.

Let us be about our Heavenly Fathers business and seek to rescue the little ones the innocent who have been victimized by what amounts to collective societal child abuse expressed through abortion, illegitimacy, divorce, and epidemic fatherlessness.

Dr. Richard Land, BA (magna cum laude), Princeton; D.Phil. Oxford; and Th.M., New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, was president of the Southern Baptists Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (1988-2013) and has served since 2013 as president of Southern Evangelical Seminary in Charlotte, NC. Dr. Land has been teaching, writing, and speaking on moral and ethical issues for the last half century in addition to pastoring several churches.

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Ethnicity, eugenics, and the SAT the way forward - Christian Post

‘One is the subject of one’s genes’: Clip of Cummings’s father-in-law goes viral – The National

A CLIP of Dominic Cummingss father-in-law discussing the quality of peoples genes has been shared widely online.

The video, which was part of a 2012 documentary programme called The Guest Wing, shows the baronet saying one is the subject of one's genes.

Cummings, the Prime Ministers top adviser currently facing calls to resign over a 260-mile lockdown trip to Durham while sick with Covid-19, hired someone earlier this year who promptly resigned amid a row over race and eugenics.

READ MORE:Ridiculous quote from Dominic Cummings' father-in-law article goes viral

Super forecaster Andrew Sabisky was found to have advocated enforced contraception to stop teenage pregnancies and claimed giving children mental performance-enhancing drugs is worth a dead kid once a year.

He had also preached that black people are less intelligent than whites.

Now a clip of Humphry Wakefield, who owns Chillingworth Castle, has been retweeted thousands of times.

In the footage, he says: The quality is everything. In general, to be elitist, I think the quality climbs up the tree of life. And therefore in general high things in the tree of life have quality, have skills, they get wonderful degrees at university, and if they marry each other that gets even better.

Hes then asked by a guest at his wine tasting event: So you wouldnt have minded if one of your children had met someone from a lower socio-economic group who was intelligent and talented?

Wakefield replies: Intelligent and talented is lovely but I want parents and grandparents whove had hands-on success running their battles well and proving theyre wonderful. Because one is the subject of ones genes. And I like the idea of them being successful genes and winning through to successful puppies.

The guest challenges Wakefield, telling him: Some things havent been in genes though have they. There have been some outstanding people and geniuses who have been first-generation, the first of their family.

He replies: No there arent. There are very few first-generation geniuses.

Sam Knight, who originally unearthed the video, said: This is incredibly disturbing footage.

Sir Humphry Wakefield stands in his crypt, sipping red wine and discussing genetics.

The video appeared online after it emerged Cummingss father-in-law had named his horse Barack because it was half black and half white.

Byline Times editor Peter Jukes rejected claims that the baronets comments were not in the public interest. He said: This, and his father-in-law's interest in genetic determinism has been made a matter of acute public interest because the Cummings' have tried to use their personal life (see Speccie piece before current furore) to defend their public positions.

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'One is the subject of one's genes': Clip of Cummings's father-in-law goes viral - The National

Our Mission at St. Thomas Law Compels us to Tackle the Justice Gap – University of St. Thomas Newsroom

As I write this, we are several weeks into a pandemic-required transformation into a fully online law school. I am grateful for the technology that permits us to stay connected, but I miss the daily face-to-face interactions with students and colleagues. When I reflect on the magazines theme for this issue the justice gap I think back fondly to the hustle and bustle of a full atrium on the first day of orientation.

During orientation week at St. Thomas, the first case our students read is Buck v. Bell, the Supreme Courts 1927 ruling in which Justice Oliver Wendel Holmes proclaimed that three generations of imbeciles are enough in upholding forced sterilizations against women deemed mentally deficient. While students are alarmed by the state laws in force at the time the product of the eugenics movement they are also troubled to learn that the states evidence of three generations of imbeciles was flimsy at best, and readily available positive evidence of Carrie Bucks intelligence was never even presented to the courts. Indeed, no evidence was introduced on Bucks behalf, as her conflicted attorney made no meaningful attempt to advocate for her.

Buck v. Bell is a jarring example of the injustices that result when our legal system does not give a voice to those whose lives depend on it. Unfortunately, the voiceless are very much with us today. The Legal Services Corporation (LSC) reports that 86% of the civil legal problems experienced by low-income Americans receive inadequate or no legal help. According to the World Justice Projects survey data, the United States ranks dead last (36th out of 36) among high-income countries on the question of whether people can access and afford civil justice.

As a Catholic law school, what is our responsibility? Pope Francis has urged all of us to recognize our duty to hear the voice of the poor. As lawyers, we not only have the duty to hear the poor, we have the power to lift the voices of the poor, to ensure that they are heard by the legal systems decision-makers.

This recognition must shape who we are as a law school community, and who we aspire to be. In choosing Buck v. Bell as the first case our students read, we hope that they are jolted by injustice. But thats only the starting point on a career-long journey. We hope that our students and alumni will always view St. Thomas Law as a community that helped motivate and equip them to confront and challenge injustice. This issue of St. Thomas Lawyer explains how were working every day to make that hope a reality.

If you have ideas for how we can improve in this effort, please contact me at rkvischer@stthomas.edu or (651) 962-4838.

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Our Mission at St. Thomas Law Compels us to Tackle the Justice Gap - University of St. Thomas Newsroom

The Readers’ Forum: Monday’s letters | Letters To The Editor – Winston-Salem Journal

Today, June 1, marks the 70th anniversary of a daring speech made on the floor of the U.S. Senate by Maine Republican Margaret Chase Smith, at a time when others avoided speaking out for fear of having their careers destroyed:

I speak as a Republican. I speak as a woman. I speak as a United States Senator. ... Surely it is clear that this nation will continue to suffer as long as it is governed by the present ineffective Democratic administration (the Truman administration).

Yet to displace it with a Republican regime embracing a philosophy that lacks political integrity or intellectual honesty would prove equally disastrous to this nation. The nation sorely needs a Republican victory. But I dont want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny: Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry and Smear.

Recently, the question has been asked if the state of North Carolinas phasing in of safe protocols for its citizens might be fast enough for Trump and the Republicans to hold their National Convention in Charlotte in August.

That is, will the COVID-19 phased guidelines of North Carolina Gov. Roy Coopers reopening plan be at the stage where the anticipated 50,000 Republican attendees will be allowed to gather in Charlottes NBA arena?

As a liberal Democrat, this writer dislikes seeing the name of North Carolina associated with anything of a Republican nature at such a national level. But thats just me.

However, its my nature to provide a solution when I bring up a problem, so here you go:

Move the Republican Convention to Russia.

Vladimir Putin could easily find a willing facility in Moscow to host the Republicans. And, instead of hiding his illegal support for Trump as was done in 2016, Putin could do it out in the open. And, instead of working through intermediaries to help write the Republican platform, Putin could be hands-on. And, the biggest benefit of all, would be that Trump and Putin could have their behind-the-curtain meetings at morning, noon and night.

While visiting the Ypsilanti, Mich., Ford plant on May 21, President Trump said, The company founded by a man named Henry Ford. Good blood lines, good blood lines. If you believe in that stuff, youve got good blood.

Thats actually what Ford would have said about himself; he was an anti-Semite and one of Americas staunchest proponents of eugenics.

During World War II, Fords company produced vehicles for the Nazi regime.

This is nothing esoteric; its pretty common knowledge.

Its hard to know what excuse would be more disturbing: That Trump had no clue what he was talking about because hes just that ignorant, or that Trump knew exactly what he was saying. We shouldnt have to hope our president is just too dumb to understand the words coming out of his mouth. And given his history of racist statements, its not like he deserves the benefit of the doubt.

The fact that Trump has a Jewish daughter and son-in-law which some people have used in his defense is irrelevant, the same way its irrelevant when a racist white person claims to have black friends.

Please, please, vote for Joe Biden in November. Its so embarrassing to our whole country to have Trump in the White House.

Please submit letters online, with full name, address and telephone number, to Letters@wsjournal.com or mail letters to: The Readers Forum, 418 N. Marshall St., Winston-Salem, NC 27101. Letters are subject to editing and are limited to 250 words. For more guidelines and advice on writing letters, go to journalnow.com/site/forms/online_services/letter/

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The Readers' Forum: Monday's letters | Letters To The Editor - Winston-Salem Journal

How Is Jeffrey Epstein Still So Elusive? – The Atlantic

Filthy Rich is the first of a wave of Epstein works headed for television. Brown, the Miami Herald reporter, is writing a book thats simultaneously being adapted into an HBO series; Lifetime and Sony also have Epstein shows in progress. Based in part on a 2017 book about Epstein co-written by the crime novelist James Patterson, and directed by Lisa Bryant, Filthy Rich is notable mostly because its airing on Netflix, which virtually assures it the kind of mass audience and exposure that might shake more information loose; on Thursday, it was No. 1 on Netflixs most-watched list in the United States. Over four episodes, theres almost nothing in the way of fresh information, other than a new eyewitness account implicating Prince Andrew, again, in sexual misbehavior facilitated by Epstein and his then-partner, Ghislaine Maxwell. (Prince Andrew has repeatedly denied Virginia Roberts Giuffres allegations that she was coerced into having sex with him when she was 17.) Instead, the documentary focuses on the women who say they survived abuse at Epsteins hands. Again and again, these women describe being lured into Epsteins circle and subjected to sexual assaults, some as adults, and some while they were still in middle school.

Theres indisputable value in giving voice to people who were rendered voiceless for most of their adult lives, and in letting them explain how the systems that were supposed to protect them repeatedly failed. But Filthy Rich also suffers from a lack of clarity, hovering over its primary subject rather than targeting its punches. The series is eminently watchable, and enraging. But it comes no closer to unraveling Epstein than any previous reportorial attempts have managed. This matters not because Epstein himself is so worthy of forensic analysis, but because so many figures in his circle continue to evade attention. The monsters are still out there, and theyre still abusing other people, Roberts Giuffre, one of Epsteins accusers, tells the camera at the end of the final episode. Why they have not been named or shamed yet is beyond me. Why indeed? And why not here, in a show that seems capable of doing so?

Presumably, the ongoing reason for tiptoeing around Epsteins co-conspirators is the same one that protected him for much of his life, which is the lopsided legal sway that the rich and powerful can claim over the unprivileged, and even over documentarians making series for massive entertainment platforms. Of all the allegations resurfaced by Filthy Rich, one I cant stop thinking about is how Florida prosecutors (led by the future secretary of labor Alex Acosta) responded when asked why theyd cut Epstein such a bafflingly generous deal. The sheer might of Epsteins army of legal superstars, Acosta implied in a 2011 letter defending the deal, was unconquerable. Epstein had amassed such influential lawyers, who were so intent on digging into their opponents, that any deal at all should be interpreted as a win. In other words, justice has no chance when its pitted against the unscrupulous force of big-name criminal defense attorneys.

Variations of this equation seemed to protect Epstein for much of his life, Filthy Rich suggests. Surround yourself with powerful enough people and make life difficult enough for anyone who threatens you, and you can insulate yourself from any consequences. The second episode dips into Epsteins origins in Coney Islandhow he briefly attended Cooper Union without graduating and, while teaching at the Dalton School, charmed his way into a job at Bear Stearns. By the time it was discovered that Epstein had lied on his rsum, he was dating his bosss daughter. Later, he went to work for Towers Financial Corporation, whose former CEO, Steven Hoffenberg, pops up in a comically honest interview. Epstein definitely appealed to us, Hoffenberg says, because we were running a Ponzi scheme and he could deliver results in this criminal enterprise. Epstein became Hoffenbergs literal partner in malfeasance, doing the crimes alongside me daily.

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How Is Jeffrey Epstein Still So Elusive? - The Atlantic

New in Paperback: Sabrina & Corina and Save Me the Plums – The New York Times

SABRINA & CORINA: Stories, by Kali Fajardo-Anstine. (One World, 240 pp., $17.) The distinctive Latinx voice and vision of this debut collection, a finalist for the National Book Award, emanates from both the authors Philippine roots and the Indigenous cultures of the American West, where she was born. In its fierce and essential stories, our reviewer, May-Lan Tan, observed, history always resurfaces, and the landscape mirrors the cycles at play in the characters lives.

THE PORPOISE, by Mark Haddon. (Vintage, 320 pp., $16.95.) In this provocative novel, Haddon revisits the part of Shakespeares Pericles likely not penned by Shakespeare to grant a princess and her abusers poetic justice. In the words of our reviewer, Sarah Lyall, Haddons writing is beautiful, almost hallucinatory at times.

SAVE ME THE PLUMS: My Gourmet Memoir, by Ruth Reichl. (Random House, 304 pp., $18.) Juicier than a porterhouse steak is how our reviewer, Kate Betts, described the former New York Times restaurant critics poignant and hilarious look back at the 10 years when she was editor in chief of Gourmet magazine.

THE IMPEACHERS: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation, by Brenda Wineapple. (Random House, 592 pp., $20.) Our critic Jennifer Szalai called this analysis of the first impeachment of an American president incisive and illuminating. Wineapple concludes that the process worked, by demonstrating that Johnson was not a king, that actions have consequences and that our government, with its checks and balances, could maintain itself without waging war.

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New in Paperback: Sabrina & Corina and Save Me the Plums - The New York Times

BILL COTTERELL | How to assess candidates gaffes – St. Augustine Record

We can all agree that Joe Biden made a horrifying error probably his worst, hardly his first when he said any black voters who are undecided between himself and President Trump aint black.

The former vice president and soon-to-be Democratic presidential nominee quickly apologized. Biden said he didnt mean to take black votes for granted or suggest anyones political choices should be dictated by their ethnicity.

Major figures in his own party, black and white, rallied around him. The Trump campaign turned the gaffe to its advantage, accusing Biden and the Democrats of racism.

U.S. Rep. Val Demings of Orlando, one of the black women among Bidens vice-presidential prospects, expressed surprise at the nerve and gall of Trump whipping out the ol race card on anyone. Theres a cliche in politics about being called ugly by a toad.

But as the campaign heats up in the summer, it would be good to consider what we call a gaffe as part of the political landscape. The media have to report them, although Trump will claim his two-fisted style is purposely twisted to sound offensive while the media downplay Biden blunders.

Whether in a presidential race or a little city commission contest, we ought to consider the source. Did the speaker make an unfortunate slip, an oafish attempt at humor, or to be casual and down-home with an audience? Or does an offensive remark fit well with a lifetime of insensitivity, political cynicism, or racial, sexist or religious bigotry.

When George Wallace promised segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever in 1963, it wasnt a gaffe. It was how he ran his campaign and wanted to govern. When Spiro Agnew showed his boorish insensitivity in 1968, he was showing who he really was.

But when Jimmy Carter used the term ethnic purity in 1976, he wasnt making some coded appeal to eugenics, he just made a really bad choice of words. In a debate that year, President Ford said there was no soviet domination of Eastern Europe; he meant to say the people of Poland dont accept Kremlin control, but in an instant a president put himself on the level of a former Georgia governor in foreign affairs.

Sometimes, a word choice thats not offensive that wouldnt mean anything for some other candidate might bite a candidate like Biden. During debates last year, he referred to parents honing childrens learning by, among other things, turning on the record player at home.

Record player? Harmless in itself, his word choice re-enforced questions that maybe the 77-year-old candidate is living in an episode of Happy Days.

More important for Biden, he referred to then-Sen. Barack Obama as clean and articulate in 2008. Thats not cool, but a review of Bidens 50-year record on social justice earns him some indulgence.

Thats what we should look at when candidates misspeak -- what theyve stood for throughout their careers. On the campaign trail, speaking casually or doing interviews, candidates cant gaffe things up too badly they just use a simple three-step process for deciding whether to say something flippant about race:

1.Consider how supporters will react.

2.Consider how opponents will react.

3.Then dont.

Bill Cotterell is a retired Tallahassee Democrat capitol reporter.

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BILL COTTERELL | How to assess candidates gaffes - St. Augustine Record

‘They Have to Reinvent Her’: Margaret Sanger’s Fans Work to Clean Up Her Racist Past – CBN News

As the founder of the American Birth Control League which later became Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger was no doubt a controversial figure with disturbing views on eugenics, race, and population control.

Some argue she wanted to exterminate the black race, while others are trying to erase that part of her past.

"In the eyes of some, Margaret Sanger has been a heroine," news anchor Mike Wallace said in a 1969 interview with Sanger. "In the eyes of others, she's been a destructive force."

In her own words, Sanger strived for a society that limited births to those she deemed fit to have children.

"I think the greatest sin in the world is bringing children into the world that have disease from their parents, that have no chance in the world to be a human being practical; delinquents, prisoners, all sorts of things, just marked when they're born," Sanger told Wallace.

In 1916 Sanger opened the country's first birth-control clinic. And as a member of the American Eugenics Society, she advocated improving the 'genetic composition of humans through controlled reproduction of different races and classes.'

She often wrote about the issue in the journal she founded called The Birth Control Review.

Margaret Sanger's Beliefs About Race and Eugenics Exposed

In 1919 in an article called "Birth Control and Racial Betterment," she wrote, "I personally believe in the sterilization of the feeble-minded, the insane, and the syphilitic."

And in 1921 in a piece called, "The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda," she said, "The most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective."

Many point to a 1923 New York Times interview as proof of Sanger's racist and eugenic motives, in which she referred to some groups of people as "human weeds."

"Birth Control is not contraception indiscriminately and thoughtlessly practiced," she said in the article. "It means the release and cultivation of the better racial elements in our society, and the gradual suppression, elimination, and eventual extirpation [destruction]of defective stocks - those human weeds which threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of American civilization."

Hayden Ludwig, an investigative researcher for the Capital Research Center, has extensively studied Sanger's life and writings.

"She talked about the need for race betterment through controlling these weeds, basically undesirable people," Ludwig told CBN News.

Singing Sanger's Praise While Ignoring Her History

In 1939, after opening another clinic in Harlem, the birth control activist launched the Negro Project, an initiative supported by black leaders such as civil rights activist W.E.B Dubois.

Critics claim the program used the pretense of better health and family planning for poor blacks in the South as an attempt to limit the black race.

Ludwig says some on the left grapple with Sanger's past and how to interpret her legacy.

"They know when she writes about weeds, they know it's repulsive," explained Ludwig. "They know it's disgusting. "The left will never abandon Margaret Sanger because she's the foundation of so many of their views," he continued.

Sanger once shared her vision for a preferred race at a women's branch of the Ku Klux Klan, writing in page 366 of her autobiography, "Always, to me, any aroused group was a good group."

Despite those views, liberals praise Sanger's work while ignoring her history.

Hillary Clinton: "I Am Really in Awe of Her"

In 2009, Hillary Clinton received Planned Parenthood's Margaret Sanger award. During an acceptance speech, she praised the group's founder.

"I admire Margaret Sanger enormously, her courage, her tenacity, her vision," said Clinton. "I am really in awe of her," she continued.

Ryan Bomberger, the founder of the pro-life group Radiance Foundation, says abortion proponents are working to clean up Sanger's past and what she stood for.

"They have to reinvent her every time they talk about her in order to justify their celebration of her," explained Bomberger.

Abortion Industry Insiders "Trained" to Overlook Sanger's Racist Views

Former Planned Parenthood director Abby Johnson said those inside the abortion industry are trained to overlook Sanger's racist views.

"They gave you an answer like, 'Well, I mean yes Margaret Sanger was a racist but everybody was a racist back then.' "You accept it because she is your hero and she has to be your hero and you cannot question Planned Parenthood," said Johnson.

In 1997 Steven Mosher of the Population Research Institute wrote about the push to repackage Margaret Sanger in an article in the Wall Street Journal.

"The reason I call it the repackaging of Margaret Sanger is because after the Nazi regime destroyed the legitimacy of eugenics forever, they then went back and said, 'Oh she was just an early feminist. She was just an early supporter of family planning,'" said Mosher.

He went on to say, "No, she wasn't. No, she was a supporter of giving IQ tests to people. She was in favor of using those IQ tests to determine who should be sterilized and who should have children."

In a response, titled "The Demonization of Margaret Sanger," Alexander Sanger, her grandson and president of Planned Parenthood at the time, called Mosher's editorial unfair. In the same piece, Esther Katz, director of NYU's Margaret Sanger Papers Project, claimed evidence revealing, "...Sanger did not rationalize her support for birth control on racist grounds, that she never advocated genocidal policies aimed at racial, ethnic or religious groups, and that she, in fact, believed access to birth control would benefit, not eliminate minority populations."

Dr. Katz turned down our request for an interview, writing, "Our goal hasalways been to offer complete, accurate, and accessible access to the full body of her writings I believe her words and deeds, accurately represented, speak for themselves."

In 1942, Margaret Sanger's American Birth Control League became Planned Parenthood, which has moved to fulfill its founder's goals, helped greatly by the US Supreme Court decision in Roe versus Wade.

"Under the veil of deceit and deception, 60 plus million babies have not been born because they were aborted legally since '73," said Alveda King, niece of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. "One-third of that population belonged to the African American community."

It is a frightening and telling number given that blacks make up only 13 percent of the US population.

Dan Gainor of the Media Research Center says that Sanger's true mission remains alive and well throughout today's abortion industry.

"Just look at the maps, see where the abortion facilities are, they are near places where people are marginalized, people are poor, people are a minority and that's their target market," said Gainor.

Because of allies in the media and academia, Gainor also points out how speech from conservatives and others about Sanger's past, Planned Parenthood practices, and abortion is often classified as hate speech.

He said, "There is nothing as close to a sacrament in the media as abortion. It is a holy writ that abortion is protected. And anybody who comes out against it, any organization, any business, anybody, the media swarm."

And so does social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

"Facebook's new oversight board and this is really concerning, has four co-chairs," explained Gainor. "They're going to be the appeals board for content. One of the four oversight boards is on the board of a pro-abortion group. There are no pro-lifers."

Conservatives say it's also a problem that exists on college campuses across the country.

"I remember at Harvard, they laughed when I was talking about the history of eugenics and they said that doesn't matter," said Bomberger. "Planned Parenthood is not like it was in Margaret Sanger days."

Those who oppose her views say that is not true and are committed to exposing her past for future generations.

"Unfortunately, they've been very effective in recasting who Margaret Sanger is. But we keep on speaking the truth. That's why we're a thorn in their side," said Bomberger.

Excerpt from:

'They Have to Reinvent Her': Margaret Sanger's Fans Work to Clean Up Her Racist Past - CBN News

Confronting the History of a Southern Asylum: An Interview With Mab Segrest – Psychiatry Advisor

Race and racism have played a particularly significant role in the development of modern medicine, from the notorious Tuskegee syphilis experiments to the creation of the first immortal human cell line HeLa. In many ways, the influence of racism on American medicine has shaped approaches to bioethics and healthcare, continuing to inform the challenges patients and providers face today.

In Administrations of Lunacy: Racism and the Haunting of American Psychiatry at the Milledgeville Asylum, published in April 2020 by The New Press, Mab Segrest, PhD, uncovers the harrowing story of the Georgia State Lunatic, Idiot, and Epileptic Asylum. Dr Segrest, Fuller-Maathai Professor Emeritus of Gender and Womens Studies at Connecticut College, New London, traces the history of this institution through the Civil War to the post-Jim Crow era, centering the narrative around the voices of its former patients.

For mental health professionals, Administrations of Lunacy offers a critical exploration of psychiatrys historic links to key moments in American history by focusing on an asylum that was the largest in the world in the mid-20th century. To learn more about this history, we spoke with the author about her book. The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.

What can mental health providers learn from the history outlined in your book?

Mental health providers can learn from Administrations of Lunacy the importance of history itselfthe overarching sweep of itthat informs the particular (micro) histories that patients or clients bring in the door to their practices. They can learn the dangers of applying a strictly biomedical model stripped of the sources of historical and local traumas.

My deep history of this Georgia hospital, at times the largest in the world and by the mid-20th century one of the worst, is intended to shape the way that historians and healthcare professionals think about psychiatric history in its relationship to larger historical trends. My book shows how the extraction of history from an understanding of symptoms happened in a state asylum. It also details what that extraction allowed in terms of what came to be eugenics, which was a weaponizing of the symptoms of suffering against the very people most vulnerable to histories of conquest and exploitation.

Finally, given that 90% of public psychiatric beds today are in jails and prisons, psychiatry as a profession has a responsibility for those patients beyond providing them medications. I would like to see major psychiatric professional organizations take a stand against mass incarceration on the basis of its mental and physical cruelties that eviscerate real treatment.

There has been a degree of nostalgia for the asylum era recently. Why do you think this nostalgia has arisen now, and in your opinion, what, if anything, did asylums have to offer?

First, its important to clarify: nostalgia for whom? None of the expatients of those public institutions have shown much of this nostalgia. Early in my research, I twice visited the Central State Hospital campus with Georgia Consumer Council membersusers and survivors of Georgias hospital system. Larry Fricks, who was the state liaison facilitating the meeting, explained to me that for many of these consumers coming back to the hospital was the equivalent of coming back to Auschwitz. No nostalgia there.

By the turn of the 20th century the idea of the hospital as asylum or a safe refuge had failed, largely from overcrowding. The original Enlightenment philosophy of moral therapy believed that providing the mad structure, listening doctors, natural beauty, nutrition, and a respite from family could be curative. But moral therapy was intended for an institution of 300 patients. The level of overcrowding made them custodial, if not carceral institutions. By the 1910s in Georgia, there was brutality by orderlies, use of seclusion, and pressures for patients to work. After World War II, journalists exposes revealed these hospitals with electroshock administered by orderlies, understaffing, and overcrowded wards as the shame of the states.2

Today, what accounts for the crises in the mental health system is not the absence of this asylum. The transit between psych wards, jails, homeless shelters, and the streets came from the failure to provide support for the community care that should have accompanied deinstitutionalization as envisioned by JFK. Instead of the 1500 clinics projected for local communities, the US got mass incarceration, or a growth in the prison population from 300,000 to 2.3 million from the 1980s to 2010, what Michelle Alexander called a New Jim Crow.3

Anyone today who advocates for the asylums return is advocating for the most retrograde of psychiatric policies and the most terrible examples of psychiatric treatment from United States history. The call for a return to the asylum signals for me a continued refusal to use sufficient public monies to meet public needs, including mental and physical health. Whether we need more places where people in crisis can get longer term care regardless of social class or race is another question entirely.

What is transinstitutionalization and how does it differ from deinstitutionalization?

These are terms from social geographers that help map out the historic periods of psychiatric institutions. The first phase is institutionalization: the use of the spaces where lunatics were confined as a healing place rather than as custodial or punitive. This was a program of the Enlightenment and its goal was called the moral therapy. Deinstitutionalization is what happened in the United States after 1960, when about half a million patients in state hospitals were gradually released from these abysmally failed institutions. Transinstitutionalization is what happened when there was insufficient community care back home, which coincided with mass incarceration.

What role did southern asylum psychiatry play on a national level?

Southern asylum psychiatry illustrates the paradoxical process by which the worst becomes the norm. Most psychiatric histories from the 18th or 19th centuries mainly see southern asylums as scientifically retrograde. But in the antebellum period, the science in these mostly northeastern institutions was not always up to snuff by todays standards. Generally, asylum superintendents across the United States held the same racist ideas as southern superintendents did about African Americans and Indigenous people as primitives and savages. The profession as a whole in The American Journal of Insanity avoided discussion of slavery and abolition as too exciting, preferring to speak about such issues through allusions.1

Asylum superintendents were the first psychiatrists, although they were not termed so then. After the restoration of southern white supremacy, professionals across the nation granted white southern asylum superintendents the authority of expertise on African Americans, given that 90% of African Americans lived in the South before 1900. Southern asylum superintendents officially confirmed that emancipation was prejudicial to the negro in 1895, a shocking assertion! This attitude carries over today. The legacy of this attitude is the false belief that negative health results for marginalized people do not come from structural racism and sexism, but the inherent nature of those people.

The fact that Georgias state hospital explains so much about national failures today illuminates the pull towards the bottom that this white supremacist model exerts on national policies. In the 1950s, the Georgia state hospital was the largest in the county, the state, and the nation. Today, the Baldwin County Jail is the largest mental institution in the county, with the Fulton County Jails being the largest in Georgia and the Cook County Jail the largest in the United States. How do we comprehend this shift?

At one point, the asylum spent 5 times more on farming compared to patients. What role did patient exploitation play in Milledgeville and how did the asylum resemble a plantation?

Patient exploitation at the Georgia Asylum took the form of occupational therapy that filled the gap from the absence of other resources or treatments for patients. A careful examination of Georgia Asylum annual reports in the last 2 decades of the 19th century showed how moral therapy gave way to occupational therapy, which involved a huge farming operation producing tons of vegetables, plus cows, chickens, and pigs. As far as I can tell, the patients were not getting much of this food.

Race and gender shaped work regimessewing for white women, laundry for Black women, gardening for white men, growing cotton and other cash crops for Black men. These work regimes were not as bad as those in the convict lease system, which consumed many more African American men than the asylum. This is not to say that patients did not leave the institution, some of them improved, but many died there.

This plantation and labor influence showed up in a 1950 annual report that described the hospitals abattoir. The possibility that mentally ill patients could be staffing any part of a slaughterhouse is perhaps the most nightmarish scenario in the whole book.

What are the dangers of therapeutic pessimism? How did they inform Kraepelinian psychiatry, and does this notion create problems for psychiatry now?

In the 19th century, therapeutic pessimism came from the realization that medicine had found no cure for the problems that showed up in asylums. Within this mindset, the curative environment became custodial in increasingly overcrowded state institutions.

The diagnostic system of Emil Kraepelin, developed in Germany, replaced the hope of treatment with the process of classifications based on the trajectory of the disease. In this diagnostic system, the principal mental illnesses were manic depression and dementia praecox, or schizophrenia. Georgia case histories from 1909 to 1924 recorded verbatim interviews with patients as ill equipped doctors struggled to apply these categories to mostly poor Georgians.

For decades, Freudian psychoanalysis replaced Kraepelins diagnostics. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)-III heralded a return to biological psychiatry at a time when new technologies of brain imaging raised expectations of new miracle drugs. But by the time DSM-5 was published in 2013, there emerged a lack of biomarkers to substantiate DSM-5 categories. In 2013, the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIHM) Director Tom Insel, MD, explained that the NIMH would be reorienting research away from DSM categories.4 This collapse of the DSM could create a vacuum into which pessimistic therapies reemerge.

Alternatively, DSM-5 also led humanistic professionals to call for a descriptive and empirical approachunencumbered by previous deductive and theoretical models. These professionals eschewed its overdiagnoses, false epidemics, stigmatizing of vulnerable populations, and biomedical models absent any awareness of sociocultural variations.5 I found these issues of DSM-5 characteristic of state asylum psychiatry as a whole, and Administrations of Lunacy aligns itself with this call for rethinking.

How did the eugenics movement and race science relate to psychiatry?

Eugenics, or the science of better breeding, arose in Europe in the 19th century and arrived in the United States in the early 20th century. It was supported by some of the biggest family fortunes of the Robber Barron era, and its offices at Cold Spring Harbor provided a base from which eugenic ideas spread rapidly. Eugenic sterilization had long been a goal of US eugenicists, and the US Supreme Court decision Buck v Bell in 1928 opened the floodgates. In the 1930s, state sponsored eugenics came to Georgia, although the institution had been performing this operation of a certain class at the turn of the century.

The state hospitals and newer institutions for the feebleminded had by the 1930s gathered people whom eugenics had branded as unfit, and they were prime targets of sterilization. In Georgia, sterilization was most rampant under Superintendent Peacock in the 1950s, a man who served (surreally) as both Superintendent and Chair of the Georgia Eugenics Commission. Peacock would write letters to and from himself asking for and granting sterilizations for particular patients.

Milledgeville was the site of several major epidemics, including syphilis, pellagra, and tuberculosis (TB). How did these diseases affect the asylum, and how might the current COVID-19 pandemic affect psychiatric patients?

These epidemics of syphilis, pellagra, TB, or hookworms were not primarily psychiatric in nature. But TB, syphilis, and pellagra had neurological effects that landed people in state hospitals. Treatment of those underlying effects, for example nutritionally with niacin for pellagra or antibiotics for TB and syphilis, eventually took care of neurological symptoms.

I have not heard how COVID-19 might register in terms of psychiatric symptoms, but certainly the pandemic and our highly inadequate responses to it creates its own negative environments for us. In general, a strong public health system that puts out accurate information to the general public and a federal government willing to take the lead to coordinate our responses according to the latest information would be profoundly reassuring and stabilizing. Unfortunately, that is not what we have.

References

1. Segrest, Mab. Administrations of Lunacy: Racism and the Haunting of American Psychiatry at the Milledgeville Asylum. The New Press; 2020.

2. Deutsch, Albert. The Shame of the States. Harcourt, Brace; 1948.

3. Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New Press; 2010.

4. Insel, Thomas. Transforming Diagnosis. NIMH Directors Blog Posts from 2013. National Institute of Mental Health. Published online April 29, 2013. http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/directors/thomas-insel/blog/2013/transforming-diagnosis.shtml

5. Kamens SR, Elkins DN, Robbins BD. Open Letter to the DSM-5. Journal of Humanistic Psychology. 2013;1-13. doi:10.1177/0022167817699261

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Confronting the History of a Southern Asylum: An Interview With Mab Segrest - Psychiatry Advisor