In what seems like an instant, Black Lives has become the central issue of our time.

Consider: On May 25, George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis. On June 1, demonstrators were cleared from Lafayette Square ahead of Donald Trumps photo-op in front of St. Johns Church, prompting nationwide protests. And on June 10, the statue of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, was toppled from its base in Richmond, Va.

The following day, Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made a remarkable statement. He apologized for his role in Trumps Lafayette Square visit, and also supported removing the names of Confederate generals from military bases.

Milley called the Civil War an act of treason, and said soldiers of color 43% of todays military must wonder about training on bases named for men who fought for an institution of slavery that may have enslaved one of their ancestors.

Most of Richmonds Confederate monuments have now been removed, in response to the same question: Although it was the Confederate capital, why 155 years after the end of the rebellion are its symbols those of a cause that, as Gen. Ulysses S. Grant wrote, was one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.

Not until a century after this lost cause was invented were the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 enacted, putting an end to legalized segregation. But equality of the mind broad acceptance that all citizens should have equal authority and autonomy has seemed as distant as ever, and even receding.

Now, amid a pandemic thats upended societies worldwide in a manner not seen since the Great Depression, we may have reached a point of clarity, where the founding vision of true equality is no longer a mirage.

Young people are leading the way. They are more tolerant, more accepting, and less offended by distinctions of race or gender than any previous generation.

Theres no reason to expect Confederates ever to be put back on their perches, or to be displayed except in museums, where they belong: We shouldnt seek to destroy the past, but learn from it.

Yet the liberation of rethinking often extends well beyond the original object. One thats now roiling institutions across the country has come to Maine which has no Confederate statutes, though before statehood it did have slaves.

The problem is eugenics, the early 20th century movement that advocated selective breeding to, in essence, create better human beings. At the time, it didnt seem remarkable to many people.

Humans have been breeding plants, horses, dogs, and cats for centuries, without many qualms. And anyone who believes that humans do not self select when choosing partners hasnt been consuming romance novels or royal family sitcoms, let alone historical tomes.

Eugenics has, of course, a dark underside. Although advocates were among leading progressives of their day British socialists and American urban reformers the movement became identified with notorious anti-immigrant legislation passed by Congress in the 1920s. It seemed to target the disabled and poor, and its nadir was undoubtedly the Supreme Court decision from Oliver Wendell Holmes counted among our greatest judges in which he pronounced, upholding forced sterilization, that three generations of imbeciles are enough.

The eugenics movement was destroyed by Adolf Hitler, whose ravings about a master race led to World War II as surely as the slave power produced the American Civil War. Yet blaming eugenics for Hitler makes as much sense as blaming Richard Wagners operas; well never listen to Wagner the same way, but no one is currently banning his music.

Eugenicists are being banned. The name of Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, is being removed from its Manhattan Health Center.

And last week, the Jackson Laboratory said it was deleting the name of its founder, C.C. Little, from its Bar Harbor conference room, saying eugenics cast a long shadow over his achievements.

Little earlier president of the University of Maine might have appreciated the irony. Jacksons considerable success as Maines leading high-tech employer stems from Littles insights into selective breeding of mice, still at the core of its world-class research capabilities.

Without Margaret Sanger, there would have been no Planned Parenthood. Without C.C. Little, there might not have been a Jackson Lab. Should we remove their names from the institutions they founded?

Historical questions are often vexed. In this case, though, we might venture a distinction.

The Confederacys legacy is, or should be, its absolute rejection. The Sanger and Little legacies are a little more complicated.

Douglas Rooks, a Maine editor, reporter, opinion writer and author for 35 years, has published books about George Mitchell, and the Maine Democratic Party. He welcomes comment at [emailprotected]

Previous

Next

Original post:

The Maine Idea: If Lives Matter, Then Names Matter, Too - Press Herald

Photo: Bronx Zoo, Monkey House, by Antigng / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0).

Better late than never, the Bronx Zoo yesterday apologized for imprisoning an African Pygmy, Ota Benga, as a display in its Monkey House in 1906. They left something out, though. But first, why did they choose this moment? From Fox News:

The chief executive of the [Wildlife Conservation Society], Cristin Samper, told the [New York] Times that the group had started digging into its history because of its 125th anniversary this year. Samper said that process, combined with conversations about racial injustice sweeping the country after the police killing of George Floyd, prompted the apology.

Did the impact of the multiple awards-winning documentary Human Zoos, by Discovery Institutes John West, now with 2.5 million views and powerfully documenting the horrific episode and others like it, play any role? They dont say. Were supposed to believe it was sheer coincidence, the 125th anniversary of the zoos opening combined with Black Lives Matter protests, that prompted them to start digging into the zoos history.

Well, fine. Let them save a bit of face. Its commendable, too, that they admit the role of pseudoscientific racism and eugenics in the story of Ota Benga, his humiliation and dehumanization. From the zoos statement:

Specifically, we denounce the eugenics-based, pseudoscientific racism, writings, and philosophies advanced by many people during that era, including two of our founders, Madison Grant and Henry Fairfield Osborn, Sr. Excerpts from Grants book The Passing of the Great Race (with a preface by Osborn), were included in a defense exhibit for one of the defendants in the Nuremberg trials. Grant and Osborn were likewise among the founders of the American Eugenics Society in 1926.

Whats missing, and its not fine, is any mention of where these evil ideas came from. What was the nature, the content, of the pseudoscientific racism that motivated Ota Bengas treatment? To be accurate, the racism wasnt eugenics-based it was evolution-based. That is left out.

For a candid and shocking treatment, I suggest watching Human Zoos.

Imprisoning and displaying an African man in a zoo was not an experiment in eugenics, although that phony science was in vogue at the time at the institutions of higher learning where today woke students and faculty lecture the country about its systemic racism. One human zoo, at the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in Seattle, featured a display of supposedly primitive native people from the Philippines, the Igorot. The 1909 Exposition grounds became the campus of the University of Washington, from which professor and white fragility expert Robin DiAngelo now holds forth. Background like this never seems to make the cut.

The truth is that placing a man in the Monkey House was intended as an education for the public in Darwinian evolution. As John West has said, Ota Benga was only one of thousands of indigenous peoples who were put on display in America in the name of Darwinian evolution.

Though its article yesterday forgets to mention it (Racist Incident from Bronx Zoos Past Draws Apology), the New York Times understood that clearly in 1906. Brushing aside protests from black clergymen that the African should be given an education not put in the cage, the newspaper explained:

The suggestion that Benga should be placed in a school instead of a cage ignores the high probability that school would be a place of torture to him and one from which he could draw no advantage whatever. The idea that men are all much alike except as they have had or lacked opportunities for getting an education out of books is now far out of date.

In other words, Listen to the science! In fact, racial hierarchy was hailed as solid science at the time. The Times continued,

[T]he reverend colored brothers should be told that evolution, in one form or another, is now taught in the textbooks of all the schools, that it is no more debatable than the multiplication table.

The New York Times remains as haughty and scolding as it was 114 years ago. But they were right that evolution was (and is) taught in the textbooks of all the schools, as if it were as unquestionable as the multiplication table. The high school textbook at the center of the Scopes Trial in 1925, Civic Biology, informed students about the ranking of the human races, with the Ethiopian or negro type at the bottom, as a straightforward conclusion of evolutionary science.

Facing up to history, not tearing it down or hiding from its lessons, is necessary and healthy. The Bronx Zoo has gone a step in that direction, but not the whole way. They still shy from laying a hand on Darwinian theory. That would be going too far. The New York Times, in examining its own part in the same story, hasnt even taken a step.

See original here:

Something Is Missing from Bronx Zoo's Apology - Discovery Institute

While Nikola Tesla may not have gotten his due in his lifetime often being overshadowed by Thomas Edison's marketing skills the genius inventor is now being paid homage in many different ways. There's Elon Musk's company, Tesla, there's Christopher Nolan's own version of Tesla in his film, 'The Prestige', and now a new film will feature the futurist at the front and center with Ethan Hawke set to play him in the eponymously named 'Tesla'.

Tesla's antagonism with Edison may be well known but 'Tesla' is set to give you a whole other look at the inventors. There's one detail that's explored in the film that no one else talks about, one that makes Nikola Tesla a less ideal hero. Read on to know more about the film.

'Tesla' will be available to rent on virtual theatres on Friday, August 21, including here.

The official synopsis for the movie states: "Brilliant, visionary Nikola Tesla fights an uphill battle to bring his revolutionary electrical system to fruition, then faces thornier challenges with his new system for worldwide wireless energy. The film tracks Teslas uneasy interactions with his fellow inventor Thomas Edison and his patron George Westinghouse. Another thread traces Teslas sidewinding courtship of financial titan JP Morgan, whose daughter Anne takes a more than casual interest in the inventor. Anne analyzes and presents the story as it unfolds, offering a distinctly modern voice to this scientific period drama which, like its subject, defies convention."

The detail that the film includes is that Nikola Tesla believed in eugenics and wrote in 1935, "The year 2100 will see eugenics universally established. In past ages, the law governing the survival of the fittest roughly weeded out the less desirable strains." Eugenics grew less popular after the Nazis' interest in it during World War II but has been making a resurgence of late.

Ethan Hawke

Ethan Hawke is an award-winning actor best known for his roles in 'Dead Poets Society', 'Before Sunset', 'Boyhood', 'Training Day', and more. In 'Tesla', he plays the role of Nikola Tesla.

Kyle MacLachlan

Kyle MacLachlan is an actor best known for his roles in 'Twin Peaks', 'Showgirls', 'How I Met Your Mother', and 'Agents of SHIELD'. He plays the role of Thomas Edison.

Eve Hewson

Eve Hewson is an Irish actress known for her roles in 'The Luminaries', 'The Knick', and 'Bridge of Spies'. She plays the role of Anne Morgan.

Jim Gaffigan

Jim Gaffigan is an actor and comedian known for his roles in 'The Jim Gaffigan Show', 'Bob's Burgers', and 'That 70's Show'. He plays the role of Tesla's patron,George Westinghouse.

The movie also stars Donnie Keshawarz as JP Morgan, Blake DeLong as William Kemmler, Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Szigeti, and Josh Hamilton as Robert Underwood Johnson.

Michael Almereyda

Michael Almereyda is a director, screenwriter and film producer known for 'Hamlet' (starring Ethan Hawke), 'Experimenter', and 'Cymbeline'. He directed and co-produced 'Tesla'.

'The Prestige'

'The Promised Land'

'The Current War'

'Ford v Ferrari'

'The Imitation Game'

See the article here:

'Tesla': Release date, plot, cast, and all you need to know about Ethan Hawke-starrer biopic of the visionary - MEAWW

This month, Planned Parenthood removed the name of Margaret Sanger from its health clinic in Manhattan. By way of explanation, the organization cited its founders harmful connections to the eugenics movement.

So is this now curtains for George Bernard Shaw?

How about H.G. Wells and his The War of the Worlds?

Henrik Ibsen and his A Dolls House?

T.S. Eliot? Virginia Woolf?

All of the above had strong connections to the eugenics movement. So did the hugely influential economist John Maynard Keynes. At one point in its history, the British newspaper now known as the Guardian editorialized as to the movements worth.

This is not merely an academic question. One of Canadas largest theaters, the Shaw Festival Theatre, is named after George Bernard Shaw, although it does not produce only his work. Until its disappearance last year, Chicago had a dedicated-to-Shaw company known as ShawChicago. A sequel to Ibsens A Dolls House was just on Broadway. And if youre a fan of My Fair Lady, a constant in our repertoire, youll likely know that musical was based on Shaws Pygmalion.

What is tricky for progressives about eugenics is that most of its adherents came from the left. Around the turn of the 20th century, the movement was widely seen as a logical extension for anyone of serious socialist belief.

Ibsen, for example, still is widely seen as a crucial advocate for womens rights and other progressive ideas.

What is eugenics? Simply put, its the idea that a society can best thrive by breeding more of its stronger members than those perceived to be weak or immoral or otherwise less desirable for the common good. In Shaws view, as manifest in several of his plays (Man and Superman, for example) the best leaders are enlightened, progressive, intelligent, effective people, not those crude fools the general populace might elect.

Shaw wanted people in charge not unlike himself. Its a fast highway from there to naked white supremacy.

Eugenics led to a profoundly dangerous and indisputably racist desire to exert a kind of human control over the findings of Charles Darwin, so as to render Darwinian notions of the survival of the fittest subject to governmental policy. That could mean encouraging the so-called best and brightest to have more children, so-called positive eugenics, but it also involved the selective use of contraception to control reproduction (hence Sangers embroilment), the propagation of forced sterilization, especially of individuals with disabilities, and restrictions on immigration.

All of those things were seriously discussed by these white literary figures, revered to this day. Its incredible, when you think about it.

A sympathetic view of the above people would point out that they held these beliefs prior to the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, fascists who quickly showed the world that the road from eugenics to death camps was short and direct. Churchill was also interested in eugenics early in his life; he wasnt a Nazi, he fought them off.

Some might also argue that most of these people came to see the error of their views and that the import and worth of their other achievements (Planned Parenthood, macroeconomics, elegant verbiage, powerful dramas, feminism, the promotion of class mobility) outweighed the import of their attachments (sometimes relatively brief) to this horrifically misguided philosophy and pseudo-science.

Where you stand likely matches where you stand on other recent controversies involving whether to judge venerated historical figures entirely within the context of their times, their sins so mitigated, or by contemporary moral absolutes when it comes to whom we want to be on our pedestals, or viewable on cable, or with their names on a theatrical marquee.

For most people, it is a wrenching issue, being as human perfection is so elusive.

But although the historic attachment to eugenics is not an easy topic for the left to discuss, if Planned Parenthood can have that reckoning with the legacy of its founder, so can the literary and theatrical establishment. A reckoning is not necessarily the same thing as a cancellation. As Angela Saini wrote in, ahem, the Guardian last fall, that instinct should be tempered by the sober understanding that the slope that sends society towards moral shame is built by many.

And like freeway construction, it keeps starting over and over.

One thing is for sure, the kudzu-like spreading of sympathy for eugenics 125 years ago offers a cautionary tale about the dangers of elitism and moral superiority, a curse that can and does afflict both left and right, then and now.

History teaches us that insisting on solutions for other people, controlling their words, thoughts, actions and desires, judging them at every moment, asserting we know so much better than them, often comes with dangerous unintended consequences.

And the assumption that the future of our societies rest on the back of our geniuses is similarly fraught. We forget the role of hereditary privilege. And of luck.

In this era of technological societal dominance by very few highly effective channels, we need to be acutely aware of what can happen when those that run them accumulate far too much power.

Right, Mr. Shaw?

Chris Jones is a critic for the Chicago Tribune.

Go here to see the original:

Chris Jones: Eugenics, George Bernard Shaw and the need for a dramatic reckoning - TwinCities.com-Pioneer Press

Every so often in Britain,eugenicsis accused of making a comeback. Recently, the Black Lives Matter movement has drawn attention to the harmful lasting impact of Britains colonialist figures, shocking those who assumed that white supremacy had been left firmly in the past.

But for those campaigning against the legacy ofeugenicsin higher education, these revelations about the roots of racism were not as surprising. From their perspective, eugenicist views never really disappearedthey had just found a safe havenin somepartsof British universities.

British universities have strong historical ties witheugenics. Sir Francis Galton, a prolific Victorian scientist known to be one of the pioneers ofeugenics, set up a lab at University College London in 1904 and endowed the institution with his personal collection of work, along with funding for the countrys first Chair ofEugenics(the post was renamed, in the sixties, to Professor of Human Genetics.) Until it was finally renamed after Black Lives Matter protests, students at UCL still attended lectureson bio-medical genetic issuesat the Galton Lecture theatre.

In 2018, it was revealed thatasecreteugenicsconference, the London Conference of Intelligence, had been held in a UCL lecture theatre.The event hosted white supremacist academics closely associated with the American alt-right, wrote the London Student.

A UCL internal report on the conference, since made public, show the conference had been attended by fringe academics to policy-interested individuals.In a press statement, UCL said The conferences were booked and paid for as an external event and without our officials being told of the details. They were therefore not approved or endorsed by UCL. The university reassured that they were committed to vigorously combatting racism and sexism in all forms, but also stated that they had a legal obligation to protect free speech on campus, within the law.

The scandal brought attention to UCLs history, and the university launched an inquiry into the history ofeugenicsat the institution. But just before the universitys report was publishedto the public, nine membersof the 16-strong inquiry team refused to sign it, and even argued that the inquiry did not go far enough in a separate set of recommendations. An anonymous member of the committee said: the big issue is not how a member of staff booked a room, but why someone with his views was a member of staff at all.

***

But its not just about one man, or one university.After the Second World War, academics from Cambridge, Oxford and Glasgow were also part of the EugenicsEducation Society, a popular 20thcentury group thatat timescampaigned for sterilisation and marriage restrictions.Universities still memorialise the legacies of famous scientists who made important discoveries but also expressed viewsthat have attracted controversy such asFrancis Crick, who discovered the structure of DNA, andRonald Fisher, a pioneer of modern day statistics.

The home ofeugenicshasnearlyalways been in universities, says David King, director of an independent watchdog organisation Human Genetics Alert. Someacademics tend to believe that all knowledge is good, even if eugenic ideas influence the research, he says:universities are a protected space for these kind of views. Political power has always operated in Britain this way, quietly and below the democratic radar, through conversations between privileged elites, often academics.

However, others disagree. Steve Jones, who was head of UCLs genetics department and former president of the Galton Institute, says that the historical ties these institutions have witheugenicsare discussed openly and extensively. In some ways, the horrors of theeugenicsmovement are what has made biologists cautious about what they are willing to do today says Jones. In the old days those involved knew almost nothing, and were willing to do almost anything; while today we know far more but are much less confident about how we use that information.

Jones argues that there is a crucial difference betweentheperspectives of medical researchers now, compared to those in the era of Galton. Eugenicists set out to change the fate of future generations, whatever the cruelties that might be visited on the people of the day. In contrast, modern genetics tries, although it sometimes fails, to improve the prospects of those alive today Jones says.

But if genetics today hasonly tenuous links toeugenics, why are people worried? A subsection ofresearch, which looks for genetic explanations for complex traits such as intelligence, mental health or personality, has recently gained traction. This field, called sociogenomics,could pave the wayfor a new era of genetic engineering and social stigma. Since the 1960s, dubious journals such asMankind Quarterlyhave been the homes of articles that appear togive backing toscientific racism, classism and ableism.

But now even more respected institutions are dabbling in it. Work linking a persons genetic code to their intelligence, income and educational attainment has been produced by researchers across UK universities, includingKings College London,University of Edinburgh, andGoldsmiths. These studies,one of whichlinks 7-year old childrens test scores with their DNA, would arguably not be out of place at the London Conference of Intelligence. Even the most prestigious academic journals, such asNature Communications, have published studies linking income with genetics. These studies have been cited in reports inMankind Quarterlyto support arguments that Muslimimmigrants have lower IQs than white western Europeans.

Authors from these studies say resultscould helpminimize social disparities in health and well-being, or they could lead toevidence-based, biologically-informededucation policy. But how can linking genes with how much you earn lead tolessinequality? And how would finding tiny unchangeable differences in the DNA of schoolchildren lead to better educational for all, when the biggest drivers of educational achievement are factors like having a safe home, and a comfortableupbringing?

***

The global rise of alt-right populism is to blame for the resurgence ineugenicsresearch, says Professor David Colquhoun, who has worked at UCL for over 40 years. The alt-right give credence to eugenic ideas, and use pseudoscientific genetic theories to support them, he explains. This is documented in scientist Angelina Sainis bookSuperior: The Return of Race Science, where she describes how racists insistently search for biological evidence that they are more special than everyone else. If skin colour cant explain racial inequality, then maybe the structure of our bodies and brains will. If not anatomy, then genes. When this one, too, throws up nothing of value, theyll move onto the next thing, she writes.

Ben van der Merwe is the investigative journalist whodrew attention tothe London Conference of Intelligence at UCL. He believes that universities have beentoo willing to provide a home for these people too. You have a minority of people who are basically cranks, and these individuals (qualified scientists and amateur bloggers) have managed to position themselves as part of the current moral panic over free speech on campus he says. Universities dont appreciate thateugenicsis not a culture war issue over the right to offend.

Universities are further heavily incentivised to hide their history ofeugenics, because many profit from legacy funding from these figures, says a UCL SU Disabled Students Officer, who prefers to remain anonymous. The legacy ofeugenicsseems to pervade inuniversity policies today, which are hostile to students with disabilities and other marginalised groups, they say. Black alumni at UCL have spoken about feeling they were forced out [of the university], and I have no doubt this happens to other groups historically targeted byeugenics. Universities in this country were built from the work of people with many harmful attitudes, says the SU Officer. Students are blocked from finding out about their institutions histories by a lack of accessible information, and an attitude that everything has been fixed now. But it hasnt.

Profit motives and prejudiced policy are not the only factors leading to a culture where eugenicsresearchseems to thrive.Criticising UCLs handling of theeugenicsinquiry, Joe Cain, professor of history of science at UCL,wrote: Excessive deference to managers is one factor. Excessive amounts of discretionary money is another. Crafty people who know how to work the system is a third. Complacent, homogenous, and soft oversight is a fourth.

What should universities do next?UCL have taken important steps, including considering new names for their buildings named after eugenicists, and plan to fund new scholarships to study racism.

David King, who says he has experienced threats and intimidation for speaking up, believes a more extreme approach is needed, in UCL and other centres. He wants places like the Galton Institute to be shut down, and funding for research into genes and intelligence to be removed.

Big science projects cost a lot of money and do not take place unless they are funded King says. There is never enough money to fund all the research that scientists want to do. Science gets stopped every day. So the real question is which science do we want? And who gets to control it?

Go here to read the rest:

The secret history of Britain's universities and eugenics - Prospect

A dark chapter in North Carolinas history is its 20thcentury eugenics program. Apart from denying the human rights of many disabled people, it had a disproportionate effect on black citizens. According to a study from Duke University, it was designed to breed out non-working black residents.

This suggests that for Blacks, eugenic sterilizations were authorized and administered with the aim of reducing their numbers in the future population -- genocide by any other name, the authors state.

The article in the American Review Of Political Economysurveyed reports from the North Carolina Eugenics Board about 2,100 authorized sterilizations between 1958 and 1968.

Sterilization rates were much higher in counties with higher numbers of non-working black residents. This was not the case with other racial groups, suggesting, the authors say, that blacks were deemed to be inferior.

The United Nations official definition of genocide includes imposing measures to prevent births within a (national, ethnically, racial or religious) group, says co-author William A. Darity Jr., a professor of public policy, African and African American Studies and economics at Duke University. North Carolinas disproportionate use of eugenic sterilization on its Black citizens was an act of genocide.

Controlling Black bodies and their reproductivechoices is nothing new, says co-author Rhonda Sharpe. Our studyshows that North Carolinarestricted reproductive freedom, using eugenicsto disenfranchise Black residents.

Bertween 1929 and 1974, the states eugenics programsterilized close to 7,600 men and woman, making it impossible for them to have children, according to the Justice for Sterilization Victims Foundation.The youngest victims were 10 years old; 85% were female; 40% were minorities including African Americans and Native Americans.

The program had strong defenders -- as this paragraph froma 1950 pamphlet by the Winston-Salem-based Human Betterment League of North Carolina shows:

You wouldn't expect a moron to run a train or a feebleminded woman to teach school. You wouldn't want the state to grant driver's licenses to mental defectives. Yet each day the feebleminded and the mentally defective are entrusted with the most important and far reaching job of all the job of PARENTHOOD!

Michael Cook is editor of BioEdge

Originally posted here:

North Carolina has a bit part in the dark history of genocide - BioEdge

Hear ye! Hear ye! The Court of Public Opinion is now in session, the Honorable Judge Vox Populi presiding.

Our first case today: The People versus E. Lee Trinkle, former governor of Virginia.

Governor Trinkle, you stand accused of racism and support for eugenics. How do you plead?

Well, since Trinkle has been dead since 1939, he cant very well testify, but he has been the latest historical figure put on trial, so to speak. Last week, the University of Mary Washington renamed its Trinkle Hall, finding the name so offensive that it expedited the renaming ahead of other nomenclature concerns.

This is of interest to us for several reasons, beyond our interest in Virginia history. Trinkle was the rare governor from Southwest Virginia he grew up in Wytheville. His name also adorns buildings at Radford University as well as the College of William and Mary. If his name causes such consternation at Mary Washington, should it not also provoke the same concerns at those other schools? And just what was Trinkles record anyway? The specific charges are contained in a report prepared last year for the Mary Washington Board of Visitors which found that students are uncomfortable walking by Trinkle Hall. It said that Trinkle is perhaps best known by three pieces of legislation either passed or presented during this time as Governor. These included the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, the Forced Sterilization Act of 1924, and the Racial Segregation Act of 1926.

Read the original:

Their View: Trinkle condemned for things that didn't make the first draft of history - Bristol Herald Courier

A couple of years ago, when I was researching the 1970s just-transition legislation to protect loggers whod lost their jobs when the Redwood National Park was expanded, I read up on the origins of the park, which dated back to the 1917 founding of the Save the Redwoods League. Turned out that the founder of the league was none other than Madison Grant, who one year earlier had authored The Passing of the Great Race, which argued that America was threatened by non-Nordic immigrants such as Jews and Southern and Eastern European Catholics and Slavs, not to mention African Americans, Asians, and Latinos. Grants book, like D.W. Griffiths landmark 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, reinvigorated both racism and nativism, and laid the foundations for a reborn Klan, which in the 1920s focused much of its hatred on Catholics and Jews as well as Blacks. It provided the pseudo-scientific call for ending immigration from any place but Protestant Northwest Europe, and Congress did just that in 1924, in a law that wasnt repealed until 1965. It also inspired such European anti-Semites as the young Adolf Hitler.

I was reminded of Grants bifurcated legacy over the past week by the Sierra Clubs acknowledgment and repudiation of its founders, John Muirs, racism, and by Planned Parenthoods acknowledgment and repudiation of the racist eugenics of the great birth control advocate Margaret Sanger. What the stories of all three of these deeply flawed pioneers illustrate is how pervasive bigotry was among Americans of their eras, and not just among the general public but particularly among educated elites, among whom the nonsense of eugenics was believed to provide a scientific confirmation of racial bias. The burning crosses that popped up in nearly every city visited by Democratic presidential nominee Al Smitha Catholicduring his 1928 campaign had their elite equivalent in Ivy League universities opposition to admitting Jews and people of color andoh yes, themwomen.

If theres a lesson here, its that even the signal advances this nation has made in progressive causes have often owed their success to individuals who also partook in, and sometimes championed, their times prevailing biases. That was no less true in 1917 than it was in 1776; its almost surely, and sadly, a constant of human existence. The broader a legacys scope, the more imperfect, and in some instances appalling, its history is likely to be. Columbus may have been a flop, as Saul Bellow wrote in the closing passage of The Adventures of Augie March, but that didnt prove there was no America.

Read the rest here:

Forefathers (and Foremothers) Flaws - The American Prospect

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

Britannica Quiz

Genetics Quiz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See the rest here:

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

Introduction to Eugenics

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

History of Eugenics

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

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

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

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

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

CLICK HERE to learn more about eugenics in modern times

Read more:

Introduction to Eugenics - Genetics Generation

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

Advertisement

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

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

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

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

[Want to discuss politics with other America readers? Join our Facebook discussion group, moderated by Americas writers and editors.]

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

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

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

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

Go here to see the original:

Margaret Sanger's extreme brand of eugenics - America Magazine

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

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

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

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

Troubling Similarities

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

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

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

Impunity and Lack of Redress

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

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

International Criminal Law and Its Domestication

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

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

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

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

Developments in International Human Rights Law

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

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

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

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

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

Accountability in Xinjiang

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Go here to see the original:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read this article:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more:

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

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

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

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

Photo by Julio Rionaldo on Unsplash

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

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

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

Elizabeth A. BakerPhoto courtesy of the artist

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

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

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

Photo by Elizabeth A. Baker

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

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

Visit link:

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

A horse visits the elderly. (Photo credit: Elizabeth W. Kearley/Getty Images)

In 2006, I was invited to speak in Alkoven, Austria at a conference on human rights located adjacent toHartheim Castle. Hartheim Castle was built in the ninth century and, in the 19thcentury, it came to serve as a home for children with physical and mental disabilities.

However, in the early 1940s, Hartheims humanitarian purpose was poisoned by the Nazi government as it began to use the castle for itsT4 euthanasia program, a nationwide eugenics program managed by mostly German physicians with the intent to eradicate those seen as being unworthy of lifein this case, the institutionalized.

This included the incurably ill, mentally or physically disabled, the elderly, and the emotionally distraught. In the hierarchy of Nazi values, inferiors like these were exterminated. Indeed, it is estimated that the T4 program was responsible for the death of upwards of 200,000 individuals either by starvation, lethal injection, or poison gas. The T4 program started before the Holocaust, in which 6 million people, predominately of Jewish heritage, were murdered. During my visit, I toured Hartheim Castle where 30,000 of these so-called inferiors fell victim to the T4 program. It was a harrowing experience.

Unbeknownst to most Americans, the eugenics movement was becoming a full-fledged intellectual craze in the United States some 20 years prior to Germanys T4 program. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas documents this grim history in his concurring opinion inBox v. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky, Inc.

Justice Thomas writes that the U.S. eugenics movement undermined the American education system, particularly among progressives, professionals, and intellectual elites. Perhaps surprisingly, leaders in the eugenics movement held prominent positions at Harvard, Stanford, and Yale, among other schools, and eugenics was taught at 376 universities and colleges.

Justice Thomas asserts that there was an aggressive movement to convince the government to enact eugenics laws targeting black people who were considered inferior to the white race. Thomas notes, however, that although race was pertinent, eugenicists did not qualify a persons fitness solely by race. He writes thata typical list of dysgenic individuals would also include some combination of the feeble-minded, insane, criminalistic, deformed, crippled, epileptic, inebriate, diseased, blind, deaf, and dependent (including orphans and paupers).

As the scope of the atrocities of the Holocaust came to light, the U.S. eugenics movement was dealt a serious blow it had been their ideology that facilitated the murder of millions. However, times changed, and in 1973 the U.S. Supreme Court passedRoe v. Wade, which led to the legalization of abortion throughout theentirety of pregnancy. Abortion as we know it today has become a vehicle for a modern-day eugenics program, this time under the banner of choice rather than compulsion.

Since 1973, the U.S. has permitted the legal murder of more than60 million children. Tragically, upwards of70 percentof mothers whose children are given a prenatal disability diagnosis, like Down Syndrome, abort to avoid the possibility of a disabled child.

Simultaneously, euthanasia confronts those who are institutionalized due to incurable illness, cognitive disability, old age, and medical dependency. In other words, the dysgenic individuals identified by Justice Thomas are still at risk today, both pre-born and born, but the basis for their elimination is disguised behind pleasant-sounding euphemisms.

Whether one earns the full rights of a human person increasingly depends on the degree of ones cognitive capacitiesanarbitrary and dehumanizing standard by design. If a person does not meet society'sever-changing criteria of humanity, then life-affirming care can be stripped from the individual by subjective decision-makers who adhere to what they call a quality-of-life assessment. Rather than recognizing the inherent dignity of all human life, this assessment focuses on productivity, utility, and economic status. Human rights and due process are noticeably absent under this new regime.

Indeed, since the first end-of-life case was heard by theNew Jersey Supreme Courtnearly forty years ago, the right to die has gained broader cultural acceptance with the near universal backing of academia, particularly in medical and law schools. New generations are taught that physicians are the arbiters of the value of life rather than patients themselves or their loved ones.

New laws and policies seek to enshrine subjectivity and quality of life assessments as paramount, to officially label some human beings as unworthy of life. Indeed,Michael Hickson, a 46-year-old disabled man who was starved and died from untreated sicknesses related to COVID-19 after physicians refused to treat him on quality-of-life grounds, represents one of the latest victims of our new regime. Mr. Hicksons tragedy illustrates how we deny care to those who have become burdensome to us.

The deadly-by-design consequences of our new regime are abundantly clear in the coronavirus pandemic. It began at a nursing home inWashington State, the center of the first known virus outbreak in the United States. The virus rapidly made its way across the country in institutions that were treating the disabled and elderly who were dying in frightening numbers. Concern quickly grew that the pandemic was particularly deadly to this population, so much so that the Trump administration issued a stern warning not to treat these individuals any differently if they contracted the virus.

Inexplicably, New York began forcing patients who had already contracted thecoronavirus into nursing homes with virus-free, at-risk patients. Unsurprisingly, New York quickly found itself dealing with an onslaught of deaths due to this high-risk population placed directly in the crosshairs of the virus.

The reaction of the nation is what you would hope as they were shocked and outraged with what was happening. Sadly, however, all the pandemic did was expose a prevailing attitude and what is occurring every day across countless nursing homes and health care systems: a prejudice toward the institutionalized, and the reality that we are a throwaway culture for those who have lost the ability to contribute in a way society decides is meaningful.

There are reasons for hope.Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt recently signed the Nondiscrimination in Health Care Coverage Act, which puts an end to the rationing of health care based on quality-of-life assessments.

This is good news and underscores that laws exist to protect those most in need of protection.

Legitimate law and policy never endorse treating equal human beings as if they were not equal, or the violence, marginalization, or killing that makes such lethal bigotry a threat to our society.

Our hope lies in more leaders understanding the magnitude of what is happening and joining together with all walks of life people of all ages, backgrounds, and beliefs to foster a more equitable and justice-oriented future.

Bobby Schindler is a Senior Fellow with Americans United for Life, Associate Scholar at the Charlotte Lozier Institute, and President of the Terri Schiavo Life & Hope Network.

Here is the original post:

Protect the Institutionalized and Defeat the Inhumanity of Eugenics - CNSNews.com

Sometime this coming week in the Twin Cities and other U.S. cities, an adult stranger will enter the room of a small child. The child will sense something is wrong as the adult begins to prod and make contact with some type of metal instrument. The child will try to move away, but the room is very small, so any means of escape are blocked off. The instrument will now clamp onto the childs limb or torso and proceed to tear, pull and crush. The child will scream, but no one will hear because the room is too well insulated. The screams will eventually stop. His or her body parts will be incinerated, or maybe even be sold to some health research center.

No name will be given and no grave will be marked for the unwanted child, whose unique personality is known only to God.

With all the opinions on racism in the media, do any of them deal with the following:

1. Do any of the protests condemn the taking of lives of Black babies at abortion centers?

2. Margaret Sanger, who founded Planned Parenthood, believed in eugenics: the mass of ignorant Negroes still breed carelessly and disastrously, so that the increase among Negroes, even more than the increase among whites, is from that part of the population least intelligent and fit, and least able to rear their children properly. (Birth Control Review, Volume XXII, Number 8 (New Series, May 1938, the Negro Number)

Do any of the protesters deal with Planned Parenthoods founder? Do they protest at Planned Parenthood?

A St. Cloud Times editorial stated: We want the best leadership we can get for our cities, schools, counties and state ensuring protection of the rights of every American, born or naturalized. What kind of leadership is it when our two U.S. Senators, Smith and Klobuchar vote to allow killing of children who survive an abortion?

What so ever you do to the least of my people, that you do unto me (Matt. 25:40)

More here:

Letter: Where are the protests about abortion? | The Globe - The Globe

When Ruth Morris was a teenager, her family was given a choice their daughter could either be sterilized by the state or stay in an institution. Her father signed a paper allowing the surgery, and forever taking away her ability to have achild.

I had to do it. They told me after it was done. I was unhappy but I couldnt do anything about it, Ruthsaid.

At the time, Ruth lived at Fairview Training Center, Oregons primary state-run institution for those with intellectual and developmental disabilities (I/DD). For decades, just about anyone leaving the institution faced compulsory sterilization before returning to the community. It was a policy known aseugenics.

In the early twentieth century, more than 30 states passed eugenicslaws.

Simply put, eugenics policy advocated improving the human race through selective reproduction. People considered ideal citizens were encouraged to have children together, while those deemed unfit weresterilization.

In Oregon, Bethenia Owens-Adair, one of the regions earliest female physicians, helped write and promote state-mandated sterilization legislation. A supporter of womans suffrage, and prohibition, Owens-Adair advocated that eugenics would improvesociety.

We can and must protect our nation from insanity, epilepsy, and the varied train of abnormalities that follow in their wake.Dr. Bethenia Adair Owens said in1915.

Oregons 1923 law targeting people deemed feeble-minded, insane, epileptic, habitual criminals, moral degenerates, and sexualperverts.

The state set up a Board of Eugenics that had the final decision over who would be sterilized. The board ordered its last forced sterilization in 1981. In 1983, Oregons eugenics law was repealed. By that time, over 2,600 Oregonians had undergone compulsory sterilization by thestate.

In 2002, then-Governor John Kitzhaber officially apologized for the policy of forced sterilization. Ruth, and others who had also been forcibly sterilized, attended the event at the state capitol. Ruth says she was happy to take part in the ceremony, I felt good that heapologized.

See more here:

Eugenics In The Shadow Of Fairview . News - OPB News

Between 1929 and 1974, North Carolina officials sterilized an estimated 7,600 people, many by force or coercion. The states eugenics program targeted people deemed feebleminded, sick or living with a disability.

Host Anita Rao discusses how and why the North Carolina Eugenics Board targeted poor Black people in its more than 40-year-long program with University of New Orleans professor Gregory Price and attorney Valerie Johnson of Johnson and Groninger, PLLC.

A recent study finds that it also targeted Black people considered economically unproductive in society. University of New Orleans professor Gregory Price led the research with co-authors William Sandy Darity, Samuel DuBois Cook Distinguished Professor of Public Policy at Duke University, and Rhonda Sharpe, founder and president of the Womens Institute for Science, Equity and Race.

The scholars found that for Black populations in North Carolina counties in a 10-year period, the number of sterilizations increased with the number of people who were unemployed and supported by the county budget. For other racial groups, the researchers found no correlation between sterilizations and county-supported individuals, which backs their claim that the racial bias of the North Carolina Eugenics Board program had economic motivations.

Host Anita Rao speaks with Price about the study and its implications. She also talks with Valerie Johnson, a Durham-based attorney for Johnson & Groninger PLLC, who helped sterilization survivors file claims for compensation from the state.

Read more:

New Study Reveals Economic Drivers Behind The Sterilization of Black North Carolinians - WUNC

Conspiracy theories are a funny thing.

Like the most tempting lies, they incorporate some truth. They also appeal to a fundamental need that we all have to make sense of our world. Though our planet is increasingly a safer and wealthier place to live (at least until the coronavirus pandemic), the media portrays a society that is in utter chaos. People desire an explanation, so as Michael Medved would say, they point to the "hidden forces behind perplexing and painful present events."

However, the overall narrative of a conspiracy theory is utterly false and entirely divorced from reality. In fact, conspiracy theories are often self-contradictory. Yet, that doesn't deter people from believing in them. For instance, one research paper showed that people who believe that Princess Diana's death was faked are also likely to agree that she was murdered.

Conspiracy Theories About Bill Gates Don't Make Logical Sense

The coronavirus pandemic was bound to generate a substantial number of conspiracy theories. We documented several of them previously. They included all sorts of ridiculous claims, from the virus being a Chinese biological weapon to 5G wireless technology being the ultimate cause. Now, we must add another to the list: Bill Gates wants to use a coronavirus vaccine to inject people with microchip tracking devices.

Let's pause a moment to examine if this conspiracy theory even remotely makes sense. Why would Bill Gates want to track people? So he can sell them a copy of Windows '95? There is no incentive, financial or otherwise, for Mr. Gates to be interested in something like this.

Those who are worried about being tracked will be disturbed to learn that you already can be tracked relatively easily. Every time you use your credit card, that provides location data. And those tiny supercomputers in your pocket otherwise known as smartphones are a treasure trove of location data. According to CNET:

"By design, wireless carriers always know where you are because your phone checks every few seconds for the strongest signal from nearby cell towers. They're also tracking you to ensure you can be found in an emergency."

So, Bill Gates doesn't need to track you. Other companies are already doing it. And if companies are doing it, that means the government can do it, too, provided that it gets a warrant.

Despite all this, a substantial number of Americans (28%) believe this conspiracy theory about Bill Gates. Another 32% are "unsure," which means they're at least open to the idea. Combined, that's a stunning 60% of Americans. And like everything else, belief in this conspiracy breaks down along partisan lines. See the following poll conducted by Yahoo/YouGov:

This isn't the only conspiracy theory about Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation. Others believe that he is using eugenics to depopulate the planet. Once again, this makes no sense; the Gates Foundation is fighting disease in poor countries (which are largely non-white). This single fact contradicts both the eugenics claim and the depopulation claim.

No matter. I still get emails like this:

"Mr Microchip himself has transformed himself into the human God of Vaccinations. We're now at least hearing of nanoparticles in vaccines. I suspect there's cellular compatible nanochips in the works also.

I am no conspiracy theorist."

I have no response, other than to post this, which has been circulating on the Internet.*

*Note: I haven't fact-checked the cited stats, but I did censor a couple of potty words.

Read more from the original source:

Conspiracy Theory About Bill Gates, COVID Vaccine Doesn't Make Logical Sense - American Council on Science and Health