Daily Archives: April 9, 2020

David Starr Jordan was the first president of Stanford University. He was also one of the most influential eugenicists of the early 20th century.

Over the past few months, my Eugenics on the Farm series has dealt with various eugenicists associated with Stanford University and examined their relationship with eugenics, the racist and ableist scientific belief in the improvement of the human race through restricting the reproduction of the unfit, typically disabled people and people of color. For Jordan, however, Im going to do something a bit different.

Ive written extensively on Jordans role in the American Eugenics Movement elsewhere, including in a request to rename Jordan Hall. To summarize, David Starr Jordan founded and worked with many of the most influential eugenic organizations in the United States: the Eugenic Research Organization, the Human Betterment Foundation and the Committee of Eugenics the first eugenic organization in the United States. He popularized eugenics in talks, textbooks and books for general audiences, such as his 1911 Hereditary of Richard Roe, and he promoted the forced sterilization of disabled people. Jordan was the kingpin of early American eugenics, creating networks and organizations deeply influential to the success of eugenic policies in the United States and abroad.

I am not going to write about any of that here. Instead, I am going to focus on Jordans complexities, because Jordan was certainly a complex man. He is still often praised for many aspects of his life: his research as an ichthyologist (fish researcher), his activism in various peace movements, etc. However, at the same time, it is impossible to separate his promotion of eugenics from any of these parts of his life. Eugenics was not a mere footnote in Jordans life; it was a central aspect.

The piece has a practical point, too. The prominent psychology corner on the right side of the front of Main Quad, one of the first things one sees as they walk up from the Oval, is named after Jordan. When we see that, despite Jordans complexities, a central legacy of his has been one of deep harm, it becomes clear why Jordan Hall should be renamed.

Jordan was a passionate anti-war activist. He participated in many anti-war campaigns, such as the World Peace Congress and the World Peace Foundations. Jordan supported other prominent peace campaigns, such as Jane Addams Womens Peace Party and Henry Fords Peace Ship. As an anti-war campaigner, Jordan fought adamantly against the participation of the United States in World War I, a position that cost him many friends and earned him many enemies.

While pacifism is certainly a noble position, Jordans anti-war beliefs stemmed in large part from eugenic theory. Jordans main contribution to eugenic research was on the impact of war on racial health. After studying various historical and contemporary wars, Jordan concluded that war, through the deaths of the brave and survival of the cowardly, reduced the overall ability of the race. In his 1915 book War and the Breed, for instance, he wrote that war involves what real students of this subject call reversed selection in which the best are chosen to be killed, and the worst are preserved to be the fathers of the future. Jordans opposition to war was in the name of eugenics in order to prevent the degradation of the race.

Jordan was also an adamant anti-imperialist and fought against the expansion of the American empire. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, American imperialism was on the rise, the most famous example being the Spanish-American War of 1898. During and after the war, the question of turning the Philippines (previously a Spanish colony) into an U.S. colony was on the mind of many Americans. Jordan, though, fought against the expansion of American imperialism and called for the removal of American forces from the island.

His reason was neither benevolence nor belief in the self-determination of indigenous Filipinos, however. Jordan, a believer in the supremacy of white races, simply did not think the inferior Filipino races could comprehend governance. In his 1901 Imperial Democracy, Jordan wrote that Filipinos were as capable of self-government or of any other government as so many monkeys. Jordans racism was the foundation of his anti-imperialist stances.

Jordan donated to and supported a few Black colleges. During his life, he donated a considerable amount to the Tuskegee Institute, a historically Black university founded in part by Booker T. Washington. Jordan was a fan of the institute, though in a rather paternalistic way. In his autobiography, he wrote that he enjoyed the universitys primative yet delightful negro spirituals.

Beneath that support, however, was intense racist reasoning. Jordans motivation behind supporting Black universities was his belief in the racial inferiority of Black people. In The Heredity of Richard Roe, Jordan argued that citizenship required a foundation of intelligence and claimed that Black Americans lacked that foundation. Because of this, he called Black suffrage an evil. Jordan thought that Black universities could, if barely, alleviate this dilemma: In a 1910 speech to the London Eugenics Education Society, Jordan lectured that education could help alleviate the negro problem. And for Jordan, there was a clear negro problem: his textbooks and writings regularly portray Black people as evolutionarily closer to apes than their white peers: blue gum negroes, blue gum apes, one read. Despite sending money to a Black university, Jordan only did so based on racist logic, and he actively taught and spreadracist ideologies, framing Black people as a problem to be solved.

Jordans best known academic legacy, besides Stanford, was his research on fish. Many ichthyologists today can trace their academic lineage back to Jordan. Jordan collected fish from across the world, and over 30 fish are named after him. He was especially fascinated with the evolution of fish: his 1923 A Classification of Fishes sought to place all fish species on a linear evolutionary line, tracing their evolutionary progression.

Even this, however, is difficult to separate from his eugenic beliefs. Many scientists of this era applied their studies to human eugenics: for instance Luther Burbank, a botanist and acquaintance of Jordan, similarly applied his botanical research to the eugenic breeding of humans. Jordan, too drew connections between his research on fish and eugenics. Jordans fascination with fish was a fascination with taxonomies and evolutionary progress: creating categories and sorting fish into them, labeling and studying the qualities of each fish, and tracing the path of evolution. Jordans eugenic research was no different: creating eugenic taxonomies of human value, ranking and categorizing human lives, to improve the human race and manufacture evolution. Jordans ichthyology research, like that of many scientists of his time, was inseparable from his eugenics research and taxonomization of humans.

In our current moment, we are living in a pandemic that has, in many ways, revealed obfuscated aspects of our society. Again, just as in Jordans time, the lives of disabled people are being portrayed as fundamentally less. Again, disabled people are living under the threat of being denied medical care due to their disabilities. Again, certain races are demonized as diseased and unfit. Again, eugenics and its hierarchies of human lives are rearing their ugly heads. Eugenics and the ideologies it perpetuates are being again brought to the forefront in this time of social crisis. It is more important than ever to reject eugenics and to bring attention to its harmful history.

Jordan was clearly a complex man with complex beliefs. Like I wrote in the introduction to this series, I do not believe it is useful to rashly judge figures such as Jordan and paint them in simple strokes.This pandemic, among other things, has shown that eugenics is not a mere historical artefact it is something to be actively confronted. Jordans eugenicist and racist ideologies undeniably permeated through all of his work in ways both obvious and subtle. If the role of the historian is to learn from the past (and it certainly is), historians must also judge the past and recognize the harmful influences of such ideologies. That starts by renaming Jordan Hall, by recognizing that Jordans legacy is that of deep harm. And there is nothing complex about that.

Contact Ben Maldonado at bmaldona at stanford.edu.

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Eugenics on the Farm: David Starr Jordan - The Stanford Daily

This essay contains discussions of scientific racism, forced sterilisation, and racist reproductive violences against people of color.

By Adrie Rose

There is nothing new about eugenics. Its certainly undergone rebranding, PR campaigns, re-naming, and re-working to give it a shiny new, gilded patina, but whether its called the social hygiene movement, the racial hygiene movement, or population controlits eugenics. Its an attempt to stop the socially illthe poor, the mentally ill, the houseless, drug users, and people of colour from procreating and outnumbering the inbred upper-/middle-class, well-educated white masses.

With walking, talking, moldy ham steaks like Richard Dawkins extolling the virtues of eugenics, its no surprise that this racist, pseudoscientific backwater is considered, almost solely, the domain of men. In fact, it feels like a concerted effort on behalf of white women to ignore and outright deny the racist history of feminismwhite feminism, specifically. And while there is a certain ostrich-like quality inherent to white feminism, the denial cannot continue. Although the truth of the past has been partially buried, the roots of that evil have continued to grow, tripping up and grabbing at the bodies of unsuspecting Black and brown people simply trying to survive. The past, and how it informs the present, must be acknowledged and confronted head-on if we are to end the violent legacy of reproductive interference in the global southmost specifically Aboriginal Australia, Africa, and Southern Asia.

In 1926, the Racial Hygiene Association of New South Wales (now the Family Planning Association) was founded by Lillie Goodisson and Ruby Rich of the Womens Reform League. Until 1928, the association was known as the Racial Improvement Society. During their tenure, Gooddisson and Rich advocated for selective breeding of future generations with particular emphasis on the elimination of hereditary defectsincluding mental illness, venereal disease, syphilis, a predisposition to criminal behaviour, and non-whiteness. Thanks to their literary propaganda, Australia passed legislation designed to sterilise Aboriginal and Indigenous people across the continent without their consent or knowledge. The Sexual Sterilisation Act of Alberta (1928) and the Sexual Sterilisation Act of British Columbia (1933) allowed for the forced sterilisation of all manner of social outcasts, leading the United Nations to condemn the country and its legislature for continued violations of human rights law. The Alberta act was repealed in 1972 after more than 4,000 people (most women and children of Eastern European, First Nations, and Metis descent) were surgically and permanently sterilised without their consent. The British Columbia act was repealed in 1973 after the formation of a Board of Eugenics was formed to unilaterally strip bodily autonomy from any person it deemed to have a tendency to serious mental disease or mental deficiencylargely Aboriginal people.

In January 2012, reports surfaced that Project Prevention, a United States-based organisation that pays drug users to use long-term, implantable birth control, was paying women in Mbita, Kenya with HIV to have IUDs implanted and had been since at least May 2011. A report detailing these allegations tells the story of women being told to sign consent forms for tubal ligation while in labour, women whose husbands signed consent forms for what they thought was a cesarean section but actually gave permission for them to be sterilised without their knowledge or consent, and women whose mothers were told that their disabilities and HIV+ would make them bad mothers, despite having already given birth. Women in their early and mid-20s whose husbands left them, sometimes taking the children, after learning that they could no longer fulfill their duties, women who were berated and shamed for their HIV status by doctors and nurses that refused to aid them unless they agreed to sterilisation, and women who signed documents in confusion because doctors and nurses would only speak to them in English.

In December 2014, five Kenyan women sued the Kenyan Health Ministry, Medecins sans Frontieres, the French arm of Doctors Without Borders, and Marie Stopes International for sterilising them without their consent. Marie Stopes founded the Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress to fund her building of birth control clinics across the United Kingdom. After Stopes death, these clinics coalesced under the umbrella known as Marie Stopes International. The first overseas location for MSI was established in New Delhi, India, carrying the dark cloud of its prior mission to furnish security from conception to those who are racially diseased, already overburdened with children, or in any specific way unfitted for parenthood.

In her writings, Stopes espoused a particular hatred for mixed-race (half-caste) people and advocated for their sterilisation at birth (Sorry mum and dad, I guess youll only have cats for grandchildren if these folks get their hands on me). Stopes was contemporaries with women like Gertrude Davenport, who argued that allowing no less than 5% of the population to be incompetent thru [sic] such bad heredity as imbecility, criminality, and disease cost American taxpayers around $100 million annually. Stopes and Davenport shared similar ideas as Rita Hauschild who conducted Bastard Research in the Caribbean between 1936 and 1937, studying Chinese-Negro, Chinese-Indian, and Indian-Negro hybrids in Trinidad and Venezuela. Hauschilds work on racial identification of embryos was a particular favourite of Nazi scientists and doctors in World War II-era Germany.

An ocean away in India, the United Kingdoms Department for International Development was funneling at least 166 million ($215,995,615) to rural clinics for the purposes of birth control, despite complaints that the money would be used for forced sterilisation. Both men and women in India alleged being dragged off the street and into clinics where they were operated on by torchlight. Reports of deaths from horribly botched operations, patients thrown out onto the street still bleeding, and people miscarrying or suffering stillbirths after being ignored when they told doctors that they were pregnant. Some clinics claimed to be incentivised with promises of 1500 (rupees) for each completed sterilisation with a bonus of 500 per patient for performing more than 30 operations in a day.

Do I think white women are actively forming organisations and non-profits with the clear aim of furthering eugenics in some dystopian plot to eradicate brown people? Not intentionally. But I think its very likely that white women and their supporters have internalised centuries-old ideas of white purity and the white (wo)mans burden. To be fair, white women are not, nor have they been the sole arbiters of eugenic thought and action in the global south. The transnational movement to eradicate Black and brown bodies is nothing new, nor was it solely the domain of German Nazis as parroted in liberal circles. Buck v. Bell, a 1927 United States Supreme Court case that has never been overturned, allowed for the compulsory sterilization of the unfit in the interest of protecting the state. But why this enduring ragethis disdain for the reproduction of visibly non-white bodies? What engenders such a visceral reaction that the Center for Investigative Reporting found 150 cases of Latinx and Black women being sterilised in California prisons without consent? Its fear. The fear is two-fold, but plain and simple, fear drives and has driven the need to cease population growth by any means necessary.

Look to the narrative of King Kong for that fear made visual. In his earliest incarnation, Kong is a slavering beast, nothing more and nothing less. He is every fear of Black male aggression come to life. Given the era of its production, its not surprising that the film never approaches more than a modern-day PG rating, but I always expect to see some grotesquely oversized depiction of vaguely human genitalia as Kong thrashes about. Well-endowed, blessed with endless energy, lacking the genteel restraint of their civilised white counterparts. Even the smallest display of sexual agency or interest from a Black person, real or imagined, is immediately twisted into a vile, perverse display of animalistic lust. Its evidence of our complete lack of humanity, no matter how well-bred we are. In the 1930s, the fear stoked by Birth of a Nation (1915) was still alive and well. Dark-skinned men, literally lurking in shadows, were a scourgestalking white women and stealing their purity away, supplanting it with literal and figurative darkness.

The fear of the hulking beast of Black sexuality is somewhat farcical, I suppose. But less comical, easier to visualise, more deeply ingrained is a very real concern that white domination will soon be usurped by the growing numbers of non-white bodies across the globe. White people are the global minority, not just in places like Asia and Africa, but in America and Europe as well. 20 years ago, non-Latinx whites were just 49.8% of the California population. The US Census Bureau predicts that the rest of the United States will follow suit in another 20 years. And white people are terrified at becoming the minority in a world they built to fulfill their needs, wants, and desires at the expense of Black and brown bodies. That terror is less associated with the horror of seeing more non-white faces in a crowd. To be sure, there is a sick fascination in white communities with rooting out those who dont belong, those immediately identifiable as outsiders by virtue of their skin. But more than that, eugenic obsession is fueled by the idea that white people will become the minority and subsequently, the victims of retribution.

To picture white women carrying the mantle of eugenic discourse and violent action, little suspension of disbelief is required. In a world where white femininity is rewarded, coddled, and purified its not actually difficult to envision the beneficiaries of the same internalising the racist baggage that comes with pink pussy hats. The same world where haphazard monuments dedicated to the memory of Susan B. Anthony are erected in a mad dash to immortalise a woman prostrate before the altar of the eradication of foreign Black and brown people. Eugenic thought and action can go through a name change and a spit shine, but there will always be a fuck it, mask off moment where the truth will out. White women continue to unironically champion the cause of ethnic cleansing by shouldering the white womans burden, even though no one asked, because it is both their historical prerogative and unspoken objective.

Further Reading:

Adrie is a Sociology grad student and freelancer living in Pittsburgh. She primarily writes about sex work, social media, race, and gender. When shes not writing or grading, Adrie works as an artist and photographer. Her great loves include the glitter accent nail, Bojack Horseman, Disenchantment, and her two cats: Misty (15) and Oscar (5).

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Sterilisation and Eugenics In The Global South Are Championed By White Women - Wear Your Voice

From his bleached mullet and shiny outfits to satin thrones, from condoms with his face on to intimate piercings, Tiger Kings central character, Joe Exotic, is an affront to good taste. Likewise, the hot-mess sprawling narrative of addiction, sexual coercion, exploitation, theft, murder, suicide, obsession, guns and explosives. Not to mention the tragic backdrop of inexplicably gratuitous numbers of majestic, dangerous, big cats.

Aesthetically, Tiger King is a documentary of excess. Too many exotic animals in captivity, too many guns and sequins, too much desperation and methamphetamine, too many storylines, too many villains, too, too much. It is addictively engrossing as a result, its popularity during lockdown hinging on revelling in the weird horrors of tasteless, Hicksville excess. Plunged into a weird, crazy world so Other to our own, we feel normal. Witnessing the extraordinarily dangerous combination of caring for big cats, while playing with unregulated guns and explosives, while on meth, makes us feel comparatively safe. What more could we want in lockdown, while the apocalypse rages outside?

Sharing the full story, not just the headlines

But this comfort, this reassurance that we are comparatively sane, normal and safe, depends upon an us and them logic that is dangerous. Taste is classed. Taste is political.

Writing about the way we stigmatise working-class celebrity, sociologistsImogen Tyler and Bruce Bennettsaw our media as a class pantomime offering community-forming attachment to a bad object. That is, these characters define what we are glad not to be, giving us the opportunity to affirm our comparative superiority through the pleasure of collective scorn.

The cast of Tiger King is depicted in the white trash archetype, a stock character with a long history going back to the US Eugenics RecordOffice who, between 1880 and 1920, attempted to demonstrate scientifically that rural poor whites were genetically defective. The rural class entered the public imagination as dirty, drunken, criminallyminded, and sexually perverse people. This was used to end welfare and introduce involuntary sterilisation and incarceration. SociologistsMatt Wray and Annalee Newitz argue the stereotype of the incestuous and sexually promiscuous, violent, alcoholic, lazy, and stupid redneck persists over a century later. This reads true of the characterisation constructed in Tiger King. While their big cat businesses may turn over huge sums, the sneering pleasure of watching their financial mismanagement reeks of the schadenfreudeof being proved right about who does and doesnt deserve wealth. This is exactly the logic of the eugenics white trash label.

The term white trash has always existed to blame those suffering social ills for their situation, suggesting it is a product of their own poor judgement and intrinsic inferiority, not structural inequality. The main characters of Tiger King are horrendous: murderous, abusive utterly reprehensible. But, beware the pleasures of disgust. Trash designates the dregs, dirt or refuse of society. That which should be disposed of.

Tiger King, Murder, Mayhem and Madness, Official Trailer

Why does this matter? Because eugenics is back. From the eugenicist views of former advisor to Downing Street, Andrew Sabisky, to herd immunity. From reassurance that coronavirus only kills the elderly or those with underlying conditions, as if underlying conditions was code for less than fully a person, to do not resuscitate orders signed against patients wishes. From certain groups being told not to go to hospital,saving beds for those with higher chances of survival, to the criminal, political, deliberate underfunding of our health service. These show our leaders strategically callous belief in the disposability of human life. Forcing doctors into a position where they must decide who lives creates the most violent discrimination. Beware comforting entertainment predicated on us and them logic which imagines them to be disposable and not us, when our government in a time of health crisis is doing exactlythe same to us.

Dr Hannah Yelin is a senior lecturer in media and culture at Oxford Brookes University

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Tiger King is popular because we love to laugh at white trash heres why thats dangerous - The Independent

CW: This essay explores anti-fatness and eugenics, and mentions death, medical genocide, and more.

Towards the end of February, many of us in america had become aware of the glaring virus we now know as COVID-19. In panic, people took to their local grocery stores and stocked up on all household essentialsmost notably, face masks, hand sanitizer, and toilet paper. While information about the effects of COVID-19 were mixed, as the virus is so new, one thing that scientists and all government officials seemed to be clear about was that face masks were ineffective against the virus. At the beginning of March, people were being instructed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to not wear face masks to prevent the spread of the virus. The U.S. Surgeon General made a public statement via Twitter demanding that everyone stop buying masks as they were ineffective against the spread of the virus. It was not clear how the very tools that were being used to protect our medical and healthcare providers from this virus were suddenly ineffective when it came time to protect those of us who were civilians. As such, many continued to buy masks in bulk, rapidly creating a shortage of face masks for the aforementioned.

Just days ago, the CDC released a public statement stating that they do, in fact, recommend that everyone wear a face mask in publicas up to 25% of people diagnosed with COVID-19 may be asymptomatic, according to the CDC.

Weeks before this discovery, I made a statement via Twitter wherein I named my distrust of the CDC, other medical officials, and the list of (contradictory) instructions they were releasing to the public in the wake of what feels like one of the most vicious pandemics we have experienced in modern history. The CDC has been at the epicenter of the war waged against my body and other bodies like mine, and this is the basis for my lack of trust in their efforts.

In March 2004, during a highly publicized news conference, the CDC published a report claiming that obesity was killing 400,000 Americans a year and that it was becoming americas number one preventable death, outnumbering tobacco. The report was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA)which, at least at the time, was the most prestigious medical journal in the nation. One of the authors of the report was the head of the CDC. Because of this, the report had the credibility it needed and would lead to egregious and violent headlines across the nation about fat people, our bodies, and the alarming rate at which we were allegedly dying from obesity.

From that moment forward, throughout the rest of that year, public officials and other media platforms used that report as evidence that obesity was the greatest threat facing the american people, and as justification for what would eventually become a forceful and strapping diet industrial complex. Thus creating The Obesity Epidemic.

However, according to J. Eric Oliver in his book Fat Politics: The Real Story Behind Americas Obesity Epidemic (2006), a more intentional look at the numbers from which the CDC was using indicates that the numbers were far from accuratesomething the CDC would later admit to. The numbers were inflated. In his book, Oliver says:

the CDC researchers did not calculate the 400,000 deaths by checking to see if the weight of each person was a factor in his or her [or their] death. Rather, they estimated a figure by comparing the death rates of thin and heavy people using data that were nearly thirty years old. Although heavier people tend to die more frequently than people in mid-range weights, it is by no means clear that their weight is the cause of their higher death rates. It is far more likely that their weight is simply a proxy for other, more important factors such as their diet, exercise, or family medical history. The researchers, however, simply assumed that obesity was the primary cause of death, even though there was no clear scientific rationale for this supposition.

In other words, the CDC contrived this number from an estimation after reviewing data that was thirty years old. It was never a calculated number concluded from their own intense research; it was a scientific guess made with hopes to punish fat people for our bodies. And it worked. As Oliver names, fat people do tend to die at higher rates than our thin counterparts, but it isnt because of our weight. We tend to die at higher rates than thin people because doctors misdiagnose us, or refuse to treat us, due to our fatness.

A year after they published the report, in April 2005, the CDC released another reportalso through JAMAwherein they not only offered a much smaller number of deaths per year due to obesityless than 26,000, to be exactbut also claimed that moderately overweight people live longer than people at a normal weight. But the damage had already been done. Around the world, people were using the CDCs original numbers as fuel for the war waged on fat people. And I would wager that the damage is still being done. No one is dying from being obese. Full stop. Fat people are dying because of a medical industrial complex committed to seeing our fatness as death; we are dying because we lack proper resourceslike housing and employmentthat would provide us with money, healthcare, and a roof to protect us; fat Black people in particular are dying, I argue, because of an inherently anti-Black system of policing that sees us as deadly beasts that need to be put down.

What is happening to fat people, the societal and systemic bias and marginalization we have to navigate, is in large part due to the one CDC report heard around the world. And to this day, the CDC continues to refer to obesity as an epidemic, and have even gone as far as to say that fat people are at higher risk of contracting and dying from COVID-19.

Some may argue that the CDC originally claimed that masks were ineffective as a way to retain the already-small supply of masks for healthcare providers and medical officials. Others may argue that the CDC made this claim due to ever-developing research around the virus. I am arguing, however, that the CDC made the claim that masks are ineffective because the CDCs sole purpose is to provide scientific legitimation of the U.S. as a eugenicist project through medical genocide. As outlined in this essay, the CDC has a history of releasing deadly information and later backtracking on it when the damage has already been done.

Choosing to tell the public that supplies that could benefit everyone is ineffective, rather than calling for more supplies to be createdin the midst of a global pandemic, no lessis eugenics. Making the conscious decision to tell the general public that something is ineffective when you have not done all of the necessary research, especially when medical officials are using the very same equipment, is medical and scientific genocide.

Scientists, researchers, and medical professionals can make mistakes. They are human, after all. As a fat person whose daily reality has in large part been warped by the violent report the CDC released over ten years ago, however, I am not convinced that any of this is a mistake. This feels far too intentional and far too familiar. In the midst of a very real pandemic, the CDC is handling it precisely the same as they did a false pandemic which they helped to create. For this reason, along with the fact that theyve been radio silent about the way COVID-19 has impacted Black communities especially, I have very little trust in the CDC, as I have no room in my politic for anti-fat science, eugenics, or medical genocide. I hope we choose to make a collective push for a more ethical research organization to lead on these issues soon. Lest we wait for thousands of more lives to be lost due to the CDCs incompetence.

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We are Witnessing The CDC's Violent Eugenicist History in Real-Time - Wear Your Voice

Dennis WardFace to Face More than 100 Indigenous women in Canada have come forward with stories of forced or coerced sterilization and lawyer Alisa Lombard says its nothing new in Canada, nor is it illegal.

I think that the practice of forced sterilization is symptomatic of a colonial hangover. And I think it has a lot to do with eugenics of course, these old ideas that some people should have children and others are not fit to, Lombard told Face to Face. Eugenics was a widely accepted theory not so long ago. It was a theory that was attempted to be brought into legislation in Saskatchewan and only failed by one vote.

It was, in fact, brought into legislation in Alberta and British Columbia.

Lombard is a partner with Saskatchewan based, Semanganis Worme Lombard and is heading up a proposed class action lawsuit representing Indigenous women who have been forced or coerced into sterilization.

Forced sterilization is a procedure more commonly known as getting your tubes tied, but without the proper and informed consent of the woman involved.

Those women, and potentially many more are hoping to have their day in court in an effort to prevent the practice of forced sterilizations from continuing, to find accountability through investigation and receive some form of reparation.

Lombard feels forced sterilization is just one more indication of systemic racism within the healthcare sector.

According to Lombard, those in positions of authority feel they should make decisions make life changing, body altering decisions on behalf of those who they think wont.

The practice, and the efforts to stop it have garnered international attention.

Lombard presented to the United Nations Committee Against Torture in Geneva, Switzerland.

The UN Committee issued a number of recommendations to the Canadian government, including investigating the practice, punishing those who perform it and providing reparations to those who have undergone the procedure.

In our clients view, whatever Canada has done is wholly inadequate and really not measured to the seriousness of the violations that are at stake here, said Lombard.

The United Nations Committee Against Torture unequivocally called for sterilization or sterilization without consent a form of torture and cruel and degrading treatment and so its our clients position that such terrible treatment, such egregious treatment requires some responses that are measured to the harms.

The practice of forced sterilization was also mentioned numerous time in the final report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.

In the report, the commissioners wrote, the forced sterilization of women represents directed state violence against Indigenous women, and contributes to the dehumanization and objectification of Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people.

The final report pointed to forced sterilization as one of Canadas genocidal acts of conduct, something Lombard agrees with.

According to Lombard, the theft of an Indigenous womans ability to give birth and the ability to pass on rights and title, culture and language says to her the life of Indigenous women, children and families simply arent worth protecting.

Lombard said the goals of the proposed class action lawsuit are to ensure no woman is subjected to forced sterilization but there is, of course, a desire for reparations.

This practice has destroyed families, has destroyed marriages, has caused siblings to wonder why they dont have more siblings, has affected the self concept of our clients as women, as Indigenous women, as life givers in their nation. And so, although there is no amount of money that can truly compensate them for the pain that they endured, and that they continue to endure both mentally, physically, emotionally and spiritually, a form of reparation is necessary, said Lombard.

dward@aptn.ca

@denniswardnews

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Forced sterilization a symptom of colonial hangover says lawyer - APTN News

As we are seeing now during the coronavirus pandemic, a combination of accidental and intentional failures exposed disabled inmates in institutions to the worst effects of the 1918 flu pandemic, which killed more 670,000 Americans and more than 50 million people worldwide. The lessons that could have been learned from the experiences a century ago are as forgotten as the people themselves; people who were trapped inside places like the Massachusetts School when the first sick patient was carted out and died in a small infirmary in September 1918.

State schools for the so-called feeble-minded were originally devised as small experimental settings. The goal of early reformers was to provide free education for people with cognitive and developmental disabilities. It was a radical notion. Opened in 1848, the Massachusetts School was the first public institution of its kind in America, and by 1918, there were roughly two dozen like it elsewhere in the country. But by then, much had changed.

In an effort to improve the health of the pupils, institutions began moving out of cities in the late 1800s. Superintendents, most of whom were physicians, not educators, had begun to recognize the benefits of fresh air and exercise, and at their urging, states spent lavishly, purchasing enormous parcels of land on which two- and three-story buildings could be situated at a distance from one another. With additional room came growth, and eventually these institutions housed permanent custodial populations in separate buildings from pupils.

Designed by famed architect William Preston the designer of the very first bungalow the Massachusetts School was one of the finest examples of disability accessible architecture in the world. The school moved from South Boston to Waltham in the late 1880s, and the campus featured state-of-the-art amenities like steam heat, electric light, and water-closets. Pupils slept in large ward rooms, divided by gender, with ample space between the beds.

However, as was the case elsewhere, the funding that states were willing to put into the institutions did not keep pace with needs as the institutions continued to grow. That growth was fueled by misapplications of science, medicine, and testing much of it false which were used to demonize people with disabilities. Institutions were packed with people deemed undesirable. Chronic overcrowding became the norm. The beds were pushed together. Then people slept on floors, in hallways, and in dining halls. Families were discouraged from visiting.

By 1918, with the Massachusetts School leading the way, state schools for the feeble-minded were no longer small or experimental. They housed tens of thousands of people, young and old. People who failed IQ tests or came from poor families. People with cerebral palsy and Down syndrome. Most of them undesirable and all of them in the institution for life.

With the outbreak of World War I, staffing at institutions dropped precipitously. The Massachusetts School had 124 vacancies. The superintendent, Walter Fernald, even sent residents of the institution to serve in the Army to reduce the number of inmates. When the viral outbreak hit, he was not even there. He was out of state, caring for his adult son who was sick with the flu, and would ultimately die.

With doctors still uncertain about even the most fundamental aspects of transmission, infection, and treatment, the disease arrived at the school on September 17 and swept through the crowded wards. Over the next six weeks, patients who were already vulnerable, succumbed, one after another. While the infection rate is estimated to have been 25 percent of the general population, 778 of the 1,600 inmates at the Massachusetts School fell ill.

In one building alone, only 15 of the 189 inmates came through without having caught the flu. Five people were responsible for caring for all of them. With an ailing and diminished staff, the institution turned to the inmates to act as nurses for one another. When the outbreak was done, more than 88 inmates had died, 5.5 percent of the population of the school and more than eight times the mortality rate in the rest of Waltham. Communal bathrooms, crowded and shared living conditions, linked ventilation, and understaffing had hastened the viruss spread and devastated the school.

The Massachusetts School was not alone. The mortality rate at the Wisconsin Home for the Feeble-minded in Chippewa Falls, Wis., was between 4 and 10 percent. There are two reasons for the lack of precision in the data. Like the new coronavirus, little was actually known about fundamental aspects of the disease, and also, nobody cared much to measure its impact on the types of people locked inside.

The same is true today. This week, more than a month into the outbreak in the United States, the CDC was still considering whether or not to keep a separate tally of institutional deaths, even though the same conditions from a century ago have ensured that facilities today are just as dangerous.

In the wake of the 1918 pandemic, institutions weighed what to do. Like many of his colleagues, the superintendent of the Wisconsin School, A.L. Beier, obfuscated what had happened by praising the efforts of the employees in heroic language, rather than as the victims of underfunding and poor planning that they were. Then he downplayed the deaths, and tried to move on.

Looking back in 1920 on deaths at the institution over the previous two years he casually wrote, The mortality rate is somewhat higher than any previous biennial death rate, but if the deaths that were due to influenza were excluded, the rate compares favorably with that of the preceding biennial period. In 1918, deaths from influenza and related respiratory illnesses accounted for more than half the deaths at the institution.

The only change Beier suggested was the construction of a modest quarantine space that could double as a welcome and receiving area for future inmates and their families when there wasnt a quarantine in effect.

Elsewhere there was a similar agreement to look forward rather than make changes to institutional settings. Americans moved forward by looking upon people with disabilities with growing resentment. Eugenics paved the way. Many people felt that healthy young men had gone off to die in the war, depriving America of a generation of their healthy offspring. What we were left with was a degenerate stock of people who were unwanted.

While Fernald was, in the years following the war, avowedly opposed to eugenics, others were not. Their ideas would ultimately make their way into Congress in the form of anti-immigrant laws, then to the Supreme Court and the infamous Buck v. Bell decision that allowed for the sterilization of people with disabilities. Later, it led to genocide in the Holocaust.

Meanwhile, epidemics continued at institutions until the late 1960s, when disability rights activists began pushing for deinstitutionalization and the creation of Centers for Independent Living. When Nobel Laureate John Enders wanted to test the first successful measles vaccine in 1960, he ran the trial at the Massachusetts School (then re-named the Walter E. Fernald State School) because it was one of the last places in Massachusetts with outbreaks.

Former residents describe the same era as one in which there were consistent lockdowns for yellow jaundice a phrase for hepatitis which ran through the wards. Little was done because leaders refused to accept that institutions could be modified or funded in ways that would end the constant threat of outbreaks. Those modifications included moving away from the use of large buildings, reducing patient populations, increasing staffing, coordinating with state oversight agencies, and creating day-to-day mechanisms for accountability to families. A minority of experienced people suggested something radical that society refused to accept: no long-term care institutions of any kind.

The risk that we will come out of todays pandemic without being open to enacting substantive change is as high as it was in 1918. One difference may be that large numbers of disabled people live outside institutions and are fighting present-day eugenic impulses to cast them aside as undeserving of equipment they need to survive in the interest of saving the coronavirus victims who have been deemed more viable in the long-term.

If we emerge from this crisis without a commitment to dramatically transforming these mindsets, which allow us to segregate and victimize our most vulnerable citizens, we will continue to sacrifice them in every emergency we face. The warning signs come from the fact that the circumstances we see today are so distinctly similar to those of a century ago, howling at us past and present to recognize what does not, and what has not worked.

Alex Green is an adjunct lecturer in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and teaches disability history at Gann Academy.

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Just like the coronavirus, the 1918 flu pandemic ravaged group living facilities - The Boston Globe