Category Archives: Eugenics

Racial responses to immigration throughout the history of the United States. It begins with the arrival of the first non-white immigrants on U.S. shores during Californias gold rush. While the United States was actively attempting to increase immigration from northern and Western Europe, as soon as a different group of people began to arrive, Americans developed mechanisms to exclude them. In the 1870s, the slogan was and whatever happens the Chinese must go, and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 did exactly that: exclude non-white immigration from China. By the 1890s, a wide range of different immigrants sailed to American ports who did not look like the northern Europeans who were the first wave of settlers.

V. S. McClatchy, the newspaper publisher, president of the Associated Press, and virulent anti-Asian campaigner, embodied the growing animus toward immigrants through his writings and testimony before congress as he pushed for a ban on all asian immigration. Politicians set out to stop the new arrivals, and scholars promoted the superiority of the Nordic race through eugenics and race pseudoscience. In the 1920s, President Calvin Coolidge campaigned to keep America American and signed into law the Johnson-Reed Immigration act of 1924, which banned Asian immigration and severely curtailed immigration from anywhere outside northern Europe. Senator David Reed of Pennsylvania, the co-author of the law that is commonly referred to as the national origins quotas, wrote an article that ran on the front page of The New York Times under the title America of the melting pot comes to an end. Reed concluded, We have closed the doors just in time to prevent our nordic population being overrun by lower races. In the 1930s and 1940s, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime took eugenics to its grisly conclusion with the "Final Solution" and the murder of 6 million Jews and other minorities, which forced a national reckoning in Germany with the consequences of racial pseudoscience and a disavowal. In the United States, there was never a complete reckoning with the race science that justified the 1924 national origins quotas. Although the underlying pseudoscience was disproved, the immigration policies that were created based on eugenics persisted through the 1960s. Obscure foundations like the Pioneer Fund continued to provide money for eugenics research and white supremacist causes. Even as the Immigration act of 1965, which was passed as part of the civil rights movement, removed the discriminatory national origins quotas, Senator Ted Kennedy pledged that the racial makeup of America would not be affected: our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually The ethnic mix of this country will not be upset. Kennedys pledge turned out to be wrong, and a new anti-immigrant movement emerged in the 1970s at the intersection of environmental population control efforts and white supremacy, mirroring the eugenics and white supremacist coalition of the 1920s.

In the late 20th century, John Tanton, a small-town ophthalmologist in upstate Michigan, built an anti-immigrant movement from scratch by founding dozens of different organizations and courting donors like Cordelia Scaife May, who was one of the wealthiest people in the United States. even as the Tanton network of anti-immigrant groups including FAIR, CIS, and Numbers USA eventually distanced themselves from Tantons racist writings and affiliations, Scaife Mays funding dramatically increased their influence in Washington, D.C., and around the country. The Tanton network built alliances with conservative politicians like Colorado Representative Tom Tancredo and Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions. They also spread their anti-immigrant message through right-wing radio hosts and like-minded media figures such as former CNN and Fox Business host Lou Dobbs and Steve Bannon, then chief executive at Breitbart News, as they looked for a presidential candidate that could take their anti-immigrant campaign to the White House. They found him in 2016, when Donald Trump ran for president on a pledge to build a wall to stop an invasion of criminals, rapists, and murders from crossing the border. as president, he enacted a Muslim ban and sought to stop all immigration to the United states in order to put America First and Make America great again. Even though Trump lost in 2020, the fact that over 74 million people voted for him demonstrated that his brand of nativism continues to be a potent force in American politics.

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The White Supremacist Great Replacement Theory Has Deep Roots - Teen Vogue

Here's every pop culture thing happening this week you need to know about, from Adele's album to the third Princess Switch movie:

Sunday, November 14

The Business of Birth Control As Bedatri Choudhury writes,There can be no real gender justice without an unpacking of the power structures surrounding the reproductive health industry complexand of the choices that the market pushes on women. Abby Epsteins latest documentary highlights the dark history of eugenics and underfunded research that the birth control pill, often heralded as a feminist turning point in the history of reproductive rights, hides within itself. Premiering at DOC NY (SVA Theatre) at 1:30 p.m. E.T. Click here for tickets.

Adele: One Night Only A new interview and concert from Adele ahead of the release of her album, 30. 8:30 p.m. E.T. on CBS

Monday, November 15

Holiday Baking Championship: Gingerbread Showdown I'm already hungry. 9 p.m. E.T. on Food Network

Tuesday, November 16

Feel Your Way Through: A Book of Poetry by Kelsea Ballerini If you thought Ballerini's songs were poetry, wait until you read heractual poetry. Available where you buy books

Wednesday, November 17

Tiger King 2 The saga continues. Streaming on Netflix

Thursday, November 18

Young Sheldon Per a press release, Simon Helberg reprises his role as engineer Howard Wolowitz (in voice-over form) to tell the origin story of Sheldon Coopers complicated relationship with engineering. 8 p.m. E.T. on CBS

The Princess Switch 3: Romancing the Star This time there are three Vanessa Hudgens(es). Streaming on Netflix

Friday, November 19

30 The new album from Adele. Wherever you stream music

Saturday, November 20

Christmas Together With You Read an official description, below. 8 p.m. E.T. on Hallmark

During the Christmas season, Megan and her father figure Frank head out on a road trip to find his long-lost love. Along the way, Megan finds the love of her own life.

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Adele's Album and 8 Major Things Happening in Entertainment the Week of November 14, 2021 - Glamour

OPINION:

Glenn Youngkins success in Virginia lights a path for Republicans in the midterm elections.

Every GOP candidate must address President Trumps grip on the party base without repelling swing voters. Mr. Youngkin welcomed the former presidents endorsement but finessed the 2020 stolen election issue by emphasizing election integrity.

Nothing is more corrosive than the 1619 Project and critical race theory narratives that the Republic was founded to perpetuate slavery and Americans require a state-enforced cultural root canal. By that kind of thinking, Italians should be sent to rehabilitation camps for the Roman conquests of Gaul, Palestine and Carthage.

We should offer children a reasonable account of the nations founding, the shortcomings of our past and progress toward greater equality. CRT and 1619 Project narratives have as much place in social studies classrooms as does eugenics in the biology curriculum.Republicans should not genuflect to the racism and sexism peddled by radical progressives, feminists and black activists. Cultures in some minority communities need as much fixing as white middle-class structural racism.

Go to college campuses and, through private conversation, learn that the next generation is quite comfortable with our evolving diversity. Self-defeating obsessions with victimization are a more significant challenge for minority advancement than prejudices long abandoned with de jure segregationbut every child deserves an equal opportunity for success.

Eschewing identity politics obsessions, Mr. Youngkin promised to ban critical race theory from schools. He talked about generally failing schools, rising crime, the high cost of living and inflation and faltering economic growthand tax relief.

Defunding the police is morally bankruptrising murder rates in American cities are terrorizing minority communities.

The George Floyd tragedy compels focus on better-trained police officers, not handcuffing or taking them off the streets. Racial disparities in enforcement are not addressed by refusing to enforce shoplifting laws and other misdemeanors. Those policies just provide street academies for young criminals and deny the elderly reasonable access to groceries, drug stores and prescription services.

Free community college and college admissions without objectively applied academic standards do a disservice to childrenbright or ordinary, black or white. Requiring that college admissions and credentialling return to sound evaluations of aptitude and achievement and abandoning gender, transgender and racial quotasand whatever else the intellectually dispossessed left can dream up to fuel the injustice industrywould force elementary and high schools to better prepare students or be deemed failures themselves.

Republicans need to address that colleges produce too many ill-prepared graduates and get behind alternatives like apprenticeships that provide shorter and less costly paths to rewarding careers.

Reckless spending in Washingtonparticularly the corrupting $1.9 trillion American Rescue Planrequires the Federal Reserve to print too much money to enable too much borrowing.

As practiced by a politically compromised Federal Reserve Chairman, Jerome Powell, printing press monetary policy does nothing to create new chipmaking capacity, unlock overcrowded ports, or otherwise unclog supply chains.

The stimulus package has left a huge overhang of unearned purchasing power that drives up the prices for everyday essentials like gasoline, groceries and restaurant meals, as do Biden Administration policies that curb oil and gas production and drive up agricultural fertilizer and transportation costs.

No-work-required Child Tax Credit checks, bigger food stamps and health insurance subsidies make America the first civilization with a leisure class at the bottom and chronically short of workers.

Republicans should affirm that the transition to a carbon-free economy at midcentury requires adequate sources of fossil fuels today and for all Americans to pitch in and work. Not bask in the largess of reparations from a government that confuses printing money of rapidly declining value with redressing the sins of folks who lived seven generations ago or in biblical times.

Democrats are all about the negative. Whites are endemic racists, markets and society are rigged, and American power in the world is a force for evil. The horrific conditions that will beset Afghanistan this winter is a stain on the souls of President Biden and the progressive foreign policy establishmentthey knew what would happen and withdrew American forces anyway.

The world is a nasty place. Open borders will only overwhelm and impoverish Americans who must compete for jobs and educational resources with mass migration of unskilled workers that flood labor markets.

At every opportunity, Republicans should pound Democrats for their irresponsible defense and open-border policies. Those self-serving progressive peddlers of national doubt, guilt, weakness and appeasement deprive the world of some shield against evil and Americans of the security and opportunities for decent lives they deserve.

Peter Morici is an economist and emeritus business professor at the University of Maryland and a national columnist.

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Virginia's Youngkin shows Republicans how to win in the midterms - Washington Times

November 8th marks the end of a period of time I sometimes like to call intersex season, or more glibly, interseXmas, as letterer Jae Lin once painted on a holiday ornament. Between Intersex Awareness Day on October 26th and Intersex Day of Remembrance (IDoR) on November 8th, brands social accountsand even some government buildingslight up in yellow and purple. Meanwhile, those of us involved in creating intersex media are left to wrestle with ~feelings~ around this temporary visibility and care.

Intersex season is joyful in that intersex people are generally warmer to each other, content calendars become available to us to provide more opportunities for education, and many of us are launching heartfelt advocacy projects into the world.

But intersex season is also a heavy time. IDoR is a reminder of the origins of medical and state violence against those of us whose bodies threaten a social order built on binary, anatomical reproductive roles. Its an endcap that feels hard and flinching.

IDoR commemorates the birthday of one figure in this history, Herculine Barbin. In mid-1800s France, Herculine kept diaries about her own experiences. Hers are some of our earliest found first-person accounts, in a time when European imperialism and eugenics movements would spread the poor treatment of intersex people around the world. Herculines diaries are also the seed of inspiration for the lamentably popular and communally criticized novel Middlesex.

No matter how many times I hear it, Herculines own story still chills me. When her sexual relationship with a woman was discovered, Herculine endured forced medical exams that focused on her unique genital anatomy being the cause for her wayward sexuality. Before anesthesia, forced surgeries were not yet common, but medicine was still given the power of enforcement. To prevent appearances of homosexuality, some European states forced people like Herculine to socially transition, no matter how theyd lived their lives. Herculine was driven cruelly away from the life she knew and forced to live as a man, leading to her death by suicide.

Herculine had no privacy, and no choice in her diaries being found, either. To call Herculine queer and intersex feels both tempting and inappropriate. I dont know what language she would have used for herself. All I know is that she deserved better. We still do.

For the past four years or so, my mind has been stuck on how to make todays intersex topics more accessible and expansive. This included political work as a Communications Director shaping ideas about legislation. It included work as a writer, trying to move beyond the flatness of forced infant genital surgery is bad, and into something more multidimensional. Intersex children become adults who deserve care and joy in the present.

During this years intersex season, a grant gave me the opportunity to pay fellow creators and activists to make a video series with this in mind. Among ourselves we often describe our dreams. One shared dream is retaining all of our dignity from medical institutions, living free from the legacy of Herculines treatment. The friends featured in these videos came together to select four topics that called to them at this moment.

Fundamentally, this video series became a push for more. Because freedom from abuse is a floor, not a ceiling. Joy is community, and joy is simply being able to exist in your own body. For intersex people who also hold other marginalized identities, that is uniquely political.

Days of remembrance seem to be about taking the joy with the pain. Theres been so much beauty, too. Im reminded of a surreal weekend several years pre-covid. A fellow member of an intersex advocacy group and I decided to drive from San Francisco to Seattle. Even though wed only be able to stay for about 36 hours, we decided that visiting a few other queer intersex friends was more than worth the drive. Together we were able to pool material resources and create a container for our joy. We melted into a puddle on the floor together, into the care of our chef friend roasting up breakfast, and into the sweet ease of shared understanding.

On IDoR I dream of being able to let my guard down for more than just one day. I want to feel that same gentle safety in my body when Im with my non-intersex queer and trans siblings, and beyond. I want the ease of existing in all spaces, free from assumptions about what body parts I do or dont have. I want to dismantle the surveillance of sex and gender. I want a deeper knowledge of the histories that brought us to this moment, so we can move forward with both confidence and humility.

Intersex communities are strong and vibrant. Our conversations beyond medical violations deserve space to be seen and grow. And we deserve softness in every season.

If youd like to check out the whole intersex community video series, you can watch it here.

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It's Intersex Day of Remembrance and All I Want Is Softness - Autostraddle

DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli, editor of the website TV Worth Watching sitting in for Terry Gross. One of the worst Supreme Court decisions in history, according to our guest journalist Adam Cohen, was the 1927 decision upholding a state's right to forcibly sterilize a person considered unfit to procreate - unfit because they were deemed to be mentally deficient. That decision is part of a larger chapter of American history in which the eugenics movement was behind preventing so-called mentally deficient people from procreating through not allowing them to marry, sterilizing them and segregating them in special colonies.

The Nazis borrowed some ideas from American eugenicists. The eugenics movement also influenced the 1924 Immigration Act, which was designed in part to keep out Italians and Eastern European Jews. Adam Cohen's book titled "Imbeciles" is about the eugenics movement in the early 20th century and the Supreme Court case legalizing sterilization. Cohen is a former member of The New York Times editorial board and a former senior writer for Time magazine. Terry Gross spoke to him last year when his book was first published. It's just come out in paperback.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

Adam Cohen, welcome to FRESH AIR. Let's start with what the eugenicists believed.

ADAM COHEN: They embraced the new genetics that was emerging in their era. And they believed that it could be used to perfect the human race. The word eugenics was actually coined by Francis Galton, who was a half-cousin of Charles Darwin, and it really derived a lot from Darwinian ideas. The eugenicists looked at evolution and survival of the fittest as Darwin was describing it. And they believed, we can help nature along if we just plan who reproduces and who doesn't reproduce.

GROSS: And who was considered unworthy of reproducing?

COHEN: Well, at the beginning, Galton looked at geniuses throughout history and looked to see if genius was genetic within families. And he believed that it was. But overtime, eugenics expanded quite a bit. And by the time it got to America, there were all kinds of categories of people who were deemed to be unfit, including people who were deaf, blind, diseased, poor was a big category, indolent.

So it was really in the eye of the beholder. People looked around, and they saw human qualities they didn't like, and they thought, we can really breed these out.

GROSS: And you left out feebleminded. What did feebleminded mean?

COHEN: Yes, feebleminded was really the craze in American eugenics. There was this idea that we were being drowned in a tide of feeblemindedness, that basically unintelligent people were taking over, reproducing more quickly than the intelligent people. But it was also a very malleable term that was used to define large categories of people that, again, were disliked by someone who was in the decision-making position. So women who were thought to be overly interested in sex - licentious - sometimes deemed feebleminded. It was a broad category. And it was very hard to prove at one of these feeblemindedness hearings that you were not feebleminded.

GROSS: So what sent you back to this unfortunate chapter of American history?

COHEN: Well, when I was in law school, I had heard of the case Buck v. Bell from 1927 when the Supreme Court upheld eugenic sterilization. But it wasn't formally taught in at least my class. And it's not taught in many Constitutional Law classes. But, you know, we knew it existed. And we knew the famous phrase that Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in the decision - three generations of imbeciles are enough. When I was thinking about something I wanted to write about, I was interested in the Supreme Court, but in many ways, I believe you can learn more about an institution and more about an ideal like justice if you look at where it's gone wrong rather than where it's gone right. And in any list of Supreme Court decisions that are terribly wrong, any list of the worst Supreme Court decisions, Buck v. Bell would have to rank very highly.

GROSS: And we'll get to more about that a little bit later. I want to get to the Nazis because I was dismayed to read that the Nazis actually borrowed from the U.S. eugenics sterilization program. What did the Nazis take from us?

COHEN: Well, we really were on the cutting edge. We were doing a lot of this in the 1910s and 1920s. Indiana adopted a eugenic sterilization law - America's first - in 1907. We were writing the eugenics sterilization statutes that decided who should be sterilized. We also had people who were writing a lot of, you know, what might be thought of as pro-Arian theories. So you have people like Madison Grant who wrote a very popular book called "The Passing Of The Great Race," which really talked about the superiority of Nordics, as he called them, and how they were endangered by all the brown people and the non-Nordics who were taking over.

A lot of those ideas were really precursors to Nazism. And also, people forget now, but there was - you know, there was some strong pro-Nazi sentiment in the United States before World War II. In New York, there were pro-Nazi rallies. In some intellectual circles it was not uncommon to find people who actually espoused Nazism. So one of the characters in my book, Harry Laughlin, who ran the Eugenics Record Office on Long Island, a guy who grew up in Missouri, a one-time agriculture professor, he was pro-Nazi. He corresponded with Nazi scientists. And he wrote with pride in his eugenic journal that the Nazis were looking to his model statute and American eugenics to plan their racial program.

GROSS: When immigration is such a contested issue, it's very interesting to learn - 'cause I didn't know this - that the immigration law of 1924 is connected to the eugenics movement. What was the law and how was it connected to eugenics?

COHEN: Yeah, so the 1924 law really changed American immigration dramatically whereas in the old days, people would pretty much just show up at Ellis Island. The people who supported the Immigration Act of 1924 wanted to maintain the racial composition of the United States, so they imposed national quotas, which actually set the immigration from different countries on what that country's percentage of the population was in 1890. And the idea was that was a time when there were a lot of, you know, so-called Nordics in the United States.

So by imposing these national quotas, more people would come in from places like England and fewer would come in from Eastern Europe and Italy. And a big concern was, for these folks, the immigration of particularly Eastern European Jews and Italians. And the degree to which eugenics was just squarely in the discussion of the Act was rather shocking. One of the villains of my book, Harry Laughlin, not only testified repeatedly about eugenics while Congress was considering the law, but he was actually appointed expert eugenics agent by Congress. And when I was looking through his papers in Missouri, there was letterhead - the U.S. Immigration Committee. It said, Harry Laughlin, Expert Eugenics Agent - kind of chilling.

GROSS: So were Jews from Eastern Europe and Italians considered mentally deficient?

COHEN: They were. And there was a lot of bogus science at the time. And there was one well-publicized study that purported to find that between 40 and 50 percent of Jews who were arriving from Eastern Europe at Ellis Island were feebleminded. And it's really shocking to go back and read the way in which people wrote about immigrants in those times, and it definitely does parallel things going on today, but even harsher rhetoric.

You know, so someone like Madison Grant, this popular eugenics writer, the way he wrote about walking around his beloved city of New York and seeing these Polish Jews walking down the street in their, you know, ugly Polish-Jewish clothing and knowing that they were trying to join our society and marry our women, it was really - it was very crude and it was a great fear at the time. And, you know, one place in which this is reflected is in the book, "The Great Gatsby," which, you know, unfolds in the 1920s. Tom Buchanan, who is Daisy Buchanan's husband, at one point at a luncheon just goes off about how he's reading this great book, which appears to be a reference to one of these two best-sellers of the time, and he says that he, you know, he's shocked to see that, you know, all these colored people are rising up around the world and they're going to swamp the white race. This was a real fear of the middle and, particularly, upper classes at the time.

GROSS: So the immigration law of 1924, which should we say limited or prevented Jews and Italians from immigrating?

COHEN: Limited extremely. So there were some but the numbers fell so dramatically.

GROSS: OK. So that law was passed just in time for the Holocaust. So how did that come into play and therefore how did eugenics come into play in preventing Jews from seeking safe haven in the U.S. during the Holocaust?

COHEN: It absolutely did prevent many Jews from coming to America at the time. Under the old immigration laws, where it was pretty much, you know, show up, they would've been able to immigrate. But suddenly they were, you know, trapped by very unfavorable national quotas. So this really was a reason that so many Jews were turned away. And one very poignant aspect of it that I thought about as I was working on the book is in the late '90s, some correspondence appeared - was uncovered - in which Otto Frank was writing repeatedly to the State Department begging for visas for himself and his wife and his two daughters, Margot and Anne, and was turned down and that was because there were now these quotas in place. And if they had not been, it seems clear that he would've been able to get a visa for his whole family, including his daughter, Anne Frank.

So when we think about the fact that Anne Frank died in a concentration camp, we're often told that it was because the Nazis believed that Jews were genetically inferior, that they were lesser than Aryans. That's true, but to some extent, Anne Frank died in a concentration camp because the U.S. Congress believed that as well.

GROSS: That's just chilling. So in talking about that 1924 immigration law, were Asians included too?

COHEN: Yeah. Well, it - you know, the national quota...

GROSS: Or I should say excluded too (laughter).

COHEN: Yeah. Well, the national quota did not work out well for them 'cause there were so few around in 1890. And on the West Coast, it was actually a big issue. So Asians were another target.

GROSS: And what did the eugenicists have to say about Asians?

COHEN: Yeah, you know, not Nordic types, so not good.

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is journalist Adam Cohen. We're talking about his new book, "Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, And The Sterilization Of Carrie Buck." We'll talk more about the eugenics movement here in the U.S. after we take a short break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF THE WESTERLIES SONG, "PLEASE KEEP THAT TRAIN AWAY FROM MY DOOR")

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Adam Cohen. We're talking about a very disturbing chapter in American history, the chapter of the eugenics movement early in the 20th century. His book is called "Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, And The Sterilization Of Carrie Buck."

So the eugenicists were partly behind the 1924 Immigration Law. There were laws that prevented people from marrying if they were deemed hereditarily unworthy. There were laws that allowed people considered feebleminded to be isolated in institutions in the U.S. What was the logic behind institutionalizing people who were deemed feebleminded?

COHEN: Well, the eugenicists saw two threats to the national gene pool. One was the external one, which they were addressing through immigration law. The other was the internal one, what to do about the people who were already here. And they had a few ideas. The first eugenics law in the United States was passed in Connecticut in 1895. And it was a law against certain kinds of marriages. They were trying to stop certain unfit people from reproducing through marriage. It wasn't really what they wanted, though, because they realized that people would just reproduce outside of marriage.

So their next idea was what they called segregation. The idea was to get people who were deemed unfit institutionalized during their reproductive year, particularly for women, keep them there, make sure that they didn't reproduce. And then women were often let go when they had passed their reproductive years 'cause they were no longer a threat to the gene pool. That had a problem, too, though. And the problem was that it would be really expensive to segregate, institutionalize, the number of people the eugenicists were worried about.

One of my villains in the book, Harry Laughlin, gave a major address in which he said that to get rid of the, you know, the one-tenth of the country that he was worried about, as many as 15 million people would have to be sterilized. So you couldn't put 15 million people in institutions. They understood that it just wasn't economically feasible. So their next idea was eugenic sterilization. And that allowed for a model in which they would take people in to institutions, eugenically sterilize them, and then they could let them go because they were no longer a threat. So that's why eugenic sterilization really became the main model that the eugenicists embraced and that many states enacted laws to allow.

GROSS: And this was involuntary sterilization. What were the techniques that were used to sterilize men or women?

COHEN: Yeah, you know, for men, it was something like a vasectomy. For women, it was a salpingectomy, where they cauterized the path that the egg takes towards fertilization. It was not - in the case of women - not minor surgery. And when you read about what happened, you know, it's many, many days of recovery and, you know, it had certain dangers attached to it. And, you know, a lot of the science was still quite new.

GROSS: When you think of what surgery was like in the 1920s and the risk of infection, that's - it's so risky, you know, even beyond the - just the wrongness of forcibly sterilizing people, to subject them to surgery and the possibility of terrible infections just seems so - it's just so horrible that our government did that.

COHEN: It seems horribly invasive. And when you add on to all that the fact that in many, many cases the women involved were not told what was being done to them. They might be told that they were having an appendectomy. Or - you know, they weren't being told that the government has decided that you are unfit to reproduce and we're then going to have surgery on you. So that just compounds the horror of the situation.

GROSS: This was an era when birth control was still controversial but was before the era where abortion was legalized. Abortion is such a lightning rod issue now in the United States and it has been for decades. So one of the major groups that opposes abortions, of course, is the Catholic Church. Where was the Catholic Church on the issue of forced sterilization?

COHEN: Well, you know, the Catholic Church was actually fairly heroic on this issue. And conservatives often point to the eugenics era as one where they feel, you know, they got it right. And when it reaches the Supreme Court, the only dissenting justice in the case of Buck v. Bell is the only Catholic on the court. So at a time when, you know, it's hard to imagine, but there weren't public interest groups that were looking out for the interests of women, of institutionalized people.

A lot of the progressives of the era, including Teddy Roosevelt, Louis Brandeis, the great progressive justice and even people associated with the fledgling ACLU, American Civil Liberties Union, they supported eugenics. So it was really a situation where there were almost no advocates for the women involved. The Catholic Church was one because they believed that - not only did they believe in reproduction, but they believed that people should be judged by their souls, not by these attributes that the eugenicists were so focused on. And in many states, when there was a eugenic sterilization bill before the legislature, the people who showed up to oppose it were Catholics, they were priests, they were nuns. And there were states like Louisiana with high Catholic populations where eugenic sterilization laws were voted down really because of the Catholic Church.

GROSS: Carrie Buck was chosen to be the subject for a test case for a Virginia law allowing forced sterilization of people considered feebleminded. And that case made it to the Supreme Court. It's this case that's the main focus of your book. And it resulted in a decision that allowed states to forcibly sterilize people deemed feebleminded. Why was a test case in Virginia considered necessary?

COHEN: In other states, they just passed laws and began sterilizing people. But one of the characters in my book, a lawyer named Aubrey Strode, really prevailed upon the Virginia hospitals to say you shouldn't sterilize anyone until we know that it's constitutional. And under his legal advice, that's what everyone agreed. So they decided that they would set up a test case, get it into the Virginia court system and, you know, hope that it went as high as the U.S. Supreme Court to get judicial approval for their law.

GROSS: So the person chosen as the plaintiff was Carrie Buck. She was, at the time - an inmate I think is the right word - an inmate of the Colony for Epileptics and the Feebleminded. What was this colony and why were epileptics and the, quote, "feebleminded" pooled together?

COHEN: Well, it started as an epileptic colony. In a few years, they expanded it to add feebleminded because they had so many people who were being designated feebleminded and they didn't really have a great place to put them all. And a lot of the hospitals were getting crowded. And at the time, there was this idea that, for both epileptics and the feebleminded, if you put them out in the country in a farm-like setting, gave them chores, that the fresh air would help with their recovery, although really no one was recovering.

GROSS: So why was Carrie Buck in this institution?

COHEN: Well, it's a terribly sad story. She was a little girl who was being raised by a single mother in poverty in Charlottesville - sometimes on the streets of Charlottesville. She got taken in by a foster family that wanted to help her to a better life or so it seemed. But they actually made her do all the work and didn't treat her very well. And she wasn't allowed to call her foster parents Mother and Father. And then eventually, she's raped by a nephew of the family and is pregnant out of wedlock.

At the time, that was a huge scandal in and of itself. And then when you add in the fact that if the facts came to light, their nephew could be prosecuted for a very serious crime, the foster family decided to have a feeblemindedness hearing for Carrie Buck and to testify that she was actually they said both epileptic and feebleminded - although, you know, total lies. She was not epileptic and never had a seizure. And everyone sort of agreed towards the end of her life that she had never been epileptic. She also wasn't feebleminded. She was doing well in school until her foster family took her out of school it appears because they wanted her to do more work around the house and to let her out to neighbors to do their housework as well.

So this is this poor young woman, really nothing wrong with her physically or mentally, a victim of, you know, a terrible sexual assault. And there's a little hearing. She's declared feebleminded. And she gets sent off to the Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, where as it happens, her mother, who probably was also not feebleminded, was already an inmate.

BIANCULLI: Adam Cohen speaking to Terry Gross last year. His book "Imbeciles" is now out in paperback. After a break, we'll hear more about the 1927 Supreme Court decision that includes the now-infamous line, three generations of imbeciles are enough. And film critic David Edelstein will review the new movie "Wilson" starring Woody Harrelson. I'm David Bianculli, and this is FRESH AIR.

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BIANCULLI: This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli in for Terry Gross back with more of Terry's 2016 interview with Adam Cohen. His book "Imbeciles" is now out in paperback. It's about the American eugenics movement and the 1927 Supreme Court decision upholding a state's right to forcibly sterilize people considered mentally deficient so that they wouldn't reproduce and degrade America's gene pool.

The plaintiff in the case was Carrie Buck, a young woman who was taken in by a foster family that didn't treat her well. When Buck was 17, she became pregnant after being raped by one of the family's nephews. Her foster parents asked for a hearing to have her sterilized. They testified that she was feebleminded and epileptic. Although Buck was neither, she was sent to a special colony.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)

GROSS: So Carrie Buck is sent to this colony for epileptics and the feebleminded. And after - I guess after she gives birth because she's pregnant during her hearing...

COHEN: Yes, yes...

GROSS: After she gives birth, she's sterilized.

COHEN: Yes. Actually, her foster family ends up taking her child and raising it as their own. And then when she's at the colony, the guy who's running the colony, Dr. Albert Priddy, is on the prowl. He's looking for someone to put at the center of this test case that they want to bring. So he's looking for someone to sterilize. And he sees Carrie Buck when she comes in. He does the examination himself. And there are a lot of things about her that excite him. She's deemed to be feeble-minded. She has a mother who's feebleminded. So that's good because you can show some genetics. And then they're hoping that the baby could be determined to feebleminded, too. Then you could really show a genetic pattern of feeblemindedness.

The fact that she had been pregnant out of wedlock was another strike against her. So he fixes on her and thinks, Carrie Buck is going to be the perfect potential plaintiff. And also, the pregnancy was important because the great fear at the time was that the feebleminded were reproducing very rapidly and they were going to take over the country. So if you have a woman who, you know, at 17 is already pregnant with what they would say was yet another feebleminded person, you know, she just fit everyone's fears of what was happening. So he chooses her, and then under the Virginia law, they have to have a sterilization hearing at the colony, which they do.

And they give her a lawyer who is really not a lawyer for her. It's really someone who had been the chairman of the board of the colony and was sympathetic to the colony's side. And they have a bit of a sham hearing where she's determined to be a suitable person for sterilization. They vote to sterilizer her. And that is the order that then gets challenged by Carrie as the plaintiff, first in the Virginia court system and then in the Supreme Court.

GROSS: So what was her representation like in the Supreme Court?

COHEN: Well, it was the same terrible lawyer who really was not on her side. And, you know, to read the briefs for her and against her is a dispiriting experience because the lawyer who was trying to get her sterilized actually did a very good job and wrote very complete, lengthy briefs. Carrie's lawyer wrote short briefs that missed some of the most important arguments on her side and then contained some facts and arguments that actually seemed to argue for her being sterilized. So he was not a lawyer who was really interested in preventing her sterilization.

GROSS: So Carrie Buck loses the case in the Supreme Court. The Court upholds Virginia's right to sterilize her. And Oliver Wendell Holmes, who I think was considered a progressive, writes the decision upholding forced sterilization. What was behind his opinion?

COHEN: Well, for me, this was one of the saddest parts of reading up on the case 'cause when I was in law school, Oliver Wendell Holmes was really held up as the pinnacle of American justice, as a heroic figure, someone who was wounded three times in the Civil War, as a great thinker and really a model for all aspiring lawyers and judges. He actually was in many ways - although he had this reputation of being a progressive - not a progressive and not a very good guy. He had been raised in the Boston Brahmin world of that era. His father was actually the man who coined the phrase Boston Brahmin. And that phrase embodied everything that they believed about themselves, right?

They took the word Brahmin from the Indian caste system. They believed that they were America's highest caste. And Holmes was raised to believe that he and his wealthy, quote, you know, "wellborn" Boston neighbors were the best people in the country or the world. And that was something that began to influence his approach to the law before - long before the Buck v. Bell case came to the Supreme Court. Oliver Wendell Holmes had written about eugenics, which he supported. And when the case got to him, well, he was just absolutely the wrong person for Carrie Buck to have decide her fate.

GROSS: So what did he write in his majority decision?

COHEN: You know, it was a very short decision, just about, you know, five paragraphs. But he packed in so many horrible ideas and misinformation that it was quite impressive. He had this famous phrase that is reverberated over the generations, three generations of imbeciles are enough. And by that, he meant Carrie Buck's mother, Carrie Buck and Carrie Buck's daughter. And a somewhat pedantic point but, you know, there were actually very precise categories of mental defect at that time. And the lowest category was idiot, the middle level was imbecile and the highest level was moron. Carrie and her mother were both determined by the colony after extensive, you know, unreliable testing to be morons. But Oliver Wendell Holmes actually, you know, demoted them in his decision and called them imbeciles, which was a lower category.

GROSS: So, you know, a lot of people just throw around words like imbecile and moron as, like, colorful ways of saying, God, that was such a stupid thing to do, what an imbecile or, oh, you behaved like such a moron. But I had no idea that those words had actually been official categories that were used to punish people, sterilize them or keep them in a colony.

COHEN: They were, and, you know, Carrie was a middle-grade moron according to these, you know, completely unreliable tests. So they were. But so the word imbeciles - you know, Oliver Wendell Holmes was a great wordsmith. And he chose imbeciles, I think, very intentionally both because it packs a lot of power into the word itself. But also, it was even more degrading than - you know, than the category that Carrie, you know, rightfully should've had. But, you know, beyond that terrible phrase - and it was terrible - you know, imagine you're going to the Supreme Court and hoping to have your right of bodily integrity not to have an operation to sterilize you performed on you and the response of the Supreme Court 8-1 is three generations of imbeciles are enough.

But beyond that, what was really shocking about the decision is that rather than just decide the case before them, which is what the Supreme Court is supposed to do, and which Oliver Wendell Holmes as a matter of his own judicial philosophy, he did believe in just narrowly ruling on the case before him, not having broad, broad edicts. In this one case, he writes not only that Carrie Buck should be sterilized, that the Virginia law is constitutional, but he urges America to do more eugenic sterilization. And he has this terrible passage where he says, 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. So at a time when we're hoping that maybe there'll be some insipient grassroots opposition to eugenics, an opposition to these terrible eugenic sterilization laws, the U.S. Supreme Court by an 8-1 vote by the pen of the great Oliver Wendell Holmes is saying, no, no, do more of this, pass more laws, sterilize more people. The nation needs it.

GROSS: I don't know, I'm speechless.

BIANCULLI: We're listening to Terry's interview with Adam Cohen, author of the book "Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, And The Sterilization Of Carrie Buck." Terry spoke with Adam Cohen last year when the book was first published. It's now out in paperback. More after a break, this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF THE WEE TRIO SONG, "LOLA")

BIANCULLI: This is FRESH AIR. Our guest is Adam Cohen, author of the book "Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, And The Sterilization Of Carrie Buck," which just came out in paperback. Terry interviewed Cohen last year when the hardback was published just about a month after the death of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

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GROSS: Your book's publication is coinciding with a vacancy on the Supreme Court. So what is it like for you to watch this battle over this vacant Supreme Court's seat having just published this book about what you consider to be one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in American history?

COHEN: In the preface of my book, I quote one of the oldest things ever said about the law from the Code of Hammurabi, which prevailed in Babylonia 3,500 years ago, and this set of laws had a preface in which the writer said the goal of the Code of Hammurabi was to bring about the rule of righteousness in the land so that the strong should not harm the weak. And I was very moved by that because even 3,500 years ago, humanity understood that the highest goal of law should be to make sure that the strong do not harm the weak. And what's remarkable is how, in our civilized legal system in the United States, how rarely we've recognized that.

So to me, that's always the test in the law. And when the Supreme Court has gone astray, it's been in cases like Dred Scott, where the strong were allowed to say that the weak, that Dred Scott, a slave, was not allowed to sue for his own freedom, in Plessy v. Ferguson, where the strong were allowed to say that black people had to sit in, you know, the colored section of a railroad, in Korematsu v. the United States, when the government was able to say, round up all the Japanese and put them in internment camps. And we see it in things like Citizens United - just a tendency over and over again to side with the strong rather than the weak.

Well, honestly, there are few justices who embodied that, you know, misguided ideology more than Justice Scalia. And while I'm sorry for his loss and his family's loss, the vacancy does create a possibility for us to get more of the kind of court that, you know, not only would we want, but I think even in Babylonian times they recognized a court that looks out for the weak and that doesn't reflexively side with the strong.

GROSS: So let's get back to the Supreme Court decision that upheld a Virginia law allowing the forced sterilization of people considered unworthy - like, mentally unworthy to have children. What happened to Carrie Buck after that decision?

COHEN: Well, she was sterilized. And, you know, to read about it is - you know, it does really underscore what a serious operation it was. She was operated on, she had, you know, a couple weeks of what seemed like rather painful recovery from it. And then as the model of the time dictated, they could let her go because she was no longer a threat to the nation's gene pool so they let her go...

GROSS: Let her go from the colony that kept her confined.

COHEN: Yes. Yes, the colony then let her go, and they found a placement for her. She - you know, the sadness just compounds. She had very much wanted to go back to her foster family, which was raising her child who would be the only child she'd be able to have. And throughout the process, they had said that one of the great things about Carrie Buck being sterilized is she would then be free to go back to live with the Dobbs family and that the Dobbs family would happily take her back. This had been all worked out.

So of course when they are letting her go, the Dobbs family, which now has her daughter, does not want her back, you know? And it's not clear if that's because they're worried about, you know, losing control of the daughter. But - so she's not allowed to rejoin her daughter. And she is sent off basically to a series of assignments to be housekeepers for various families. And she lives her life. She eventually marries and marries again. She, of course, never had children. And, you know, one of the poignant facts that came out towards the end of her life is that, you know, no one who knew her as an adult thought that there was anything wrong with her mentally. And one of the friends who knew her at an old age home towards the end of her life said she always had her eye out for the daily newspaper, was very excited when it arrived so she could, you know, read all the news and that she used to love doing crossword puzzles. So this was the woman who was deemed too feebleminded to reproduce.

GROSS: So the 1927 Supreme Court decision that upheld a state's right to forcibly sterilize a man or a woman who was considered feebleminded and genetically unworthy to reproduce, you consider that decision one of the worst Supreme Court decisions ever. You acknowledge there's a lot of competition for that. But why do you consider this one of the worst?

COHEN: Well, you know, if you start by just looking at all the human misery that was inflicted, about 70,000 Americans were sterilized as a result of this decision. So that's an awful lot of people who wanted to have children who weren't able to have children. Also we have to factor in all of the many people who were being segregated, who were being held in these institutions for, you know, eugenic reasons because they were feebleminded, whose lives, you know, unfolded living in places like the colony rather than living in freedom.

Beyond the human effect, though, there was something just so ugly about this decision. And, you know, when you think about what we want the Supreme Court to be, what the founders wanted the Supreme Court to be, it was supposed to be our temple of justice, the place that people could go when all the other parts of our society, all the other parts of the government were not treating them right. So Carrie Buck, this poor woman who has been raped, who has been wrongly designated feebleminded, who has had her baby taken from her, who is being held as a prisoner in his horrible colony, goes to the U.S. Supreme Court. And we all know what the court should've done.

Not only did it not do it, but the contempt that, you know, just dripped from this decision - three generations of imbeciles are enough, it's better for all the world, you know, if we sterilize more of these people. It just was a level of ugliness that I'm not sure we've really seen often in the Supreme Court.

GROSS: I didn't know about this 1927 eugenics Supreme Court decision until reading your book, and I was surprised to read in your book also that this decision has never been overturned. It's still in the books. So why is it still in the books? And does it have any meaning now? Is it being used to justify forced sterilization or colonization?

COHEN: Well, the court had an opportunity to overturn it in a 1942 case challenging the Oklahoma sterilization law and they specifically chose not to. They struck down the Oklahoma law but on very narrow grounds, and the justice who wrote the decision later said, yeah, we wanted to keep Buck v. Bell in place. And it is still being used. In 2001, a sterilization was upheld by a U.S. Court of Appeals - one step below the Supreme Court - citing Buck v. Bell. So it's still there and it's still being used. And, you know, honestly, we're living in strange times now. I think we all see that every time we, you know, turn on the news or pick up the newspaper.

Could this be used to approve, to uphold bad policies that our next president or our next Congress or, you know, some state legislature enacts? Absolutely. It's a menace as long as it is the law of the land. And it is the law of the land.

GROSS: Why do you think it's important that Americans know about eugenics and this chapter of American history?

COHEN: Well, you know, it is - it was shocking to me how little-known it is, and, you know, I didn't learn it in law school. The leading constitutional law treatise - you know, which is, over 1,700 pages - you know, has half of a sentence and a footnote about it. It's just not, you know, something that people are aware of. The reason it's important is that, you know, I think that the instinct to demonize the other, to try to defeat the other, is, you know, very - you know, deeply felt in our country and no doubt other countries. You see some of it in the immigration debate going on today. I think these instincts to say that, you know, we need to stop these other people from polluting us, from changing the nature of our country, they're very real, they may be growing right now. And I think that, you know, the idea that those who don't remember the past are condemned to repeat it, it's very troubling that we don't remember this past.

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The Supreme Court Ruling That Led To 70,000 Forced ...

Ginger Mouton, left, and Matt Hurt rehearse a scene from "So You Can Look Ahead," which runs Nov. 4-7, in LU's Studio Theatre. UP photo by Maddie SimsA girl from southern Italy arrives on the scene, a spotlight glowing around her as she stands on the streets of New York City in 1932. With the Great Depression in place and the eugenics movement at its height, this is where So You Can Look Ahead begins.

Lamar Universitys department of theatre and dance will present Edward Morgans play, Nov. 4-6 at 7:30 p.m., and Nov. 7 at 2 p.m. in the Studio Theatre. Morgan is also the guest director of the production.

It reflects on modern issues and questions about race and immigration, Morgan said. The issues and characters resonate with Americas ongoing conflicts over race, immigration and intolerance from all sides of the political spectrum.

So You Can Look Ahead tells the story of a young girl from southern Italy who immigrates to New York City with her uncle, as well as a middle class married couple, Stephen, who works for the Museum of Natural History, and Alice, a social activist who stands against anti-immigration movements and works in a soup kitchen at a womens home.

The couples Italian friends bring a young girl to the womens home. Stephen and Alices lives are thrown out of balance when they discover the young immigrant girl is pregnant.

Adding to the complication is the fact that Stephens boss is a eugenicist.

Eugenics is the belief that some races are superior to other races, scientifically superior, biologically superior, Morgan said. And part of (that) was a big anti-immigration movement.

Between 1890 and 1925, about 25 million people immigrated to the U.S., mostly from Southern and Eastern Europe, Morgan said.

There are Hungarians and Jews and Slavs, and some Poles and southern Italians, and they weren't considered white people what we consider white were not considered white at the time, he said.

The play has been performed in readings, but this is the first full production, Morgan said.

Ticket prices $7 for Lamar students with a valid ID, $10 for faculty, seniors and students, and $15 for general admission.

For tickets, visit lamar.edu/lutdtix.

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LU theater to present premiere of 'So You Can Look Ahead,' Nov. 4-7 - University Press

Is it OK for society to sterilize people? As in, make it so that they cant have children.

That sounds pretty horrible.

You know, before the Holocaust against the Jews even began, the Nazis were engaged in eugenics as in, weeding out people who were considered medically or genetically inferior.

People who were mentally disabled; people who were sickly; even people with epilepsy or cerebral palsy, even deaf people and blind people. Homosexual people; people who were depressed. Even people who were just weak.

Hundreds of thousands were sterilized as in, they were made so they could not have children, so their genes would not be passed on.

And in fact hundreds of thousands were killed, too a sort of Holocaust, based on the theory that they were inferior, and that it was the states job to improve the race.

Heres Hitlers order.

Let me read the English translation of the German.

Its an order from Hitler to medical doctors not to soldiers to kill people deemed inferior:

Reich Leader Bouhler and Dr. Brandt are entrusted with the responsibility of extending the authority of physicians, to be designated by name, so that patients who, after a most critical diagnosis, on the basis of human judgment , are considered incurable, can be granted mercy death. A. Hitler

A mercy death. Got it.

Do you think it was just them, just the Nazis?

There's a masters thesis from no-one less than Tommy Douglas, the Christian man, the progressive man, the spiritual leader of the do-gooders in the NDP. Its called The Problems of the Subnormal Family.

It was his thesis in March of 1933. Thats two months after Hitler became chancellor, by the way. Tommy Douglas was right in synch with the Nazis on this stuff. Do you think I exaggerate? Look at his advice.

Make it so you cant get married without the state giving you a permit. Make it so you have to give the world seven days' notice so doctors or others can object. Segregate people based on social status. Sterilization of physically unfit and mental defectives.

Thats your NDP saint Tommy Douglas.

That was 1933. Thats how it was. And thats how it would be in Nazi Germany.

On tonight's show, we'll look at Josef Mengele,Karl Brandt and the Nuremberg verdict on the trial of Nazi doctors.

The court that tried those horrific Nazis wrote down a code, a rule, like the Ten Commandments. It had ten points outlining human research medical ethics.

Where are our doctors today, upholding these values? Well, theyre being silenced.

The entire basis of medical ethics we use today comes from what we learned from the Nazis. And to his credit, Tommy Douglas himself later renounced eugenics, after seeing what Nazi Germany was like.

Eugenics are back. Segregation is back. Forcing people to take medical procedures on pain of losing their work and career and position is back.

How do you describe this massive ethics violation other than what it is a return to pre-Nuremberg values. Where doctors did what politicians ordered them to do.

Where deaths resulted.

Sorry, you tell me is there a single thing that has been done in the name of public health these past two years that a Nazi would object to?

GUEST: Cosmin Dzsurdzsa (@cosminDZS on Twitter)

FINALLY: Your messages to me!

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Is it OK to force people to get sterilized against their will? - Rebel News

History is shallower for Australians - white Australians - than it is for almost any other nationality. The past is closer to hand, more present, which might explain why its retention or destruction feels more personal, and why this play goes so quickly to concerns about how far the past can reach into the present. Such musings also go some way to explaining this play's key concept - bad blood - not, as it is in England, a synonym for a feud, but the idea that criminality can pass through generations. Put as bluntly as that, the idea seems related to eugenics, but that was not the author's intention I'm sure.

We're in Pyrmont, a poor suburb of Sydney in the 1960s where June Macreadie's personality dominates her family. She rails against her daughter, Margo and receives aggression in return, favours her boganish son Ollie and dotes on her whip smart granddaughter, Narelle. June's passion is the abolition of the death penalty, her fear is the corrupt local police's predilection for stitch-ups and her anxiety is that her estranged brothers' violence will leak out of her into future generations. Bad blood you see.

As the time frame moves to 2007 and then back to 1985, we see how these themes develop, mainly through the eyes of Narelle. Class issues are never far away: increasing affluence fails to lead to increasing power for the Macreadie family and people like them; as many problems are created as solved by the gentrification of post-industrial Pyrmont after the 2000 Olympics; and Narelle's impostor syndrome almost derails her law career.

This is fertile ground indeed, but Alana Valentine chooses to narrow her play's perspective rather than extend it. Jessica Zerlina Leafe is excellent as the nine year-old Narelle, but she is limited to clichs as the rebellious punkish 80s student. Janine Ulfane's June is never less than credible, but we do not need to hear so much shouting to establish the fervour of her convictions. If that soapy move is director, Tom Brennan's, choice, Fiona Skinner spending the last 40 minutes or so in a hospital bed as Margo pushes the politics and ideas aside in favour of the kind of family trauma that is a staple of soaps the world over. That the socially specific becomes the sentimentally generic is on the playwright.

At two and a half hours, it's a long haul over such familiar territory, especially as there is so much promise in both the first half and the excellent programme. Ten thousand miles is a long way for a play to travel in order to tell us what we already know.

The Sugar House is at the Finborough Theatre until 20 November

Photo Pamela Raith

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BWW Review: THE SUGAR HOUSE, Finborough Theatre - Broadway World

Ten researchers from NHGRI, led by Vence Bonham, Jr., J.D., acting NHGRI deputy director, have published a commentary in the journal Human Genetics and Genomic Advances that details the need for diversity and a unifying anti-racist ethos in genomics research. The commentary, entitled Cultivating diversity as an ethos with an anti-racism approach in the scientific enterprise, was accompanied by an op-ed published in The Hill by Eric Green, M.D., Ph.D., NHGRI director. These two publications reflect many of the key tenets associated with NHGRIs recent establishment of a new Training, Diversity and Health Equity (TiDHE) Office.

The key point is that diversity is not an outcome, but a process, the authors of the paper write in the commentary. It is not a one-time step, but a progression of steps that are intentionally built into the fabric of a lab, team, department, academic institution, or company over time.

The ten commentary authors emphasize the importance of diversity across all facets of scientific research especially in the field of genomics, which grew out of genetics and its troubled history with racism and eugenics. The authors discuss the need to build diversity into the fabric of the organizational culture in order to create an environment where team members can openly discuss race and racism within their institution and in their lived experiences.

The commentary identifies three distinct approaches that the field should consider while building diversity as an ethos into its culture. The first is to value diversity beyond the numbers, meaning that institutions should examine and correct the underlying structural issues that result in exclusion and underrepresentation. The second is to avoid viewing diversity as a favor to underrepresented groups; instead, it must be viewed as what it is a benefit to scientific enterprise. Third, there is a need to challenge institutional norms and to correct the structures that undervalue the work of minoritized scientists.

Rather than providing a step-by-step guide for how to challenge structural racism in scientific institutions, the commentary encourages those involved in the research community to begin by interrogating their own views and the norms they follow. We do not provide how-to guidelines in this commentary, the authors write. Instead, our recommendation is to start by intensifying the need for continuous reflection.

Dr. Greens The Hill op-ed reiterated many of the points made in the commentary. It publicly announced NHGRIs commitment to working towards a truly anti-racist environment and acknowledged that such ongoing efforts will undoubtedly involve discomfort, as even those who consider themselves allies will need to confront their own underlying prejudices.

These two publications greatly informed the formation of the new NHGRI TiDHE Office. Mr. Bonham is currently serving as the interim director of this office, with plans to identify a permanent director in Spring 2022. The TiDHE Office will work across all parts of NHGRI to support and coordinate training programs and workforce initiatives that increase and enhance opportunities for students and scientists underrepresented in biomedical research. It will also promote genomics research that addresses health disparities and improves minority health.

The TiDHE Office will also work across NIH and develop partnerships with outside organizations to further its goals of increasing and cultivating diversity and fostering health equity in genomics. For example, the TiDHE Office is currently working in partnership with many key stakeholders to begin implementing the NHGRI Action Agenda for Building a Diverse Genomics Workforce and has already hosted roundtables with private industry representatives to discuss these plans.

NHGRI is committed to cultivating diversity as an ethos and has established a concrete plan for addressing inequities within the organization and in the broader genomics community. Mr. Bonham has encouraged members of the genomics community to sign up to receive updates from the TiDHE Office.

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NHGRI researchers emphasize the need for diversity in genomics - National Human Genome Research Institute

by Shasti Conrad

Local elections dont just matter: They are a matter of life and death for far too many in our communities.

About a month ago, I learned that my hometown of Newberg, Oregon, became the center of attention for all the wrong reasons. The local school board voted to ban symbols such as Pride flags and signs declaring that Black Lives Matter, calling them political statements and therefore inappropriate for school. What they really did was politicize humanity and, in the name of neutrality, help the oppressor.

As someone who also had to navigate predominantly white spaces as a student of color, my heart went out to students who, in that vote, witnessed representatives of the community invalidate their entire existence as a mere political statement that didnt belong in a classroom setting.

The fact that Newberg is my hometown galvanized me to take action. And I am now working with people in Newberg to hold school board members accountable for this, by supporting recall efforts for Brian Shannon, and making the Newberg School District more welcoming and equitable. And while the story of Newberg is deeply personal to me, it is also far from unique. These incidents are happening in schools all around the nation and in our own backyard.

In Bellevue, candidate Faye Yang peddled dangerous misinformation straight from the eugenics campaigns of the early 20th century including claims that certain races have lower IQs. In Kent, there is a school board candidate amplifying the dog whistles of QAnon candidates an action harmful in and of itself as Kent is one of the most diverse cities in the entire nation. Constituents of Kristiana de Leon, councilmember for Black Diamond, Washington, have told her horror stories. She and I work together at my consulting firm.

In Enumclaw, a lone school board director resigned after less than a year into her appointment during fall of 2020. While her official statement claimed she resigned because this last year, particularly the last 6 months, has been incredibly difficult for all of [my family] and ultimately I need to do what is best for [them], the full story is that this director was harassed at work, including in her neighborhood, namely for wearing a mask and defending the school districts practice of acknowledging Indigenous land and peoples, an agreement reached in partnership with the Muckleshoot people.

This director brought her husband to school board meetings because parents followed her to her car, verbally abusing her. De Leon recalls attending one of these meetings, saying The vitriol during the board meeting was overwhelming. The amount of anger directed at masking, which rolled directly into tension over the acknowledgement of Indigenous communities, was palpable.

PTA volunteers and teachers in the Tahoma School District, including community members of color, have also been doxxed, harassed, and threatened over everything from masking to using pronouns to attending trainings on equitable teaching practices. The teacher union president also received threatening and abusive voicemails over a comment she made about her choice to discontinue patronizing a local establishment as a result of the owners political actions.

From conversations with constituents, educators, and neighbors, it was clear that this was a coordinated attack from the QAnon school board candidate. Much of this organizing happened on the private Facebook page, of which Kyle Meyers is an admin, said de Leon who went on to explain that much of this reaction is traced back to controversy of critical race theory (CRT) in schools. She added that she had seen screenshots from coordinated online efforts to get rid of any educator seen to support CRT. Its absolutely shameful that instead of putting forth policies, these people are running on a platform of terrorizing PTA parents and educators.

There are countless more stories throughout King County alone, to say nothing of the national narrative that echoes similar themes. A recent Salon article described how the GOP and the QAnon movement as a whole are regrouping to make school board narratives the new battleground. If this feels coordinated, its because it is; it is the newest chapter in the playbooks of the Heritage Foundation, ALEC, and beyond. Indeed, while the Koch brothers claim to disavow anti-CRT movements on paper, their long-standing history of antagonism against desegregation and basic safety measures such as masks in public schools, as well as ongoing contributions to conservative organizations, suggest otherwise. This is the monster that was decades in the making.

This toxicity is nothing short of an ongoing insurrection to terrorize people particularly Communities of Color who are working to increase equity and inclusion whether in schools or local elections. While some mobs build gallows and draw guns, others chase down teachers and threaten school board directors lives. Rather than taking responsibility to regroup their members, the Republican Party openly embraces this violent hostility while hoping that burned-out liberals and moderates will shrug off the dog whistles blowing louder and more fervently.

So, what can we do?

We can take what happened to King County Councilmember Kathy Lambert as an example of how we can organize to tell both ourselves and our elected officials that this is where we draw the line. Lambert signed off on her campaigns blatantly racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic mailer that sought to demonize her opponent by villifying King Countys only Black councilmember, Girmay Zahilay, as well as two additional People of Color and Bernie Sanders, who is Jewish.

The literature lit a fire under voters, elected officials, and activists alike, and the maelstrom of outrage was channeled into one central focus of demanding Lambert to apologize, and when that didnt happen, asking those supporting her to decide if they stood by her actions and words. While I was part of that effort to hold Lambert accountable resulting in her losing not only campaign endorsements but committee assignments the final say on accountability rests with voters.

Do not sit out this election. Vote like your lives depend on it, because they do. Defy the projections that voter turnout is predicted to be abysmally low. The future of healthy democratic institutions depends on us defying those odds and defying the rising tides of violent extremism that seek to silence us.

Editors Note: Identifying information about community members facing harassment and intimidation was removed to protect their privacy and keep them from further harm.

Featured Image: Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash.

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OPINION: School Boards and Local Elections Are Ground Zero for Our Values - southseattleemerald.com