Category Archives: Eugenics

A second film adaptation of part of the six-book series Dune by Frank Herbert is scheduled for release in October this year under the directorship of Denis Villeneuve. The new adaptation includes more actors of color than its predecessor. Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures/Telegram & Gazette via TNS

A second film adaptation of part of the six-book series Dune by Frank Herbert is scheduled for release in October this year under the directorship of Denis Villeneuve director of films such as Arrival and Blade Runner 2049. The new adaptation includes more actors of color than its predecessor, the universally negatively reviewed 1984 Dune, written and directed by David Lynch. However, whether or not the issues within Dune can be resolved by merely including actors of color in the adaptation is another issue entirely. The truth is, we dont really need another futuristic Dune adaptation right now. What we really need is a dramatic rethinking and retelling of the story.

Absolute power does not corrupt absolutely; absolute power attracts the corruptible. (Dune)

Articles and essays have dealt with the anti-colonial nature of Dune, its problematic use of eugenics, white saviorism and Orientalist tropes. But we will not resolve any of these issues with another film adaptation. The premise of the story is that, many years into the future, House Atreides assumes power of a spice-rich planet Arakkis over a crypto Arab people called the Fremen but is attacked by rival House Harkonnen, supported by the galactic emperor. The white heir to House Atreides, Paul, survives and is also the prophesied messiah (MuadDib) for the Fremen. He wages war against the Harkonnen, eventually defeating them and the emperor with the help of the Fremen. He then becomes the next ruler of the universe. But as he sees into the future, Paul realizes his actions will create a galactic jihad which will kill billions of people. This moment of reflection is meant to complicate his white saviorism.

Paul Atreides role as a white savior cannot be solved so simply. Dune cannot be truly anti-colonial because it still replicates Western ideas about power. Paul supposedly frees the Fremen from galactic colonial rule, but Dune really places the Fremen into a colonial binary. They are either colonized, incapable and unorganized actors without agency or bloodthirsty savages in an out-of-control religious war. Centering a story on anti-colonial rebellion does not make it anti-colonial if the indigenous characters largely adhere to dangerous tropes. Paul is a reformed colonial ruler and white savior who merely seeks the power to create his own larger empire. Any effective anti-colonial take on Dune would have to be a response to Herbert, which means not directly adapting Dune but dramatically retelling it.

Frank Herbert claimed in 1980 that Dune shows that humans with unlimited power will inevitably make mistakes, but the (super)human in question is white. Herbert wants to show how white, Western modes of power are inherently broken, but he cannot imagine anything other than whiteness as the dominant mode of power. The insistence that good intentions absolve heinous actions is not acceptable; it is apologist. We must understand that an unaltered Dune will merely replicate the same racial systems of our current predicament and limit its characters to the same fates.

The importance of eugenics in Dune is another irreparable element that needs to be rethought or abandoned. Here Dune is not alone other franchises such as Star Wars have also experienced the pitfalls of eugenics in the midichlorians and the Skywalker/Palpatine bloodlines. Paul Atreides is the product of selective breeding; he is the Kwisatz Haderach, or a super-being, who is destined to control the entire universe. The fact that we continue to cast white, male actors as Paul Atreides is troubling. We cannot ignore the atrocities forced sterilizations and abortions of women of color, the mass murder of Jewish people, gay people, people with disabilities, etc. committed in the name of eugenics. Eugenics is a racist and ableist theory, and it is still used in the U.S. by white supremacists, fascists and the far-right. Eugenics is not an ethical plot device; it never was.

He who controls the spice controls the universe. (Dune)

Herbert claimed he was inspired to write Dune in Oregon while studying destructive waves of sand, but he was writing during the Sahelian droughts of the 1960s80s, when myths about desertification blamed local people instead of global climate changes. In the Dune universe the spice allows for space travel, but the Fremen are unable to use it on their own. These environmental undercurrents point to neo-colonialist ideas about the preservation of the natural world. Paul, the environmental shepherd, is the only one who can save the sandworms who produce the spice. Environmental conservation language has long been used by colonial powers, and the informal empires that came after them, to justify foreign interventionism in the Global South. This parallels ideas about conservation today.

Although Herbert was great at conceiving how white, Western systems of power are inherently flawed, he was not able to imagine any better alternative. A way to move beyond the issues within a traditional Duneadaptation would be to more seriously consider Afrofuturism. A more deeply thought retelling of Dune could benefit from exploring the Fremens long-standing indigenous engagement with the science of their own natural world what values did they place on the spice and why? How did they imagine their own futures and in what ways had they been attempting their own liberations?

Dune in its entirety need not be forsaken; we must imagine new ways to remake it. The 2020 TV series Lovecraft Country is a great example of how to use classic sci-fi stories to make meaningful anti-racist ones. Lovecraft Country was not an adaptation of Lovecrafts work; it is a strong response to Lovecraft. Sci-fi writers of the future would do well to ask Afrofuturist questions about the kinds of writing they produce: Who benefits from future technologies in the worlds we imagine? Who builds these possible futures and to what end are these futures constrained by current power structures? The real questions for the 2021 version of Duneare Will we ever truly commit to holding sci-fi novels accountable for the racial environments they grew out of and the types of worlds that they create? Or will we continue to remake fantasy worlds in our own fragmented image?

Katherine (Hyun-Joo) Everett, ne Mooney, is a Ph.D. candidate of African history at the Ohio State University and has published an essay in Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective. Follow her on Twitter: @hyun_joo_kim

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Opinion: Reckoning with and remaking 'Dune': The limitations of world-making in sci-fi - OSU - The Lantern

INFINITE COUNTRY By Patricia Engel

To someone who grew up reading the giants of the Latin American Boom generation in translation Vargas Llosa, Garca Mrquez it was surprising that Patricia Engels third novel, Infinite Country, was not translated from the Spanish: The book sounds like Edith Grossman but with a borrowed amp and feedback. The prose is serpentine and exciting as it takes the scenic route to nowhere. There is a compliment in that. Her writing sets out to be majestic, and it is, like an overflowing souffl.

The novel follows a mixed-status family as they struggle to survive and reunite after a fathers deportation from the United States. The teenage Talia, American-born but raised in Colombia, escapes a reform school in the Andes and races to make her plane to rejoin her mom and siblings in New York. Twenty years of page-turning family history are told as she rushes to catch that plane.

The most unforgettable scenes in the novel are the intimate and meticulously rendered descriptions of Andean landscapes and mythology, of Colombias long history of violence. Engels capacity to dive deep into history and folklore extends also into her narration of the life of Talias father and the family patriarch, Mauro. One senses Engel building a mythology around him, too.

The novel captures the romance of the immigrants first days in America with a visceral tenderness. Their skin darkens in the Texan sun. They see the ocean for the first time. I feel sorry for their lost youth, then angry at their gullibility. For Talia and her family never lose their innocence, even as they withstand unimaginable systemic violence, and find phantoms of intergenerational trauma like buried mines inside themselves. Such windup dolls exist, to be sure, but most undocumented immigrants I know are being held together by faith and rubber bands.

Talias young mother, Elena, in particular, is presented as a saint, nave and eternally suffering an exquisite new iteration of a noble savage in the hands of a writer who is not herself undocumented. When the white owner of the restaurant where Elena cleans bathrooms rapes her, she feels guilty for her infidelity. The narrator points out that until now, she has been with no man besides her husband, a testament to her purity.

Elenas body, it seems, has integrity only when it is uncorrupted by knowledge and awareness. When she is in the hospital giving birth to her third child, a nurse tactlessly inquires how she plans to take care of three kids on one income. Elena thinks about forced sterilizations in Colombia, how they lured women to clinics offering free gynecological services and the women came out unaware they could no longer have children. To her, babies are not burdens. The scene implicitly links the American nurse with the centuries-old record of colonial eugenics imposed on Indigenous and Black women, and our brave Elena champions her reproductive rights.

But does she really know her reproductive rights? After her rape, she prays and panics until she gets her period. When my undocumented mother gave birth to my brother in this country, the nurses, always Afro-Latina or Mestiza, waited until my father was out of the room to discuss family planning not to talk about children as a burden, but to suggest social services that could help my poor family. But they knew sex was taboo for my mom, and that this might be her only chance to make a choice. Elena quotes the Colombian saying that a baby arrives with a loaf of bread under its arm as a sort of rebuttal. Such earnest, romantic repetition of ancestral wisdom in Latino art is often done by American artists who have choices, privileges and resources that our subjects, fictional or not, do not have. Literature about undocumented people in this country is too rare and too often written by writers whove never been undocumented for the literary world to continue to act as if we all still lived in Macondo.

This is a compulsively readable novel that will make you feel the oxytocin of comfort and delusion. The ending reads like child-of-immigrant fan fiction. Id hire Engel to ghostwrite my nightmares. Mauros love for his daughter motivates him to overcome alcoholism and homelessness, cross the border safely and reunite with the wife he still loves. The siblings whove never met yet smell familiar to one another. The novel closes as husband and wife are dancing, their bodies in perfect sync.

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In This Novel, Immigration Status Is Part of the Family Drama - The New York Times

An unexpurgated edition of Chips Channons diaries has finally been published

Mar 4th 2021

IN AUGUST 1936 Henry Chips Channon and his wife, Lady Honor Guinness, went on an official visit to the Berlin Olympic games along with a bunch of other British grandees. They had a simply wonderful time. They didnt pull off the ultimate social coup of having dinner with Hitlerthe closest they got to the Fhrer was when he visited the Olympic stadium and one felt as if one was in the presence of some semi-divine creature. But the rest of the Nazi elite went out of their way to entertain the visiting Britons.

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Hermann Gring was flirtatious, gay and charming. Frau Gring was tall, handsome and nearly naked. The Ribbentrops party lent dignity to the new regime. Just as thrilling was the spectacle of daily life. Everyone kept raising their arms and saying Heil Hitler! in a thoroughly captivating manner. And what about the rumours of terrible things going on in labour camps? Being a responsible MP Chips took a trip to one such camp and was impressed by what he saw. It looked tidy, even gay. The purpose of the camps was to wipe out class feelingnot something Chips was normally in favour of getting rid ofand such feeling has become practically non-existent in Germany. Chips concluded that England could learn many a lesson from Nazi Germany.

These vignettes are all taken from the first of what promises to be three volumes of the diaries of Channon, a rich American who climbed the heights of British society in the 1920s and 1930s and also became a Tory MP. The diaries were first published in 1967 in heavily redacted form: many of the subjects of Chipss indiscretions were still alive and able to sue. Simon Heffer, a journalist and historian, has taken advantage of the passage of time to produce an unexpurgated edition.

The diaries do more than merely titillate. They demonstrate just how many members of the British upper classes were either infatuated with Hitler or at least regarded him as a useful bulwark against Bolshevism. In one entry, Chips described a visit by his uncle-by-marriage, Lord Halifax, a Tory grandee, to Germany to go fox-hunting with the leading Nazis. He liked all the Nazi leaders, even Goebbels!He thinks the regime fantastic, perhaps too fantastic to take seriously. But he is v glad that he went and thinks nothing but good can come of it. (Halifax almost messed up the occasion by mistaking Hitler for a footman.) The diaries also provide yet more evidence of the vital role Winston Churchill played in saving Britain from the pro-Hitler sympathies of the upper classes and the cynical calculations of appeasing politicians. Thatfarceur would stir up trouble anywhere, Chips wrote, luckily for England and the peace of Europe he has no following whatsoever in the House [of Commons].

It is becoming fashionable on the left to dismiss Churchill as a racist. A vandal spray-painted the word on his statue in Parliament Square. During a recent discussion on Churchill and race held in, of all places, Churchill College, Cambridge, panellists competed to denounce him as a racist, white supremacist and eugenicist. Churchill certainly said some repugnant things about race. But by the standards of his time he was relatively moderate: he was much less enthusiastic about eugenics, for example, than many heroes of the left such as Sidney and Beatrice Webb, H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw and Harold Laski. He was mercifully free of the common vice of anti-Semitism. And as Channons diaries make clear he led the battle against the worst racist in history at a time when other members of his party and class thought labour camps wonderful innovations.

This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline "Nazi parties"

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A chronicle of the British establishment's flirtation with Hitler - The Economist

EditorsNote:All opinion section content reflects the views of the individual author only and does not represent a stance taken by The Collegian or its editorial board. Letters to the Editor reflect the view of a member of the campus community and are submitted to the publication for approval.

My name is Marley Lerner, and I am a junior studying womens studies and ethnic studies here at Colorado State University. I work for The Brazen Project, which is a student group on campus that works to remove stigma from abortion by talking about it boldly and without shame. A majority of what we do is host trainings and educational programs for turning abortion access advocates into activists.

Because we are a student group, we host a club meeting each month. Our club meetings are themed, so each time we meet we are discussing a different topic. Our meetings this semester are special because we have created a space for creative outlets. Each conversation we have can be heavy, so at the end of our discussion we have time for folks to create an art piece. Whether this is a playlist, a poem, a collage, a drawing or anything else, we have our club members submit them to us to go on our online scrapbook, also known as Tumblr.

Our first club meeting was on Feb. 1, the first day of Black History Month. Because of this, we decided to dedicate the conversation to the experiences of Black folks with eugenics and abortion and how that intertwined. We talked about the origins of birth control and Planned Parenthood, which were based in eugenicist ideology and other eugenicists that were infamous during that time. There is a history of white feminism in reproductive rights, meaning pro-womens equality in a white supremacist lens. It is important to make this distinction because white feminism actively impacted the eugenics movement. Because of this, one of The Brazen Projects biggest values is centering the voices of people of color.

The Brazen Project has a partnership with an organization called Soul 2 Soul Sisters. Soul 2 Soul Sisters is a Black womxn-led, faith-based response to the anti-Black violence in the United States. Their organization does a great deal of amazing work, some of which include artistic videos. We shared one titled Black Woman Body to showcase how reproductive rights impact Black womxn in a Black womxns narrative. After we watched the video, our club members mentioned that they got chills and that certain lines from the video were sticking with them. It is a very powerful video that is bound to leave an impact on anyone.

After we shared our initial reactions, one of our cohort members, Ellen, posed some thought provoking questions. The questions that burgeoned the most conversation were why are we watching this? and why is this important? The general consensus of the group was that this video and other art pieces like this are vital to the discussion of reproductive rights because it is amplifying Black voices and sharing a true insight into the realm of reproductive rights. This is not something that just impacts white women. This impacts all types of individuals capable of getting pregnant, and it is important for us to show those experiences in the best way possible.

So far, our Tumblr submissions have received a watercolor painting and a collage. We are hoping to get more pieces as the semester continues so that by the end, we can look over our online scrapbook and see physical representations of the conversations we had. If you are interested in The Brazen Project, you can follow us on Instagram @boldandwithoutshame, Twitter @_BrazenProjectand Facebook.com/brazenproject. We also have this link bit.ly/brazencc that you can sign up with us through!

Marley Lerner

Junior womens and gender studies student

The Brazen Project

Letters may be sent toletters@collegian.com. When submitting letters, please abide by theguidelines listed at collegian.com.

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LTTE: A message from The Brazen Project The Rocky Mountain Collegian - Rocky Mountain Collegian

The COVID-19 pandemic has been around for one year. It has been a devastating disease particularly in the Black community. During this time, there have been over 28 million documented cases in the United States and hundreds of thousands of deaths. Sadly, although Blacks make up 12 percent of the population and 12.2 percent of cases of COVID-19, they account for 16 percent of COVID-19 deaths. This level of disparity is not seen in other ethnic groups. Thus, medical intervention is needed to mitigate this disparity.

There is no cure or treatment for COVID-19. To stop the spread of COVID-19, governmental policies are needed to address the inequities in the physical environment, housing, occupation, education, and economic stability that increase the risk of exposure to COVID-19 for racial and ethnic minority groups. On an individual level, hand washing, social distancing and face covering are necessary. The recent emergency use authorizations of Pfizer and Moderna vaccines provide new tools to prevent COVID-19.

Many Blacks are reluctant to take the COVID-19 vaccines for good reasons and false information. The medical mistreatment of Blacks is well documented in the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment and the Eugenics program, both done from the 1930s to the 1970s.

I am here to say that much has changed in medical research. Informed consent is now required prior to research, and transparency is ongoing during the research. In the past, there were no Black researchers. Today, both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were developed by Black doctors. Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett, a native of Hillsboro and chairwoman of the Vaccine Research Center at NIH, not only developed the Moderna vaccine, but fine-tuned a new technology to expedite vaccine making. She made Warp Speed possible. Dr. Onyema Ogbuagu, director of COVID-19 research at Yale Medical Center, developed the Pfizer vaccine. The process of making the vaccine was very transparent, and research protocols were followed without the omission of any steps. The rapid release of the vaccine occurred because of the research of Dr. Corbett.

False information on social media should be ignored. Dont believe that COVID-19 is 5G toxicity, or the vaccine inserts a microchip for controlling and tracking your every move. I urge you to listen to Dr. Fauci and his team, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the health department and other credible physicians.

We are further reassured about the safety and quality of the vaccine because our own Dr. Pennie Hylton of Warren County directs Biomedical Advance Research and Development Authority, the HHS Agency that is responsible for the quality and safety of every batch of vaccine that is made in the US.

Both the Pfizer and Moderna Vaccines are 94/95 percent efficacious with minimal temporary side effects. Individuals with severe allergic reactions should seek individual care from a physician. To date, over 26,000 vaccines have been administered without a single death reported. Compare this to COVID-19. There are over 28 million cases and over 500,000 deaths. The vaccines are very effective in preventing COVID-19, while the risk of dying from COVID-19 is high if not vaccinated. Thus, the benefits of the vaccine clearly outweigh the risks.

For these reasons, I decided to be vaccinated. I received my COVID-19 vaccination on Feb 5. I encourage everyone to get vaccinated. It is easy to schedule an appointment to get vaccinated, although you may have to call more than once or leave a message for a return call. Phone numbers to call for an appointment: Warren County: 252-257-1185; Vance/Granville: 252-492-7915; Franklin: 919-496-2533.

In a pandemic, everyone can become infected. If over 70 percent of the population is vaccinated, a state of herd immunity will exist and, thus, the community/country will be protected from the disease. The health of everyone is interconnected. Thus, the health of the least of us determines our health.

Get vaccinated to protect yourself, your loved ones and your community!

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Why Blacks should be vaccinated against COVID-19 | Opinion | warrenrecord.com - warrenrecord.com

This past week, the Joint Rules Committee of the Vermont General Assembly set Friday, March 12 as the Legislatures crossover date.

What does that mean?

Every year, the House and Senate agree to set a deadline for policy bills that need to be voted out of committee to be sent to the other chamber. This is our internal deadline to set which bills move on to the next step or not, House Speaker Jill Krowinski said during the Joint Rules Committee meeting.

Why does it matter? If theres a bill that has your interest in the House or Senate, this is the moment where it may surge forward through the committee process, or land on the back burner.

Keep in mind the House and Senate rules committees can grant exceptions, and theres always the possibility of language being attached to an existing bill.

That said, this seemingly innocuous internal planning deadline actually says a lot about the legislative committee process and about the priorities set by leaders in deciding which bills will move forward, and which will not.

It also says we can expect a flurry of committee activity in the next few weeks as lawmakers rush to meet the deadline. Considering that the Legislature is not meeting during the week of Town Meeting Day, that ratchets up the deadline pressure.

Consider, for example, the House Human Services Committee. The panel plans to spend most of the week working on H. 171, which seeks child care financial aid and worker salaries. Work begins at 1:15 p.m. Tuesday, and the agenda indicates a vote may be possible Thursday or Friday.

Money bills such as the budget, transportation and capital improvements are exceptions to the rule, Krowinski said. And if something important comes up, the House and Senates individual rules committees can offer flexibility.

That might be needed depending on if and when Congress passes another coronavirus relief bill, such as the $1.9 trillion proposal.

You can watch any House or Senate committee hearing by going to the relevant committees page on the Legislatures website and clicking on the agenda for the week. Hearings are streamed live and archived for later viewing. Agendas are subject to change.

TUESDAY

A busy week in House Commerce and Economic Development kicks off at 9 a.m. with testimony on H. 159, the Better Places program. Reps. Mollie Burke of Brattleboro, Sara Coffey of Guilford and Kathleen James of Manchester are among the sponsors. At 3 p.m., attention shifts to H. 84, the downtown and village center tax credit program.

Should police in Vermont be allowed to use facial recognition technology on seized media when investigating child sexual assault, kidnapping and homicide cases? H. 195 proposes just such an exception, and the House Judiciary Committee will hear testimony at 1:15 p.m.

In House Education, work continues on a community schools bill sponsored by James (1 p.m.) , and the committees work on reviving the states school construction assistance program (1:40 p.m.).

At 12:30 p.m., House Corrections and Institutions gets a first look at S. 18, a bill which passed the Senate last week and eliminates good time sentence reductions for persons convicted of certain serious crimes.

At 1:15 p.m., Victoria Capitani, chairperson of the Dover Select Board, is among the witnesses addressing the Senate Education Committee on the state pupil weighting formula.

Should the Legislature issue a joint resolution apologizing for the Vermont Eugenics Survey of the 1920s and 1930s? The House General, Housing and Military Affairs Committee hears witness testimony on this grim chapter in Vermont history at 1 p.m. Tuesday, and again on Thursday.

WEDNESDAY

Starting at 9 a.m., the House Health Care Committee hears testimony on H. 210, a bill dedicated to eliminate disparities in health status based on race, ethnicity, disability, and LGBTQ status.

Another health issue takes center stage at 9 a.m. in the Senate Health and Welfare Committee, where S. 24, which would ban flavored tobacco products and e-liquids, will be heard.

Also at 9 a.m.: The Senate Judiciary Committee returns to S. 30, which would ban firearms from child care facilities, hospitals and government buildings.

At 2:45 p.m., the House Agriculture and Forestry Committee considers H. 65, which would reimburse up to 50 percent of crop losses caused by black bears.

At 3:15 p.m., the House Government Operations Committee continues work on a bill that would provide more staff to the Director of Racial Equity.

THURSDAY

The House Transportation Committee is proposing the Replace Your Ride Program, which would provide grants to lower-income motorists to ditch their older, less efficient vehicles for more environmentally friendly transportation, including electric vehicles, bikes and motorcycles. Testimony is set to begin at 9 a.m.

At 3:15 p.m., U.S. Rep. Peter Welch, D-Vt., briefs the House Ways & Means and Senate Appropriations committees.

The House convenes at 10 a.m. Tuesday, 1:15 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday, and 9:30 a.m. Friday.

The Senate convenes at 9:30 a.m. Tuesday, 1 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday, and 11:30 a.m. Friday.

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Look Ahead, Vermont: Crossover deadlines, child care proposal, and the legacy of eugenics - Brattleboro Reformer

The focus of Isabel Wilkersons new book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, is deceptively simple: Wilkerson rejects the notion that race and caste are synonymous. As she writes, the terms can and do coexist in the same culture and serve to reinforce each other. She continues: Race, in the United States, is the visible agent of the unseen force of caste.

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Sit with that as I tell you a bit about Wilkerson. She is a former New York Times reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for her work covering the Midwest. In 2010, she published The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of Americas Great Migration, an award-winning book on the migration of African Americans from the South to the North during the 20th century.

The word epic stands out to me as I consider Wilkersons work on the history of race and caste in our country and beyond. While she synthesizes the work of previous historians and sociologists in Caste, she also offers fresh analysis on the subject. Make no mistake: Caste is a big book and comes in for a hard landing in the readers psyche. As I read through its 400 pages, I couldnt help defaulting to superlatives and predicting that it will become an American classic.

Wilkerson writes that caste is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of ancestry and often immutable traits, traits that would be neutral in the abstract but are ascribed life-and-death meaning. Take in that excellent explanation of caste with this image: As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance.

In America, the implementation of caste has a solid start date going back 400 years to the time the first ship of the transatlantic slave trade set anchor in America in 1619. As Wilkerson points out, until that point, people of various nationalitiesincluding the Irish, Germans, Poles and, of course, the Britishnever thought of themselves as white. That construct came to life when they came together to create a new country and a new culture. The common denominator among them was their white skin, a prerequisite of belonging to the dominant caste. Black people, trapped in brutal enslavement, were on the bottom of this rigid, merciless construct.

Wilkerson elucidates the concept of caste as she examines two distinctive cultures. Indias centuries-old treatment of Dalitsa word that means downtrodden and has replaced the term untouchablesis an obvious comparison. Despite explicit protections in Indias constitution, to this day Dalits are regarded as subhuman; contact with the upper castes is tacitly forbidden. This ingrained expression of inferiority makes it nearly impossible for Dalits to move about in Indian society. One Dalit, a scholar who has studied in the United States, seemingly breaking out of the castes social strictures, told Wilkerson he wore shoes that didnt fit because he was too intimidated to ask a clerk for the right size.

Wilkerson shows that India is a natural template of a deeply rooted caste system when she writes about Martin Luther Kings visit to the country in 1959. The civil rights leader was visiting a school in Kerala for outcast children, where the principal introduced King as a fellow untouchable from the United States of America. Wilkerson observes that it was a moment of reckoning for King, who realized that the Land of the Free had imposed a caste system, not unlike the caste system of India. During Wilkersons research trip to India in 2018, as an African American woman she similarly discovered that caste in America was as entrenched as it was in India when Dalitsgravitated toward me like long-lost relatives.

The third braid of Wilkersons narrative brings in Nazi Germany and how its ideas of aryan superiority owed a debt to the American eugenics movement, which emerged in the late 19th century. German eugenicists consulted their American counterparts and widely read the movements literature in the years leading up to the Holocaust. German researchers also came to America to study Jim Crow laws. The American enforcement of racial disparities and the ongoing caste system influenced the drafting of the Nuremberg Laws.

In an interview with NPR, Wilkerson said that her intention in bringing Germany into her calculus of caste was to show how Germans have confronted their Nazi past through education and public memorials. For example, stolpersteines, or the Stumbling Stone Project, which a German artist began in 1996consists of brass plaques embedded in sidewalks in front of Nazi victims homes across Germany. The plaques form a decentralized, interactive monument. To qualify to place a plaque in front of their house, the occupants must research the history of the people who lived there before the war. People have to secure permission from the city and pay 120 euros to sponsor a stolpersteine.

Wilkerson also visits Germanys Holocaust Memorial, which sits at the seam of a reunified Berlin. The monuments location makes it impossible to ignore the countrys Nazi past. In New Orleans, Wilkerson reports on the 2017 demolition of a monument to the confederate general and slave owner Robert E. Lee. The mostly African American demolition crew was forced to complete the job under cover of night while fending off death threats.

In an interview published last year in The New Yorker, the philosopher Susan Neiman, an American Jew who has lived in Berlin since 1982, says that Americans have a lot to learn from Germany about confronting our painful history of slavery, racism and, I would add, caste. She notes that there are more Holocaust museums in the United States than in Germany, Israel and Poland combined. On the other hand, there are almost no museums dedicated to slavery in America. It took more than two decades to establish the National Museum of African American History and Culture after the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum opened in 1993 on the National Mall. Neiman says that the American preoccupation with the Holocaust is a form of displacement for what we dont want to know about our national crimes.

The Germans have a dedicated word for grappling with their national history, which loosely translates as working off the past. Americans have yet to begin the reflective and difficult process of addressing our racist past and continuing caste system. Imagine, says Neiman, a monument to the Middle Passage or the genocide of Native Americans at the center of the Washington Mall. Suppose you could walk down a New York street and step on a reminder that this building was constructed with slave labor. I have no doubt that Wilkerson would say those memorials represent the crucial first steps toward dismantling the American caste system.

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And Then: Looking for Light in the Long Shadow of Caste - jewishboston.com

Between 1927 and 1979, more than 8,000 people were involuntarily sterilized in five hospitals across Virginia. They were a result of the 1924 Sterilization Act, affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court three years later. Rather than the misguided initiative of well-meaning men of the day, the states eugenics program was many things: a manifestation of white supremacy, a form of employment insurance, a means of controlling troublesome women, and a philosophy that helped remove poor people from valuable land.

When author and historian Elizabeth Catte researched her new book Pure America: Eugenics and the Making of Modern Virginia, she realized just how much eugenic sterilization in Virginia had been used as a method of control. Despite its purported reason, which used language about what it termed hereditary defectives, the law arrived at a moment when powerful people were attempting to steer the state toward a more modern version of itself.

The problem is that these powerful people didnt want a complete break from the past, she explains, citing how those in power wanted to preserve a society that condemned Black people as biologically inferior where power followed bloodlines and women were relegated to subordinates. Eugenics allowed these older beliefs to feel modern and scientifically validated. Cattes book is the subject of her upcoming online talk at the Library of Virginia.

Under Virginias Sterilization Act, the state ordered the sterilization of anyone committed to a state institution who was deemed a mental defective, as well as people afflicted with hereditary forms of insanity that are recurrent, idiocy, imbecility, feeble-mindedness or epilepsy. This criteria cast an intentionally large net over the states residents, while the umbrella of feeble-mindedness was often applied to unwed mothers, teenage runaways and the poor.

What surprised Catte most, after extensive research at the Library of Virginia and the University of Virginia Special Collections, was that sterilization in Virginia wasnt just a method employed to prevent future births. It also functioned like a kind of employment insurance, particularly when it came to young women. If unable to become pregnant, the thinking went, these young women would be better suited to serve as menial workers. Families in Virginia could apply to state hospitals to receive sterilized young women as domestic workers and be assured that pregnancy wouldnt interrupt their employment or create a potential scandal.

Eugenic sterilization was practiced at all five of Virginias state psychiatric facilities: Eastern State, Western State, Southwestern State, the former Lynchburg State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-minded and Central State, the only facility for Black patients at the time. In the early 20th century, the patient populations began to grow exponentially because the countrys population was also growing, lifespans were getting longer and local communities had begun to chafe at the expenses they incurred helping the elderly, poor or disabled survive.

Growth of patients meant growth of the hospitals physical environments as well, including large agricultural operations needed to supply food and other commodities for the hospitals. Although eugenic sterilization was seen as a means to decrease patient populations, the reality was that didnt happen.

The book makes a case for the states eugenics program having contributed to the inequalities of today. One example among many is the fact that its legal today for employers to pay disabled workers less than minimum wage and to base their compensation on perceived productivity, Catte explains. Its still perfectly legal for an employer to compare a disabled workers productivity to their nondisabled coworker and adjust the disabled workers wage down accordingly.

In Virginias eugenics era, state leaders used mathematical formulas to determine how much labor could be extracted from its unfit residents as a public good.

Its hard not to see the shadow of those ideas today in debates about work requirements, public assistance and how unproductive people must earn back their right to survive.

The legacy of eugenic sterilization programs can also be felt today in the reluctance on the part of some people of color to be vaccinated against the coronavirus.

What I can say in the context of my work is that eugenic beliefs did sometimes translate into unethical medical experiments, perhaps most notoriously in the Tuskegee syphilis study, which was masterminded by eugenicists trained at the University of Virginia, Catte says. But those connections are only a small facet of the larger story of medical racism in the United States.

Author Elizabeth Catte presents a virtual talk Pure America: Eugenics and the Making of Modern Virginia, at the Library of Virginia on Thursday, Feb. 25, at 6 p.m. Register at lva.virginia.gov.

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Defective History | Arts and Culture - Style Weekly

A recently released study finds that Europe has reduced the number of babies born with Down syndrome by 54 percent. In 2016, the same researchers found that the US rate of Down syndrome births had declined by 33 percent. Some friends and colleagues have asked me whether such reductions, which entail prenatal diagnosis and electivepregnancytermination, mean that we are still practicing some form of eugenics.

Down syndrome is a genetic disorder usually associated with an extra copy of chromosome 21 hence its other name, trisomy-21. Children with Down syndrome generally exhibit growth delays, reducedintelligence, and a shortened life span of around 60 years. The risk of having a baby with Down syndrome increases with parental age. When prenatal testing reveals the diagnosis, some parents, including apparently many in Europe and the US, elect to terminate the pregnancy.

The widely-shared belief that people with Down syndrome cannot have children is mistaken. Fertility rates across the board for individuals with Down syndrome are lower and much lower in men than in women but babies have been born to both fathers and mothers with the condition. Unless efforts are made to reduce the risk, such as prenatal testing and selective pregnancy termination, about 50 percent of babies born to a Down syndrome parent will have it.

Having the disorder carries many health consequences. On average, adults with Down syndrome have the mental ability of an 8-year-old, and later in life the risk ofdementiais greatly increased. The condition also increases the risk of conditions such assleep apnea, spinal cord injury, thyroid problems, heart disease, leukemia, and even diseases of the teeth and gums.

Yet some people with Down syndrome have earned university degrees, performed on multiple instruments at Carnegie Hall, designed successful fashion collections, served in public office, won awards for playwriting and acting, and, as recently as November of last year, completed the Ironman triathlon.

In 2017, a Special Olympian testified before Congress,

I am not a research scientist. However, no one knows more about life with Down syndrome than I do. I am a man with Down syndrome and my life is worth living. I completely understand that people pushing this particular final solution are saying that people like me should not exist. But seriously, I have a great life!

Eugenics

The Greek roots of eugenics simply mean well born, and adherents believe that humanity can be biologically enhanced by controlling reproduction. Francis Galton, who coined the term, intended it to refer to all agencies under human control which can impair or improve the racial quality of future generations. The use of the termracialshould not be ignored, as many eugenicists have also held racist views. A century ago, eugenics programs focused onmarriageprohibitions and forced sterilisation.

The first sterilisation law was passed in the state of Indiana in 1907. Along with confirmed criminals and rapists, it targeted idiots and imbeciles. As amended in 1927, it eliminated criminals, focusing instead on the insane, feeble minded, and epileptic. The law specified that two surgeons should examine each case, and if they determined that sterilisation would benefit society, they were authorised to proceed.

Between the Indiana laws enactment and its 1974 repeal, about 2,500 people were sterilised, including roughly equal numbers of women and men. People who supported the law at the time saw it as another means to reduce disease and poverty, helping to ensure that high birth rates among the unfit did not impose an undue burden on society.

Such policies took an even more sinister turn in Nazi Germany. Initially, programs focused on segregating, institutionalizing, and sterilizing the mentally ill and physically and mentally disabled, but the program progressed to systematic killing with poison gas, paving the way for extermination programs targeting homosexuals and racial groups such as Jews and Roma.

No one should underestimate the complexity and difficulty of deciding whether to test for Down syndrome or terminate a pregnancy. A host of considerations are often involved, such as family circumstances, socioeconomic status, and religious affiliation. Some people are relatively well-equipped to welcome a Down syndrome child into their family, while others are not. Those grappling with such choices often suffer mightily.

Yet those who opt to test and decide to terminate should be clear on one thing: They are tinkering with who is born and who isnt, and they are doing so based ongenes. My wife and I faced a similar choice when we had a child in our 40s, electing not to test. In some cases of Down syndrome, such a life would have been marked by severe disability and early death, but in other cases, the outcome might have been quite different.

The point is not that parents facing perhaps the most difficult decision of their lives should be branded eugenicists, but simply to indicate that despite protests to the contrary, eugenics has not been fully consigned to historys dustbin. As a society, we are still deciding who is and is not born based on genes, and the decisions we make shape humanity not just into the next generation, but generations to come.

This article has been republished, with the authors permission, from Psychology Today.

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Yes, eliminating people with Down syndrome really is a kind of eugenics MercatorNet - MercatorNet

Rubel Shelly| The Daily Herald

Some people question the need for a month-long focus on African American history.

If were going to have every February as Black History Month, when do we get a White History Month?

That one is easy enough to answer: Until recently, American history has been written in terms of white culture. When a Black figure made it onto the page, it was in relation to a white person or white institution. Black History Month helps fill some of the abysmal gaps in our history by introducing names, events, and institutions that have been excluded from the record.

What have any of them done that merits being in history books? That my kids need to know their names?

While that one smacks of outright racism,let me give a forthright answer: It seems that people as white as I am tend to know a smaller percentage of Black historical figures than a similar list of Caucasian figures in history. What do you know about, for example, Dorothy Johnson Vaughan or Mark Dean?

Vaughan (1910-2008) was a skilled mathematician whose work was critical to NASA and figured prominently in the mission that launched John Glenn into space. When she was hired to help with the space program, she and her African American colleagues had to eat and use bathroom facilities in segregated areas. Her story is told in a 2016 book and film titled Hidden Figures.

Dean, born in 1956, has long been recognized as one of IBM Corporations most eminent engineers. In the early 1980s, he and a colleague developed a system that allows computers to communicate with printers and other devices. I am indebted to him.

Then what about Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Madame C.J. Walker, W.E.B. Du Bois, Billie Holiday, Thurgood Marshall, Vivien Thomas, Dizzy Gillespie, Henrietta Lacks, Rosa Parks, Fred Gray, Jackie Robinson, Toni Morrisonor John Lewis? My point is simply that beyond Martin Luther King Jr. or Oprah, people over 50 dont know much about Black history. Black History Month will help our children and grandchildren do better with these names.

Weve had the Civil Rights Movement now, and weve passed laws to correct all those things. Why cant they just move on?

That one, when put into words, doesnt really need an answer.

My personal sensitivity to this issue has been heightened since I began to notice reactions to my opening-day lecture in Medical Ethics Class. As I begin to explain the need for serious ethical reflection in medicine, I cite a couple of egregious examples of unethical events.

I start with the notorious Nazi practices. Physicians and nurses killed off deformed children, mentally ill adults, elderly personsand minority populations. They also performed gruesome experiments on healthy prisoners. They froze Jews to death to gather information on hypothermia. Poles and Slavs were deprived of oxygen in depressurizing experiments for the Luftwaffe. They sterilized inferior women. They created the pseudo-science of eugenics.

Once students are thoroughly indignant over such atrocities in Europe, I introduce a close-to-home event that shows that Americans have not been above ethical reproach. So I ask, How many of you know about the Tuskegee Syphilis Study?

Every person of color raises his or her hand. Typically, only about 20%of white students have heard of it. Six hundred men 399 with syphilis and 201 as a control group were studied for bad blood from 1932 until 1972. All were Black. Penicillin was discovered to be specific for treating syphilis in 1947. Not one person in the group was offered penicillin between 1947 and 1972, when Jean Heller exposed what had been going on.

If you dont know about Tuskegee, Google it. It will help you understand why Black people lack a great deal of eagerness over the COVID-19 vaccine.

It will help you understand why we need Black History Month.

Rubel Shelly is a philosopher-theologian, who writes regular columns forThe Daily Herald.

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Rubel Shelly: Why we need the education of Black History Month - Columbia Daily Herald