Category Archives: Eugenics

Sexuality educator Isy E. Abraham-Raveson, who specializes in consent, body image, and gender as it relates to children, discussed the history of reproductive rights and advocacy with roughly 20 attendees in Fong Auditorium Thursday evening.

Harvard College ReproJustice Action and Dialogue Collective hosted the event as part of programming for Harvard Sex Week. The discussion focused on how reproductive health issues have affected people of color throughout U.S. history.

Abraham-Raveson opened the discussion by asking attendees how they defined the phrase reproductive justice. Audience members responded with answers relating to abortion, consent, menstrual products, and the landmark 1973 abortion rights case Roe v. Wade.

She then asked attendees to reflect on their experiences related to reproductive health. Audience members spent several minutes writing down their thoughts, which they later shared in small groups.

Abraham-Raveson led participants through an exercise in which they constructed a timeline of historical issues related to reproductive violence, like sterilization and eugenics, as well as modern legal restrictions on access to abortion.

In another exercise, she asked attendees to categorize reproductive health issues that particularly affect certain groups, like immigrants, racial minorities, and BGLTQ people. Participants wrote down their ideas on posters and then shared them with the rest of the attendees.

Toward the end of the event, Abraham-Raveson led the group in a discussion on advocacy for reproductive health.

Isabel MarionSims 23 said she believes one of the most important parts of reproductive health advocacy is education.

It would act as inspiration for a lot more people to join in advocating, which would work as a catalyst for change in general, she said. The more people who know and think its a problem, the easier it is for things to change.

Guadalupe M. Jacobson-Peregrino 21 agreed with MarionSims and said education enables people to understand their rights and medical options available to them.

Many of the attendees said they found the event to be very educational. Maria Keselj 23 said she enjoyed learning about the history and context behind reproductive health issues.

Jacobson-Peregrino said she learned a lot from this event, even though she has taken a number of classes on the subject as a Women, Gender, and Sexuality concentrator.

Now, Im thinking about it as the colonization of womens bodies and how, in order to reverse it, we need to decolonize the female body, she said. How do we decolonize the female body? It brought a whole new jumping-off point for my mind.

Abraham-Raveson said after the event that her goal was to educate attendees and encourage them to share their experiences with one another.

I like to think of myself more as a facilitator than a presenter, Abraham-Raveson said. My mission is to get people excited about something important, get them in conversation about it, provide them with some knowledge that they may not have already had, and direct them towards action steps.

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Students Engage in Discussion on Reproductive Rights and Advocacy | News - Harvard Crimson

Several weeks ago, I had the pleasure of sitting in on a Humanities Washington Think and Drink event moderated by the inestimable Clyde W. Ford.

Ford is one of the most interesting people most of us will ever have the pleasure of meeting, and in addition to being a respected speaker hes also the acclaimed author of a number of books, including the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Award-winning mystery The Long Mile. His latest work, Think Black: A Memoir, chronicles his years working for IBM, and his fathers stint there as Americas first black software engineer.

Think Black is something far bigger than a tech memoir. To begin with, its more than a memoir: Its a biography of Clydes father, John Stanley Ford, and his grandfather, John Baptist Ford, a Pullman porter during the 1920s. Its Clydes story of growing up black in New York City during the civil rights era, torn between parents whose only common ground seemed to be their intelligence, a love of music, and their desire to create a better world for their children.

Its an exploration of the intersection between technology and race in America during the 20th century, and in the world at large. Its also an indictment of IBM, a company that was involved in eugenics in the 1920s, whose technology was used to catalogue Jews during the Holocaust and blacks during South African apartheid, and which has recently come under fire for its creation of technology used by police departments to aid in racial profiling.

I found the books exploration of the inner workings of IBM particularly fascinating. A company that, to this day, presents itself as a forward-thinking problem-solver, its been involved in highly unsavory endeavors for most of its existence. Thomas J. Watson, IBMs founder and the man who hired Stanley Ford, publicly portrayed himself as a Branch Rickey-esque promoter of equality, and perhaps he did see himself as such, but he was a businessman first and foremost.

Within the company, he demanded cult-like obeisance and adoration from his employees; an official songbook was circulated in the organization containing lyrics like that man of men our friend and guiding hand, The name of T.J. Watson means a courage none can stem. Watsons hiring of Stanley Ford and other black men into mid-level positions with the company was a calculated move, as was his cultivation of a family-like atmosphere that kept employees comfortable enough to overlook certain injustices.

During Stanley Fords time with IBM, however, his warm feelings toward Watson cooled somewhat, and after he was denied promotion following Watsons death in 1956, he worked covertly to subvert IBMs hiring practices by coaching other black men on what would be covered on the hiring exam, to help them obtain positions with the company.

Think Black is a lot of things. Its a relatively short book that covers a lot of ground, succinctly and engagingly. Most importantly to me, its a warm and compassionate yet unflinching exploration of the fraught experience of being a black man in the emerging tech world of the mid- to late 20th century. It opens a window to a very important and largely unacknowledged place and time in history, and we are the better for having looked through it.

Think Black: A Memoir by Clyde W. Ford was published in September by Amistad Press. It retails for $25.99.

Emily Ring is manager and event coordinator for Inklings Bookshop. She and other Inklings staffers review books in this space every week.

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Book Scene: 'Think Black' tackles racism in the tech industry - Yakima Herald-Republic

Editors note: This commentary is by Robby Porter, of East Montpelier, a self-employed woodworker and the owner and partner in small scale hydroelectric projects. He is the author of Doodlebug, A Road Trip Journal.

Like the saying about bringing a knife to a gunfight, the Cornices are out-of-step with the times. In small, rural towns across this country, 30 or 40 feet above Main Street, proud, silent and sometimes crumbling, these decorative flourishes along the tops of buildings are clueless against the computer technology, faster than a bullet, that causes the empty storefronts and faded Space for Rent signs at street level.

With their mute communication, the Cornices tell of a time when place mattered, when a small town could be the point of intersection for commerce and ideas, hopes and lives. If their stoic brick and stone could express emotion, they would show bewilderment, sadness and confusion. The Cornices are from a time when a successful person would construct a beautiful building in their hometown not only as an investment, but also with the hope of bequeathing something of lasting value to future generations a commitment to the place they loved and considered theirs and special.

At these thoughts the Spreadsheets scoff, What are they? Sentimental indulgences, thats all. Beauty? Ha! Just one persons arrogant assumption that they know what looks nice to someone else. A building might last 100 years. Compound the extra cost of those cornices for a century and think of the value you could create. Sense of place? You mean xenophobic, provincial, jerkwater.

The Spreadsheets are an extension of the idea that free trade is always good and money is the measure of value. If it makes sense, by the logic of the Spreadsheets, to move manufacturing overseas or import resources from somewhere else, then little by little that logic prevails. The cost to place does not matter to the Spreadsheets, only the bottom line, a number on a computer screen. Place matters only in reference to shipping routes, low taxes and efficiency. Theoretically, the value the next generation gets is money, limitless, borderless, fungible, mobile and unattached.

The Cornices are an extension of place. Someone built something in a particular place, put their name on it and put extra effort into making it beautiful, a cost they were unlikely to receive a monetary return on, because that was their place and they wanted to make it better. People whose parents and grandparents came from countries where they could never hope to own property, made good in this country and then gave back to their communities in a thousand ways, some personal and forgotten but not unimportant and some enduring, like the Cornices. Now, as the ever-increasing gravity of big cities pulls young people away from the small towns and rural areas to jobs that pay a living wage, the Cornices remain, a reminder of a bygone age.

The era of the Cornices wasnt noble. Jim Crow, racism, eugenics, child labor, segregation, disenfranchisement, vast unmitigated poverty and ignorance were features of their time. And yet when you look at the Cornices you feel the commitment to place that emanates from them and the hopeful sense of a future that will be ever better.

The physical representations of the Spreadsheets, the box stores and enormous distribution centers, are as unattached and standardized as the shipping containers which deliver their wares from someplace far away. No commitment to place. No regionalism, provincialism, nationalism and theoretically no racism, sexism or anti-immigrantism, just individuals, atomized, maximizing their consumer choice and personal freedom to whatever extent their finances allow in a supposedly free market.

For a narrow subset of humanity, the promise of the Spreadsheets seems to be working well. These are the very wealthy and also some whose combination of advanced education and technical skills allow them to live more or less as global citizens, nominally citizens of a state, but actually moving their bodies and money around the world as suits their career or entertainment or investments the Elites. They are connected to whatever place and acquaintances suit them best at any given time. The one value they stand for is the system of globalization which allows them to continue maximizing their freedom and wealth.

There is another group reaping rewards from the Spreadsheets, the Hapless Beneficiaries. These are the truly destitute around the world, people living on a few dollars a day, the humanity neglected by the rest of humanity. The Spreadsheets, in their voracious appetite for cheaper labor commodity, have discovered that the hands and lungs of this group are just as able to perform hard and repetitive work as more expensive bodies elsewhere. This reality causes rejoicing by the Elites because it is the perfect counterpoint to the destruction wrought by the system that benefits them. Look, a poor person who used to live on one dollar a day now living on two dollars a day. A 100% increase in wealth. Globalism floats all boats!

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The gains received by the Hapless Beneficiaries and the Elites have come at great cost to the rest of us. Vermont has been spared the worst, so far. The rural Midwest and Appalachia have been less lucky. Cities of a certain size seem to be able to maintain their center of gravity. But all across the country the suction created by the Spreadsheets is pulling communities and people apart. The republic is divided against itself, red against blue, urban against rural.

In Trumps opening campaign salvo the Mexican border and the illegal immigrants crossing there were convenient and exploitable symbols for the destruction of the American middle class caused by the borderless and hard-to-picture Spreadsheets. The vulgarity and racism with which Trump imagined the consequences of open borders diverted the mainstream media, always suckers for a sensational story, from comprehending the enormity of the underlying problem. Trumps language condensed the problem and a solution with compelling imagery Mexican rapists and a wall. If that seems like an oversimplified explanation, it is, but the savant salesman closed the deal and now hes president.

Whether Trump logically understood the connections he was making or just used his magical salesman powers to intuit the connection, like a jazz musician instinctively improvising on a riff, is an open question. When it comes to selling, he is either an intuitive genius or a calculating one a question of tactical importance for his political opponents. As for the rest of us, assuming the republic survives his administration, what matters is that the people in power start thinking seriously about the consequences of running the country on the logic of the Spreadsheets for the benefit of the Elites.

The fact that Trump is the messenger who finally got through with this message shows how isolated the Elites are from the reality most citizens live in. A man whose only known value is money, who is the walking embodiment privilege, whose business tactics involve systematically screwing small tradesmen and ripping off students, this caricature of elitism is what finally got the rest of the elites to recognise that perhaps it is wrong to abandon everything that doesnt smell like money, that the accuracy of the phrase fly-over-states denotes moral failure rather than wit, that everything cant be priced in dollars.

However flawed the product being sold, every successful sales pitch has to contain a kernel of truth. Donald Trump recognized the truth that place is defined by borders and that many Americans feel displaced within their own country. What it means to be part of a place or a country is to have a connection beyond the purely practical or monetary. This idea of value is unquantifiable by the Spreadsheets and therefore incomprehensible to them. If the price is the same, its all the same to the Spreadsheets who stand only for money and its ability to flow unimpeded around the world relentlessly seeking a better return.

Convincing nearly half the country that he, Donald Trump, an elitist who started life making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year as a toddler-landlord, would reverse the destruction caused by the Spreadsheets, this was salesmanship as masterful as the famous quip, The prettiest trick of the devil is to persuade you that he does not exist. The devil captures souls by offering them something they desperately want, in this case, fulfilling the longing of many people to believe that someone in power would protect their place instead of selling it to the highest bidder.

To rephrase the Rabbi Hillel, If I am not for a place, what place will be for me? But if I am only for a place, what am I? If not now, when?

For all of human history, there seem to be two contradictory actions people will resist until the last drop of their blood has been spilled. The first is any attempt to usurp or relocated them in any way, violently or through persuasion, from the place they view as their homeland, and this applies no matter how harsh or inhospitable the place is.

The second is any attempt to prevent them from leaving their homeland, if they want to, and seeking a better life in some other place, no matter the risks. People will set off on a flimsy raft across a shark-filled ocean, or walk hundreds of miles carrying small children just for the chance of a better life someplace else.

The value of money to the Spreadsheets is in existential conflict with the primal human desire to be connected to a place or to seek a new place.

When the forces of free trade cause a factory to move, the Elites sigh and shrug. Sad, but the market has spoken. Then they move along to a bigger city or a different country. Perhaps they even have to sell their house for less than they paid for it, a capital loss they can no doubt offset against share price gains in the company that will now have lower labor costs in the new place. The people left behind, who either love their place more than they love money, or dont have enough money to leave for a new place, they suffer as do the buildings and roads and schools.

When desperate migrants fleeing economic or climate or political disruption flood over a border, the Elites, connected to no place, are perplexed by the stench of racism rising from the people who already live in that place. What did they expect, that communities and voters drowning under decades of stagnant wages and billowing addictions would all smell sweet when they were swamped with immigrants?

The Spreadsheets dismiss connection to place as an outdated notion, an anachronism like the idea that your last name reflects where you are from. They say that place no longer matters, that in a global economy we all live on one place, the Earth, and we should move around as market forces demand.

But this idea fails even more dramatically on a global scale than it does on a local one. The future habitability of the Earth, the place we all share, is of no concern to the Spreadsheets. The same Spreadsheet logic that inexorably destroys small communities is just as steadily destroying the climate that gave rise to human civilization. Running the world for the interests of people who only value money will have us fighting with each other over who inherits a planet none of us can live on.

Like the rabbis aphorism, its both at once. Were going to have to devise a system that respects our individual connection to place and doesnt destroy the place we all call home. Its going to have to be a system with borders and trade, a system that allows people to migrate but doesnt displace people who want to stay in the place they call home. The principles that form the foundation of this new system will not be measured by money alone but will have to value people and their connection to place. If that sounds like a difficult balance to strike, no doubt it is, but as the rabbi points out, the time for this change is always now.

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Robby Porter: The Cornices and the Spreadsheets - vtdigger.org

One year ago today, a white nationalist stepped into a Pittsburgh synagogue and killed 11 Jewish worshippers. Before his shooting, Robert Bowers made clear in a social media post that he believed killing Jews would help block non-white immigrants from entering the United States and ensure the survival of his White race.

Last week, white nationalist Patrick Crusius pleaded not guilty to killing 22 mostly Latinx people in an August 3 mass shooting at an El Paso, Texas, Walmart. Before the attack, the 21-year-old posted a manifesto online, which said the shooting was a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas and was inspired by the great replacement.

As a Mexican American and as an American Jew, we see the threat of white nationalism affecting our communities firsthand. And as researchers at the social justice think tank Political Research Associates, we spend our days analyzing the strategy and rhetoric of these anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant movements across the right wing.

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Our research has shown us that its not just isolated white nationalist shooters or fringe neo-Nazis with tiki torches who rail against immigrant invasion and replacement and frame Jews as conspiratorial manipulators. In the era of Trump, these views also animate the rhetoric and policy of mainstream right-wing leaders. PRAs new report, Taking Aim at Multiracial Democracy: Antisemitism, White Nationalism, and Anti-Immigrant Racism in the Era of Trump, traces the interconnections between anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy, from White nationalists to the White House.

White nationalist shooters like Bowers and Crusius imagine that immigrants of color and forces of multiculturalism pose an existential threat to the identity and demographic cohesion of the white race, an imagined crisis they call white genocide or the great replacement. In their eyes, the only way to preserve a future for the white race is to establish a homogenous ethnostate where whites are the demographic majority, and from which non-whites must be purged. Dogmatic opposition to any and all non-white immigration is central to this worldview.

Anti-Semitism is also central to white nationalism.

According to white nationalists, for more than a century, Jews have covertly worked to loosen U.S. immigration policies and engineer a slew of progressive forces, including the civil rights and feminist movements. White nationalists believe that the goal of Jews is to gradually corrode the demographic, cultural, and ideological pillars upholding traditional white U.S. civilization. The organized Jewish community, wrote Greg Johnson, publisher of the white nationalist periodical Counter-Currents, is the principal enemynot the sole enemy, but the principal enemyof every attempt to halt and reverse white extinction.

Over the past year, white nationalist shooters like Bowers and Crusius have attacked Jewish, Latinx, and Muslim communities, while several more planned attacks have been thwarted. These white nationalists seem to believe they are blocking great replacement and protecting the white race from extinction. They encourage others by sharing their ideas and tactics with the broader white nationalist movement online before ultimately carrying out each attack independently, enacting a strategy of leaderless resistance championed by white nationalist leaders for decades. Their movement enjoys an expanding base of potential support, aided by misogynist ideas that have also deeply influenced white power shooters. Without appropriate interventions, we can expect these attacks to continue and to escalate.

These ideas werent solely propagated through a violent white nationalist fringe. Right-wing elected officials and Fox News anchors regularly threaten that an invasion of non-white immigrants is causing massive demographic changes in America, and insinuate that a hidden Jewish conspiracy lurks behind this threat. This rhetoric is deployed in different ways, putting all of our communities in danger.

Iowa Republican congressman Steve King uses the great replacement theory to justify attacks on bodily autonomy and support abortion bans, while attacking immigrants. If we continue to abort our babies and import a replacement for them in the form of young violent men, we are supplanting our culture, our civilization, King said. Increasingly, right-wing elected officials such as President Trump, and U.S. Representatives Matt Shea, Chuck Grassley, Matt Gaetz, Josh Hawley, and others traffic in thinly veiled anti-Semitic memes.

Right-wing politicians blame the so-called immigrant invasion on a conspiracy of globalist elitesan increasingly prevalent anti-Semitic trope, evoking a shadowy cabal behind progressive causes and political and financial institutions. They funnel much of their rhetoric toward liberal Jewish philanthropist George Soros, with the implication that Jewsas a peopleare all somehow globalist elites. By the time of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, a conspiracy that Soros was seeking to undermine American sovereignty by funding a migrant caravan had been championed for over a week by right-wing politicians and Fox News anchors, and had reached hundreds of millions on social media, boosted by this mainstream exposure.

Mainstream media can also be complicit in normalizing racial animus and deploying white nationalist rhetoric. Fox News anchors such as Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham regularly broadcast great replacement and white genocide rhetoric to millions on their prime-time shows, earning the praise of David Duke and other white nationalists. Diatribes against Soros and globalists appear regularly as well.

Ostensibly centrist and liberal publications can also be complicit. A few weeks before the mass shooting in El Paso, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens decried Spanish being spoken at a Democratic debate and wrote that the party makes too many Americans feel like strangers in their own country. A party that puts more of its faith, and invests most of its efforts, in them instead of us. Similar points were made in Crusius manifesto. Whether intentional or not, Stephens softened the edges of the great replacement conspiracy theory in the pages of the New York Times.

The organized anti-immigrant movement helps normalize the toxic stew of xenophobia and anti-Semitism as well. Anti-immigrant groups like the Center for Immigration Studies and the Federation for American Immigration Reform were once thought of as political fringe groups, founded by a white nationalist who advocated for eugenics. These organizations have worked tirelessly to normalize their rhetoric and gain political power. Now in Trumps America, the deeply harmful anti-immigrant policies these groups spent decades advocating for are coming to fruitionand former leaders of these anti-immigrant organizations now hold key positions in federal immigration agencies.

Not surprisingly, FAIR and CIS have dabbled in anti-Semitic rhetoric as well. Days after the Pittsburgh shooting, CIS Executive Director Mark Krikorian promoted the conspiracy that Soros was funding the migrant caravan. In 2016, FAIR sued the Obama administration seeking records of its collaboration with open-borders globalist, George Soros and featured an expos at its annual Board of Advisers conference of Soros big money network to destroy U.S. borders. Other prominent anti-immigrant pundits have also trafficked in anti-Semitism, including Michelle Malkin, who argued in a September 2019 appearance on Fox that global financiers including Soros are colluding to undermine American sovereignty by sabotaging our will when it comes to enforcing strictly immigration law.

In these ways, right-wing elected officials, media pundits, and social movements fuse anti-Semitism with anti-immigrant racism to mobilize millions behind an exclusionary nationalist agenda. Millions are trained to view immigrants not as human beings seeking a better life, but as pawns of subversive elites, weaponized to undermine American sovereignty and identity.

Many are led to embrace inhuman anti-immigrant policies, believing theyre joining in illusory revolt against globalist elites. This conspiracism fans the flames of ultranationalism, demonizing immigrants and Jews as absolute Others of the America First project who must be expelled to preserve national identity, traditional values, and Western civilization.

When right-wing leadersincluding elected officials and the president of the United Statesvoice anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant conspiracy theories, it grants these ideas legitimacy and a massive public forum, helping to create a climate that encourages white nationalist attacks on Jews, immigrants, Indigenous people, and Black and Brown people. Because of this mainstreaming, anti-Semitism has become a potent force in mainstream right-wing U.S. politics, and will likely escalate as we approach the 2020 elections. Non-white immigrants, Muslims, Black folks, other people of color, Jews, and women will also continue to be principal targets of white nationalist violence.

To honor the memories of those killed in Pittsburgh and El Paso, we must organize together for policies that advance racial and economic justice, and build safety through solidarity by showing up for each othernot only when our communities are attacked by ICE raids, exclusionary policy, or white nationalist violence, but also and critically as were developing our own alternative vision for multiracial and feminist democracy. This looks like resisting attempts to divide us, and requires engaging with our differences. Through our shared understanding of the Rightin both mainstream and white nationalist versionswe can overcome the tactics used to exclude, incarcerate, disenfranchise, criminalize, and scapegoat our communities and silence our allies. For it is the very communities targeted by white nationalism that can, through deep solidarity and the practice of building collective power, form the cornerstone of a reconstructed We, the people.

If we are to defend the safety and deepen the vibrancy of our communities, we must understand how anti-Semitism, racism, and anti-immigrant rhetoric work together to create a cohesive ideologyand we must interrupt this totalizing, conspiratorial narrative with a bold, expansive vision of real, inclusive, feminist, multiracial democracy that allows all of us to thrive.

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The Tree of Life Shooting Was a Year Ago. The Far-Right Threat Still Looms. - Truthout

Two weeks ago (in Preterm Cleveland v. Himes), a divided panel of the Sixth Circuit barred the state of Ohio from enforcing its law that prohibits medical providers from performing an abortion if they have knowledge that the pregnant woman is seeking the abortion, in whole or in part, because her baby has been diagnosed as having Down syndrome.

In her majority opinion (joined by chief judge Guy Cole), Judge Bernice Bouie Donald declared that the Roe/Casey regime confers a categorical right to abortion before viability. (Donald was appointed by President Obama, Cole by President Clinton.)

In her dissent, Judge Alice Batchelder (an appointee of President George H.W. Bush) argued that the undue-burden analysis under Casey instead requires a fact-intensive inquiry that also takes into account the States interests and the benefits of the law, not just the potential burden it places on women seeking an abortion. Having failed to conduct that inquiry, the majority and the district court had no basis for enjoining the law.

Batchelder further pointed out that the Supreme Courts ruling in Gonzales v. Carhart (2007) allowed the federal ban on partial-birth abortion to apply before viability. She also invoked Justice Thomass observations (from his forceful concurring opinion last spring in Box v. Planned Parenthood) that laws like Ohios promote a States compelling interest in preventing abortion from becoming a tool of modern-day eugenics and that the Courts abortion rulings do not require states to allow eugenic abortions.

Im pleased to see that the state of Ohio has today filed a petition for rehearing en banc. The petition argues that the panel majority erred when it concluded that there is a categorical right to a pre-viability abortion: Indeed, Casey itself upheld a law prohibiting minors from getting abortions without parental consent or court approvalthat is, a law that banned those who could obtain neither consent nor court approval from getting an abortion. The petition also emphasizes the two critically important state interests that the law advances:

First, anti-eugenics laws protect the dignity of people living with conditions or traits targeted for abortion. The practice of targeting unborn children with Down syndrome for abortion devalues the lives of people living with Down syndrome.

Second, anti-eugenics laws are necessary because eugenic abortions do deep damage to the integrity of the medical profession. [Quoting Batchelder dissent.] Humans are not show dogs or racehorses. Every human life matterscertainly the people of Ohio may enact laws reflecting that viewand the medical profession [which actively promoted eugenic solutions in the early 20th century] must never again be associated with a contrary view.

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Sixth Circuit Ruling Bars Ohio Law Against Down Syndrome Abortions - National Review

Surf City Beginning in 1912, the people of the New Jersey Pine Barrens were under attack and faced extermination. It didnt come from an enemy army or disease, but from the modern science of eugenics and the progressive political movement of the day. Two government-funded reports had labeled the residents in the press as incestuous inbreeders who lived a life of crime. Soon, shouts of what will we do with those people resounded from the states urban centers. It wasnt long until the politicians answered the call.

The April 23 edition of the Camden Courier reported, The startling conditions that have been reported as existing in the pines of Burlington county, by Miss Elizabeth Kite, will be investigated by the grand jury summoned at the opening of the term of court of Burlington county yesterday. Action along this line has been caused by the publication of Miss Kites report. Attracted by Miss Kites touch upon the alleged unlawful conditions and responding to suggestions made by the public press, Prosecutor Atkinson had Miss Kite summoned to appear before the grand jury.

On May 13, the Asbury Park Press told readers there had been some action.

The grand jury also disposed of its investigation into alleged immoral conditions in the pines of Burlington county, as presented in recent reports by Miss Elizabeth S. Kite. There was action in one case, Gardner Hendrickson of Southampton township, being indicted for bigamy. He thought, he declared, because his wife had married his brother, he had a right to marry another woman.

The problem was also handed over to the state saying, The grand jury in its presentment stated that it was the duty of the state to provide that the propagation of deficient classes be stopped by the enforcement of adequate laws made for the purpose.

By the spring of 1913, Gov. Woodrow Wilson, who signed a bill authorizing forced sterilizations, had left the state to become president, leaving behind his hand-picked choice, James Fiedler, to serve as temporary governor.

On June 26, the Paterson Call announced, Acting Governor Fielder, moved by the recent report of Miss Kite on immorality in the section of South Jersey known as the pine belt, will make a personal tour of inspection tomorrow to study the habits of the people in that section. The executive intends to spend the entire day in the country embraced in the exhaustive report of Miss Kite. If there is any immorality going on Mr. Fielder wants to see it.

Today what took place would be called a media circus, as a governor went in search of immorality. The Asbury Park Press of June 28 explained, Following a strenuous days tour of the notorious belt the executive diagnosed the trouble with the inhabitants of the pine lands. Discussing the subject with a staff reporter from The Press he set forth his views in no uncertain words. He laid the blame to a great extent at the door of those who live among the people whose morality is practically null and who have raised no hand to aid them. (H)e suggested that he would use his influence to bring the grand juries of the counties affected to indict those whose vices are responsible for the mental, moral and physical degeneration of the inhabitants of the belt.

The governor had other dignitaries traveling with him.

The Rev. A.W. Bostwick a member of the party who made the tour suggested during the day that the state establish segregation colonies where the mentally defective could be sent and where the immoral could be detained. Even more radical surgical steps toward the obliteration of the deplorable conditions were spoken of but neither appealed to the executive as practical. In the former case the segregation, it was argued might work toward the introduction of more revolting actions and the second would require trial.

Being a good politician and thinking about re-election, Fielder proposed a gentler remedy.

He advocated the introduction of properly censored motion pictures, illustrated lectures, and any form of amusement that would serve to interest the people in a cleaner form of living. He said that from his observations he did not think that it was due so much to the fact that they were imbued with a desire toward immorality as it was that they were uneducated, illiterate. They must first be taught what they must not do and then it will be time to show what they must do. On his trip today he found much that needed immediate remedy.

The Press concluded, The need of social workers was strongly apparent to the governor when he entered a little two room house where the front room served, he said, for living room, bed room, kitchen, dining room and hen house. He said that while he was in the front room the chickens were walking over the bed, and the house was in a filthy condition. In the heart of one of the principle towns in the belt he found a man and woman dwelling together with children, tho, they had never been married. Everyone in town knew it, he said but paid no heed to the effects that might come.

While the Asbury Park newspaper was generally sympathetic, the New York Sun took a hard line.

NEW JERSEY should do something quickly about the Pineys, that degenerate race which dwells in the sand and pine barrens in the heart of the State, decided acting Governor James E. Fielder on Friday night after an all-day trip through the wilder parts of Burlington county. Not much longer should these degenerate descendants of a fine stock be allowed to multiply and inbreed to swell the States list of public charges, he declared. Segregation will be tried and perhaps sterilization to stop the birth of idiots and criminals and defectives. Social centres are to be established in the little red school-houses. The decent folk of the district are to be pilloried if they do not see that the law is enforced against their worthless neighbors.

To the Sun, Fiedler didnt seem as kind.

I have been shocked at the conditions I found. Evidently these people are a serious menace to the state of New Jersey because they produce so many persons that inevitably become public charges. They have inbred and led lawless and scandalous lives till they have become a race of imbeciles, criminals and defectives.

The state must segregate them, that is certain. I think it may be necessary to sterilize some of them. They tell me there are as many as 1,500 right here in Burlington county and several thousand in the pine belt of the state.

For the children we must have social centers in the schools, and these would do something for the grown persons. There must be sharp heed that the children attend school, and it will be possible to educate parents in many cases.

He concluded his interview with The low mentality of these people is the great handicap, and it is plainly responsible for the low moral standards among them. Lack of education is another factor, and the universal poverty and the fact that the children all have to go to work at a tender age contribute to keep these people down. But from what I have seen today I believe that the Pineys largely know their plight. They are now generally sending their children to school. They are no longer indifferent to whether the child can read or write. There is hope for a race that knows where it stands. But I will act on the situation at once.

Segregation camps and sterilization or movie theaters and recreation centers which way would the state of New Jersey go when it came to dealing with those people in the pines?

Next Week: the colony.

tpfcjf@comcast.net

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New Governor Addresses Piney Situation - By THOMAS P. FARNER - The SandPaper

TVF International sends slate to MENA

Indie factual distributor TVF International has secured a raft of sales to broadcasters across the Middle East and North Africa region.

Pan-MENA news network BBC Arabic picked up a package of titles, including Attitude Pictures In My Mind series; You, Me and Eugenics (Furnace for BBC); and Prisons Uncovered, the one-off special commissioned by Spring Films ITV.

Al Jazeera, meanwhile, has licensed a package of 35 hours for the Documentary Channel. The package includes: New Species(pictured), a ZDF/ARTE/Globo co-production; and Channel News Asia commissions Algorithms: How They Rule our World and Coming Clean About Green.

For Discovery Familyin MENA, the pay-TV broadcaster licensed seasons one and two of Raw Recruits, a Burning Bright production for Channel 5.

Discovery also picked up the CW-commissioned magazine series Did IMention Invention? and Choice TVs The Healthy Food Guide.

Pan-MENA channel Alhurra licensed two one-off current affairs films from Channel News Asias Undercover Asia strand and the history doc Partition.

Lastly, satellite provider OSN acquired the one-off documentary Apollos New Moon.

Big Brothertravels to Australia

Australias Seven Network has picked up Endemol Shine Groups Big Brotherfranchise the sixth comeback for the format this year and the first outside Europe.

The series, produced by Endemol Shine Australia, returns to the region in 2020 for the first time in six years, ushering in a new era of the global reality competition format.

Viewers can expect a dynamic new house and new rules designed to create show stopping twists.

DOK Leipzig to award record-setting prize money

DOK Leipzig plans todole out 82,000 (US$91,000) at this years festival, in addition to non-cash prizes valued at 11,000.

The non-cash prizes can be used by filmmakers to develop projects.

Additionally, all the Golden Doves in the long film competitions are endowed by prize sponsors for the first time.

German pubcaster MDR will once again sponsor the Golden Dove in the International Competition. The Medienstiftung der Sparkasse Leipzig is contributing the prize money for the Next Masters Competition, as in previous years.

Three new awards will be presented at DOK Industry,the festivals platform for film professionals: Development Prize for the Best Female Documentary Film Project for a Female Director, the D-Facto Motion Works-In-Progress Prize and the EWA Womens Talent Development Award.

A total of 24 awards will be presented at the Leipzig, Germany-based documentary festival, held Oct. 28 to Nov. 3.

Sportel Awards recognize documentaries at 30th event

Jaime Murciegos filmBoxgirls andVincent AlixsPresque parfait (Almost Perfect) were awarded at the annual Sportel Awards Ceremony.

Spain-based Murciego took home thePeace and Sport Documentary Prize at the event, held Oct. 21 in Monaco. Presque parfaitfrom Alix and France premium television channel Canal+ was presented the Jury Prize.

Short documentary The Guardian Angel of Nazar from Mikey Corker (Austria) and Red Bull Media House earned the Discovery Prize.

The international competition jury is presided over by Olympic champion pole vaulter Yelena Isinbayeva.

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Extra: TVF Int'l titles head to MENA; Big Brother returns to Australia - Realscreen

This Dystopian Hell Hole Nightmarish Hellscape That Democrats Are Putting Out

Whoopi Goldberg repeatedly fact-checked Meghan McCains analysis on The View of Sen. Bernie Sanders remarks about population control in light of climate change.

The Democratic presidential candidate agreed that family planning was a key feature in addressing climate catastrophe, and McCain backed her friend S.E. Cupps assessment of the remarks as an endorsement of eugenics.

Population growth is on the decline, McCain said. The worlds population is projected to nearly stop growing by the end of the century and in all clarity, I think people know this, but S.E. Cupp is one of my closest friends, and I agree with that. We were actually texting each other when this moment happened in the climate change debate.

Any time youre talking about population control, she added, if youre a pro-life person, it starts sounding alarms. Because, again, like in China they enacted a one-child policy, and now men outnumber women by 70 million in China and India. Its disgusting.

Related: Gross Distortion: S.E. Cupp Roasted for Insane Attack Accusing Bernie Sanders of Promoting Eugenics

Co-host Sunny Hostin pointed out that wasnt eugenics, which Goldberg had already defined earlier in the discussion, but McCain pressed on.

I believe its a slippery slope towards that, McCain said, and I do think this dystopian hell hole nightmarish hellscape that Democrats are putting out that climate change is just going to end everything to the (point) that were going to have to have population control in this country seems very extreme.

McCain and Abby Huntsman agreed that Sanders seemed to be supporting population control through abortion, while Hostin and Joy Behar argued thats not was he was saying at all and Goldberg cut in with a fact check.

Lets be clear about what he is saying, Goldberg said. Lets not make something up when its not what he said, because when you bring in eugenics, thats a different conversation. That is the controlling of a population because you dont like the size of your nose or theyre too dark.

McCain interjected to say that eugenics disproportionately impacts minorities and people with disabilities, but Goldberg said that was beside the point.

Eugenics doesnt have anything to did with minorities or anybody else, Goldberg said, over McCains protest, and I will say this to you also. Think about all the women in Ireland who for years just wanted birth control, they just wanted birth control because they live in a Catholic country that said you cannot have it.

They were having an insane amount of children, Goldberg added. What these women fought for and pressed for and marched for and got was the right to make that decision for themselves. I think thats clearly and maybe I misinterpreted it, but when he says, I think especially in poor countries around the world, where women do not necessarily want to have large numbers of babies, and where they can have the opportunity through birth control to control the number of kids they have, thats something I support. Thats different than eugenics.

McCain said she heard Sanders through the prism of a conservative, and she was alarmed.

I was shocked by what was coming out of his mouth, McCain said, and clearly everyone else at the table thought it was normal and just in the vein of climate change.

Huntsman was also alarmed, and the panelists argued over Sanders meaning, but Goldberg stepped back in again to restore order.

Listen, you can be pissed at what he said all you want to, she said, but report it correctly.

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Trump Makes Startling Statement: 'We've Taken Control of the Oil in the Middle East US Has Control of That' - The New Civil Rights Movement

The extent of racism in UK universities has been yet again exposed by a new Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) report. But while statistics like the fact that more than a quarter of minority ethnic students have faced both physical and verbal racist attacks are shocking, theyre not new. Last year the Student Room found that one in two students had witnessed or faced racism on campus, while a National Union of Students (NUS) report said that incidents of racism made students of colour want to discontinue their education.

I have heard anecdotes such as these firsthand. When the EHRC enquiry was launched I was serving as black students officer at the NUS, where I was regularly contacted by students of colour to support them with the racism they were experiencing on and off campus. Some of these stories made it into the news, with stories of leaked Facebook and WhatsApp chats, pictures of socials, and videos in halls going viral.

These stories and statistics can no longer be waved away as an aberration or minor part of some peoples experiences. For students of colour, racism is a constant in their lives. It is woven into every part of their so-called student experience, from being freshers to finding employment. For black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) staff, the challenge of getting a job in a university is surpassed only by the difficulty in getting promoted in a profession in which only 0.6% of UK professors are black. Although some universities have begun to make progress on these issues, often by using the Race Equality Charter framework, too many are sitting idly by and failing students and staff.

The problem is that racism and other forms of oppression are not something institutions want to readily admit exist, let alone begin the difficult work of rectifying. The marketisation of higher education has led to universities shifting focus from teaching and learning to protecting their reputations for fear of dropping in the league tables and losing out on students. In such a system, how can we expect universities to address racism, when the threat of bankruptcy looms with every low student intake? Meanwhile universities that are successful enough to expand are incentivised to increase their surplus, rather than looking after their students by increasing student support services or grants to the students union.

The focus on protecting the reputation of the institution was a theme of the EHRC report. One student said their university was more bothered about covering the incident up to maintain a spotless reputation than it was about tackling racism. Universities have begun to fear that talking openly about racism will deter potential applicants, but an honest conversation about race in our universities is desperately needed. This has been called for by students, staff and academics for decades, but has gained momentum over the past few years with the Why is my curriculum white? and decolonising movements enabling people to articulate their visions of a fairer campus.

For far too long universities have been exempt from public criticism thanks to their perception as elevated spaces of knowledge; places where liberalism and tolerance rule and which have meritocracy at their very heart. But studies like the EHRC report or research by the NUS black students campaign have begun to tear down this myth.

Yet for many, this myth never existed. Their experience at university isnt discussing lofty ideas in dreaming spires. Its being stopped by security; being asked to represent your people in a seminar; watching your junior colleagues getting promoted above you; being fearful of being referred to the home office at every student demonstration you attend; hearing lecturers use the n word; not using your ethnic name when applying for graduate schemes and fearing the prevent duty.

The truth is that from a historical perspective, universities have never been meritocratic or liberal. Many were created with the sole purpose of enabling people of wealth and prestige to accumulate further wealth and prestige. Their legacy includes training the next generation of people to run the British empire, funding from slavery and intellectualising eugenics to justify the racism on which the empire was built.

The writing is once again on the wall, and universities have a choice to make. They can continue to resist calls to change by hiding behind their reputations. Or we can finally see the tearing down of the myth of the liberal, tolerant institution and the creation of a progressive, democratic alternative.

The rest is here:

Universities must stop covering up racism in order to protect their own reputations - The Guardian

How should we remember historical figures who we know have done terrible things? Its a dilemma we face more often, as universities and public institutions critically examine their histories, reassessing the past with 21st-century eyes. And over the last year, University College London has been in the midst of a historical inquiry into its role as the institutional birthplace of eugenics the debunked science that claimed that by selectively breeding humans we could improve racial quality.

We tend to associate eugenics with Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, but it was in fact developed in London. Its founder was Francis Galton, who established a laboratory at UCL in 1904. Already, some students and staff have called on the university to rename its Galton lecture theatre.

Galtons seductive promise was of a bold new world filled only with beautiful, intelligent, productive people. The scientists in its thrall claimed this could be achieved by controlling reproduction, policing borders to prevent certain types of immigrants, and locking away undesirables, including disabled people.

In hindsight, its easy to say that only a moral abyss could have given rise to such a pseudo-scientific plan, not least because we have borne witness to its horrifying consequences through the 20th century, when it was used to justify genocide and mass sterilisations. And by the standards of today, Galton does resemble a monster. He was a brilliant statistician but also a racist (not just my assessment, but that of Veronica van Heyningen, the current president of the Galton Institute). He was obsessed with human difference, and determined to remove from British society those he considered inferior.

Yet as our critical gaze falls on Galton, are we losing sight of just how popular his idea was among so many Britons? In the early 20th century, a surprisingly broad roster of public figures aligned themselves with Galtons vision. It attracted people on the left and right, prominent writers and intellectuals, leading scientists and politicians. Virginia Woolf, TS Eliot, DH Lawrence, Julian Huxley, Winston Churchill, Marie Stopes all held eugenic views. Churchill was vice-president of the first International Eugenics Conference, held in London in 1912. Although there were notable critics, to be a eugenicist was to be firmly in the mainstream.

This was an age in which it was not unusual for scientists to believe that humans were divided into different species, some more advanced than others. Biologists proclaimed that it would be better for society if disabled and mentally feeble people hadnt been born. Eugenics made it into government policy: the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913 institutionally separated those whom the state considered mentally feeble or morally defective from the rest of society, effectively preventing them from having children.

From our 21st-century vantage point, what do we do with this knowledge? Whom do we keep and whom do we condemn? The moral boundaries may feel clear. A eugenicist is a eugenicist. A racist is a racist. But if Galton is out, where does that leave everyone else? The guilty party isnt merely Galton, or even eugenic ideology its also the age in which he lived. The sad saga of eugenics teaches us not only that scientists can be wrong, but that the promise of a better, brighter future at the cost of innocent individual lives can be all too tempting to many. Teamed with the prejudices of the time, it can be devastating.

Primo Levi, corresponding with a German scientist he had worked under while imprisoned in Auschwitz decades earlier, wrote that he couldnt accept the mans plea that he hadnt known what was happening around him. To cast Galton as the evil figure pushing eugenics may be to overlook the bigger truth that thousands were freely buying into his flawed theories, and that Britain was remarkably receptive to them. Too many happily ignored, and some even enthusiastically embraced, the implications of his plans namely, that they might require innocent people to make sacrifices against their wishes.

Tempting as it is to single out Galton for condemnation, that instinct should be tempered by the sober understanding that the slope that sends society towards moral shame is built by many. We must remember Galton as who he really was, and see him in full glare with nothing erased. But dividing the world into good guys and bad guys allows us to wash our hands of moral complexity. The danger lies not just with the bad guys but with every one of us, and it is always there.

Angela Saini is a science journalist and author. Her two-part documentary series, Eugenics: Sciences Greatest Scandal begins on BBC Four on 3 October at 9pm

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In the twisted story of eugenics, the bad guy is all of us - The Guardian