Hello!
Welcome to the eugenics podcast. I'm
Patrick Merricks.
I'm Marius Turda. How's it going mate?
It's going very well, thank you. You're
well? Yeah very good.
Had those amazing storms here in
Oxfordshire yesterday so it
very much cooled down and I'm raring
to go.
So today we're talking about #BlackLivesMatter movement.
So we're relating it to the history of
eugenics of course
and so so what's this direct relation
we have here in this news story?
This illustrates how new
evidence keeps
appearing, notwithstanding the research
that's been done on American eugenics
for the past
30 to 40 years. We continue to have new
evidence coming up
and this relates to North Carolina's
sterilization program,
and how it directly targeted
Black Americans. So within the big debate
we have at the moment
about equality, social justice, racism
anti-racism
and #BlackLivesMatter to have these
being discussed publicly it's extremely
important.
So a long history of
of eugenics in the United States and
sterilization
particularly of the Black community. So
what can you tell us about
this history?
North America is known
in the history of eugenics as a key
promoter of negative eugenics,
including sterilization. It is
the first country in the world that
introduced realization laws
in 1907. So we have that long discussion
about
sterilization within the American context
and
also within the debate about
which categories of individuals are most
affected by it
was it criminals; was it the 'mentally
defective';
was it ethnic minorities, and now we have
enough historical evidence to
to suggest that there it is widespread across the 20th century. It may have
started with criminals
and defectives in hospitals and prisons
but it continued to cut across other
segments of society
and by the 1930s and 40s sterilization
began to include more and more ethnic
minorities.
American eugenics was always very keen
to
emphasize its main concern with the
'white race' and the 'decline of the white
race', so very important
American racists like Madison Grant were
also
important eugenicists, so you have that
streak within American eugenics:
its preoccupation with the 'decline of
the white race', the protection of the
white people.
So within that you have a number of
measures introduced and applied across
the country
but increasingly there is a big
discussion of course
about interracial relations, about segregation,
about separatism and about keeping
the two communities apart: the black and
the white. So
we can see how slowly sterilization
programs begin to include more and more
ethnic minorities during the 30s and 40s. We have
this example from North Carolina we
started with,
that sterilized about 8000 people in
the 1930s and 40s
and out of 8000 people 5000 of them
were Black American, African-Americans
so it's quite a significant number but
rarely
would sterilization be applied to
African-Americans during the 1930s and
40s.
Eugenic programs rather focus
on institutionalization,
segregation, and sterilization becomes
more popular
ironically after the 1950s.
The sterilization of ethnic minorities
becomes more popular
 during the 1950s and 60s.
We've seen in previous podcasts
that eugenics was related to other
movements birth control and feminism
but here it also says there's a
connection with Black emancipation
and so what's this about? It is
important to note
that at the beginning of the 20th
century eugenics was such a broad
church; it included various ideas and
various ways of dealing with
a number of issues: from poverty to the
protection of the race,
from cultural emancipation to the
protection of mothers,
from declining fertility to
building better health infrastructures.
Within that variety of ideas it should
not come as a surprise that many of the
key figures
in African-American emancipation
movements
such as Du Bois or Thomas Turner or
Booker Washington
or Thelma B Boozer
actually used the language of eugenics
to promote the emancipation of
African Americans. So you have a very
cultural
intellectual language used by someone
like Du Bois,
who talked about you know how can we
make Black people be
more be better at what
their natural abilities are and
thus uplift them culturally and
socially,
you have a more practical language of
eugenics used by someone like
Thelma Boozer who used it in connection
to
controlling fertility and birth control
uh in the 1930s
to help poor African-American women to
deal better
with their with their family situation.
So ultimately they did realize that
notwithstanding the focus of American
national eugenics on race
there is a possibility within that
discussion
to contribute with what can be called
'Black eugenics',
to promote the betterment
of the African-American community and
Du Bois put it there very nicely
in 1932 when he talks about birth
control
in the Birth Control Review and he says:
we need to think about
quality not just quantity! Quality is
what matters. So he uses that language
and that metaphor to express the
possibility
of social engineering
and cultural betterment and
improvement.
So that's important. But they also
use it, and
we shouldn't neglect that, they also
use it to to critique and counter-argue
claims put forward by white American
supremacists and eugenicists. So
interestingly with the Black American
writers
they use your journey to critique
white scientific racism so they saw that
as a way
to criticize alleged
claims put forward by white eugenicists
and white racist that Black people are
'inferior'
or they belong to a different level of
civilization and so on and so forth. 
It's a very interesting,
a very interesting combination of ideas
and forces
but this is mostly during the early
part of the 20th century. Things
changed after the 1940s.
Yeah so this is, moving on
chronologically, so we have the
connection to
Margaret Sanger who's also been in the
in the news recently.
You know about this,
so what is this
project?
Yeah that connects to the
the discussion that happened
during the 1930s between Margaret Sanger
and her organizations and certain
leaders in the African-American community to
help
promote ideas of birth control and
contraception
amongst African-American communities
particularly in the South.
So this is one project that Sanger
initiated and she got
the support of the African-American
leaders.
But obviously it was done within the
racist understanding
of the 1930s that of course you would
have Black ministers and nurses but
ultimately
birth control could only be administered
by white doctors
and at the family clinics so that white
doctors will always be, in a way, in a
position of power.
So that's a good example to see how
there was a
a possibility particularly with respect
to birth control
and contraception and family planning
for eugenics to
intersect with the African-American
community in a different way
than what we normally know that relates
to sterilization and segregation and
institutionalization.
So as we return to the
present day
we were talking again about this
North Carolina's role in the history.
So how would you like to sort
of
sort of end this? It relates to an
argument
I noted earlier
regarding the increase of
sterilization
of African-American people mostly during
the 1950s and 60s.
So you have the period of civil rights
movement and of dismantling of white
control and white power in the South and,
at the same time,
this is when sterilization becomes more
popular
with American eugenicists, with American
health reformers,
American hospitals. So it's a very
interesting and less known
historical caveat
that, on the one hand, politically
speaking and socially speaking cultural
speaking there's so much
towards emancipation and equality and, at
the same time, this is the period, as this
report clearly shows, when North Carolina
was trying to 'breed out'
Black people during the 50s and 60s
through their
sterilization program. So there's so much
to be
to be looked into and move the
conversation about sterilization,
and about control and about
how the state operates, both nationally
and regionally, and a federal level
as it happens in the United States
during the 1950s and 60s; in other words
we need to move the conversation about
sterilization, about eugenics, about family
planning
and about the control of population to the
50s and 60s.
Well, thanks Marius for another
very important
conversation today, I think. And 
well thanks to everyone for
viewing and/or listening
to the to this podcast and so once again
Marius thank you and
see you next time.
Thank you, Patrick.
Until next time.
