1916: Eugenics
At the turn of the twentieth century, debates regarding urban health, social advancement, and the creation of a stronger society dominated white academic literature. With the increasing acceptance of Darwinism and “survival of the fittest,” scientists began exploring genetics as a pathway to creating a better society. What emerged from this pursuit was the “pseudoscience” of eugenics. Leading scientists, philanthropists, and religious leaders fell under the influence of eugenics arguments, embracing the assertion that “regardless of context, immigrants, persons of color, and the socially unfit were what their heredity made them” (Seldon, 2005, pp. 202-203).
Winning family of a Fitter Family contest stand outside of the Eugenics Building at the Kansas Free Fair, in Topeka, KS.
Source: Wikimedia
As education scholar Steven Seldon noted “Under the broad promise that eugenics would lead to the ‘self direction of human evolution,’ its supporters used biological metaphors to shape social policies regarding immigration restriction, the segregation of those judged socially unfit, and state-sanctioned sterilization” (Seldon, 2005, p. 201). This “new science” rested on old racialized ideologies that continued to assert the superiority of the white race. If God had not cursed the Black race, thereby making them inferior, then science would prove that their hereditary make-up was the reason for their inferiority.
The rise of social policies based on eugenics added to the dire situation for people of color during the early and mid-twentieth century. Eugenics applied the crudest practices of animal husbandry to human genetic selection. In commenting on the wide impact of eugenics theory on American life, journalist Antero Pietila (2010) wrote that “[e]ugenicists advocated selective breeding. Birth control, castration, forced sterilization, and in extreme cases, euthanasia, were among the methods discussed and practiced for weeding out the “unfit”” (p. 42). Eugenicists in the United States “opposed ‘racial mixing’ because it destroyed the racial purity of whites” (Feagin, 2014. p. 78). Pietila (2010) found that
Baltimore eagerly embraced eugenics. Dr. William Welch, the famous first dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine [and first dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health], and Dr. Lewellys F. Barker, the chief physician at Johns Hopkins Hospital, directed eugenics research at the Cold Spring laboratory…under Alexander Graham Bell. (p. 44)
Eugenicists combined their pseudoscience with biased studies on the differences between the human races’ physical attributes to (re)conclude falsely that African Americans were inferior to whites. In 1916 New York lawyer Madison Grant published The Passing of the Great Race. In this book, he developed a ranked list of races with the Anglo-Saxons at the top and Black persons at the bottom. He went so far as to articulate a history of the world that argued the “rising and falling civilizations [were] based on the ‘amount of Nordic [Anglo-Saxon] blood in each nation” (Kendi, 2017, p. 310).
Psychologists also embraced eugenics theories and used them to inform standardized intelligence tests (IQ tests). Despite receiving criticism from some scholars, the majority of psychologists embraced eugenics and the intelligence testing protocols based upon it. One of the leading authors of the IQ test, Lewis Terman, argued that his test would demonstrate “enormously significant racial differences in general intelligence, differences which cannot be wiped out by any scheme of mental culture” (Kendi, 2017, p. 311). White politicians and policy makers now had a “science” to support their racist agendas at a time when those ranked lowest on the eugenics scales had very little social power or legal protection.