MILTON REYNOLDS: So I am going to need to share my screen just to walk through a couple of things. And hopefully this will work out for us. So let me just go ahead and do that.
But let me also offer up an audio description which I failed to do at the start of my first session.
I am an African-American man, middle-aged. I have waist-length natty dreadlocks, and I have grown myself a COVID beard that is salt and pepper, at this point manifesting more salt than pepper.
My background is a series of large dark bookcases filled with colorful books. So that will give you some sense of who I am and how I'm appearing, and I apologize for forgetting to do that the first time around.
The second session I'm hoping will draw some relationships between what color-blindness prevents us from seeing and being able to also reposition race as not something that's rooted in biology but is actually rooted in the nation state. And I think that from a conceptual level, making this pivot will help us understand the ideological underpinnings but also to get a better sense of how these ideas live and reproduce through our systems and structures of society.
So let me try to share my screen here. Hopefully folks are able to see this screen. Yeah? And still see the ASL facilitator as well. So hopefully that's going well.
So I'm just going to walk through a couple slides, and again, once I finish these slides, we can break for conversation and pivot to a couple of things.
What I would love for you to think about though as we go through this information is what, if any, of this information strikes you as new, significant, or troubling.
While this is not a prompt that you need to follow, I'm assuming that folks will also be beginning to think about the implications again for this organization and how we all work together. But let me just move through this.
So I think it's useful to start our conversation about race by re-situating race as, again, being rooted in the nation state. So the first Congress of the United States, in March 4, 1790, begins to dictate the path forward for our nation. So this is the first Congress and it's the first time that there's been any meaningful legislation that discusses who we are as a nation. So this idea of who might naturalize and become a citizen is critical.
So the naturalization act of 1790 states, this is obviously excerpted from that. All free white persons who have or shall migrate in to the United States and shall give satisfactory proof, before a magistrate, by oath, that they intend to reside therein, and shall take an oath of allegiance, and shall have resided in the United States for one whole year, shall be entitled to the rights of citizenship.
So that's a little bit of a word salad and a mouthful. But I think when it was articulated, it was connected to whiteness. I think it's also fair to suggest that whiteness as we understand it today was not necessarily the way they understood whiteness then. It would have been a small number of folks who had emigrated from Europe with many of those coming from southern and Eastern Europe, being seen as the sub races of Europe.
Their whiteness may have been salient in relationship to indigenous communities, folks from Mexico or enslaved Africans, but they would not have been seen as white in relationship to white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, or WASPs, who were in many respects putting forward these ideas.
It's also fair to suggest that part of this was to deny citizenship to the indigenous communities whose land was being dispossessed, but also to prevent enslaved Africans from being seen as fully human. And, in fact, they were recognized as property rather than people at this point in our society, so I think it's critical to understand that these ideas are rooted in the nation state rather than in biology.
Gender is also part of this construction. Women's rights as I understand it would have been recognized primarily through the rights of their husbands and that they as individuals would not have been seen as having the same sort of autonomous rights as free wealthy white men in that time period.
I'm going to share a few quotes. Move us out here on the west coast know David Starr Jordan as the President of Stanford University. His name is on many buildings and local school districts as well as at the University of Stanford, although they recently made the decision to remove his name from the edifices of one of the buildings, Jordan hall. This is from him.
"The most vital question concerning immigration, and the one most hard to solve, is the problem of eugenics, the problem of building up our nation with folks of sound heredity. Like the seed is the harvest. This is the great law of biology. It is the great law on which national permanence depends, as well as agricultural prosperity. The strength of the republic can be maintained only by strong men, the sons of strong men."
This is from his book Blood of the Nation, published in 1910.
When we see how nation is framed, we can see he is drawing connections between the nation and actually the harvest, that is that the nation is produced by people of the nation. And that its permanence depends on healthy seed.
And when he's talking about seed, he's talking about not necessarily seeds that get put in the ground.
The next one, Theodore Roosevelt, who said in 1913, "Someday we will realize that the prime duty, the inescapable duty, of the good citizen of the right type is to leave his or her blood behind him in the world; and that we have no business to permit the per pet weighs of citizens of the wrong type. The great problem of civilization is to secure a relative increase of the valuable as compared with less valuable or noxious elements in the population. The problem cannot be met unless we give full consideration to the immense influence of heredity."
Here again, Teddy Roosevelt is speaking to the nation itself as a biological entity. I would argue that the notion of citizens of the wrong type is a fairly capacious framing, and that would include people who would be identified or identified as people of color, but it would certainly include disabled people. Again, if the goal, eugenics is more of a utopian future. Part of that healthy future is about making sure that, quote/unquote, the right people are propagating themselves and those deemed to be the wrong people or dysgenic are not commingling their eggs and sperm, just to put it bluntly.
Moving forward, we have Harry Laughlin, speaking to the U.S. House Hearings in Biological Aspects of Immigration in 1920. He states, "The character of our future civilization will be modified by the blood or the natural hereditary qualities which the sexually fertile immigrant brings to our shores."
So in this case, we hear him communicating immigration as a threat. And it's a threat to the corpus or body of the nation. The threat is not necessarily limited to people's sort of cultural beliefs but in this case he's speaking about it directly as being tied to their biology.
Note that he is speaking to the notion of their hyper fertility. That is a trope that we will see resurrected throughout the course of history. Something we probably all have heard more than we would have liked to in the last several years, and I suspect that some of these ideas will be with us for a while until we thoroughly ferret them out.
This is more of a word salad, hearing from Davenport, in first 23, further along in his book. "In the United States, we are slowly waking to the consciousness that education and environment do not fundamentally alter racial values. We are engaged in a serious struggle to maintain our historic republican institutions through barring the entrance of those unfit to share in the duties and responsibilities of our well-founded government. In the matter of racial virtues, my opinion is that from biological principles there is little promise in the melting pot theory. Put three races together, Caucasian, Mongolian, and the Negroid, and you are likely to unite the vices of all three as the virtues.
For the world's work give me a pure blooded ascertain through observation and experiment what each race is best fitted to accomplish. If the Negro fails in government, he may become a fine agriculturist or a fine mechanic. The right of the state to safeguard the character and integrity of the race or races on which its future depends is, to my mind, as incontestable as the right of the state to safeguard the health and morals of its peoples."
The others are relatively short. So this is Vice President Calvin Coolidge in 1924, nearly around the time of the completion of the Johnson Read act of 1924. This is an argument for that act: "America must be kept American. Biological laws show that Nordics deteriorate when mixed with other races."
So again, in this case, Nordics is a reference to folks of northern Europe. And it's a very specific geographic call out because they are seen as being those who are most Aryan and therefore most ideal.
Two more. Calvin Coolidge, again in 1924, states, "There are racial considerations too grave to be brushed aside for any sentimental reasons. Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend. The Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races the outcomes suggest that the observances of ethnic law is as great a necessity to the nation as immigration law."
And then the last one is short and comes from a different shore. This is from Adolf Hitler, who states in 1925, "The state is a racial organism and not an economic organization."
So I'm going to stop my screen share there for a moment and sort of come back to the present. And maybe let's just open the floor for a couple moments to see if there are any questions that are emerging. And again, thinking about what information struck you as new, significant, or troubling. To what degree was any of this information presented to folks new information.
And you can either identify yourself or rock it from the chat.
I see Larry Berger's hand.
LARRY: New for me was the quote from the 1790 law, the nationalization -- I don't remember the name of it, but the 1790 law that first created naturalization process. Not surprising. Still unspoken implicitly part of our immigration law. But I wasn't aware that it was so explicitly stated.
MILTON REYNOLDS: Thank you. I would say when I first encountered this, I was struck by that too, Larry. I think I was probably struck more by the fact that I was well into my 30s before I had even had an encounter with this document, having gone through schools. It would occur to me that something as critical as the first determination of who we might be as a nation would be an important document for all Americans to get to encounter. And, in fact, it wasn't until I was an adult where I even had access to this. So I can appreciate that it was new for you as well.
LARRY: I guess one other quick one is that the quote from Teddy Roosevelt, certainly not surprising because he was the President who put out Holmes on the Supreme Court. But I hadn't seen that quote.
MILTON REYNOLDS: Again, I picked a few. There are plenty. And depending on what we wanted to focus on, we could have put a number of people under the spotlights.
I do think what's interesting is that rather than sort of being these ideas being fringe or out of the mainstream, they're actually very mainstream. And interesting enough, when we begin to look at the history of race, and specifically eugenics which we'll get into shortly, it is probably one of the most bipartisan endeavors in the history of this country. So it's interesting that both political parties do traffic in these ideas and have in a historical sense, so I think that's an important big idea.
Any other thoughts or questions, comments, things that strike you as new or significant? I want to try to keep the floor open so we can have more of a conversation since we won't be in small groups.
Looks like Cheryl's hand is up.
CHERYL: Yes. Hi. One of the things that stood out to me and builds off what you were starting to touch on was brief, but the quote that was part of testimony to Congress. It's not surprising, but just really resonated with me that not only was this coming from leaders but the supposed experts that were speaking to our broader systems had this kind of baked in problematic attitude. So that just particularly jumped out at me, is just stopping to think about this is what the advisers and experts to our systems and government were hearing and being told and that is what contributes to the systemic discrimination as well.
MILTON REYNOLDS: Yeah, and I think, I appreciate you picking up on this notion of experts. There is sort of a tyranny of the experts. Science is beginning to rise in prominence, and vying with religion in terms of who will be the arbiter of truth. There is increasing role that experts are playing and the role that they begin to play is in terms of advocating the direction of society.
I think we understand the dynamics of power, certainly at that time, I think we should also work with the assumption that many of the people who belong to marginalized communities did not have a seat at the table, right? They did not have curatorial agency or access to power. So in many respects the direction of the nation was determined by a relatively small and profoundly homogeneous group of people. That's part of history we have to begin to grapple with in very deep and meaningful ways.
Let's see if there are any other thoughts, questions, or comments before we move forward.
It looks like Kevin Williams has a hand up as well. And I'm going to encourage folks, when you are speaking, unmute yourselves and turn on your camera, if you could. That would be a big help.
For some reason, I can't hear you, Kevin.
I'm still not getting any audio, unfortunately. And you seem to be unmuted on this end. Is it possible to put it in the chat?
While our sorting that out, Kevin, I'm going to call on Felicia.
FELICIA: I couldn't believe that Calvin Coolidge, that was the quote. That was really troubling for me, given his role as a President, former President, that he would actually say something so terrible, which means to me that's just a climate and a culture of the country at the time. Because if it wasn't a popular thing to say or to believe, then he wouldn't have said it, because he was a lawyer and a politician, and then he would have to fear repercussions being held against him in different ways. So I felt like for the President to say that, it's like spokesperson for the country. Then, you know, there was no hope for anybody else to have any type of fear of treatment at that time.
MILTON REYNOLDS: Yes. And again, one of the things we're understanding in the present is that when certain people, particularly people in higher levels of power, speak these words, they're actually inviting people in to a conversation. And I think when we look at race through the lens of history, what we find is that it's actually a very normal conversation. And typically out in the open conversation. Which is fundamentally different than the sort of ways that color-blind framing have driven race into more of a covert, at least in terms of being articulated, people find ways to talk all around race while still speaking to it but speaking to it in coded language.
In the past, it's not coded at all. It's out in front, which suggests it has a tremendous amount of currency.
As an educator, a challenge we face, again, these color-blind frameworks really stifle conversation. And race is a complicated set of ideas, and we can't understand complexity through simplification or rapid action. That complexity does, however, yield to time on task. So we have to recommit to having these conversations and allowing students to engage in conversations that invite them to question the context, as you said, because the language is indicative of the context. And when we understand that this language has been used by leaders literally from the inception of this country, although that conversation and framing of it evolves over time, we can understand that race in spite of the commonly heard narrative, this is not us, this actually is us. It very much is us.
The question that this moment is provoking is there this be us in the future. That's the conversation we have to get in. As do all organizations that are committed to doing work around social justice, because the reality is, the work that we do is tied to historical notions of disposability of various different segments of the population. And those segments are typically defined as disposable in a categorical sense. Not that individuals are disposable, though it affects us as individuals, but that these assignments are categorical. And that's a really important distinction, which is, again, very different from the narrative of individualism, individual merit, which is actually used to abstract ourselves from the historical forces that are shaping our destinies in a collective fashion. So I appreciate your comments, Felicia.
So I see your hand, Parris. Let's see if Kevin has been able to sort out the audio. Let's see if that's doable.
So it sounds like, I see in the chat from Kevin, it says your microphone is out. So the question that you're posing, so thank you for putting it in the chat, Kevin, is did anyone push back against those types of statements. I can't find any.
So the reality is, there have always been people who contested these ideas. Yet when we put them into context, they were more mainstream than not so people who would have been pushing back would have been outliers in many respects, although I think it is important to recognize that there are always people who saw these ideas as atrocious. There were fewer numbers, and typically there was a lot of incentive to engage with these ideas as being part of the masses, but clearly these ideas also had significant impacts on various different communities, so we can also suggest that members of those communities were often at the forefront of the movements to push back against these ideas, although their voices weren't always seen as holding the same kind of veracity or seen as legitimate, which is, again, another feature in this moment.
There have been lots of people talking about the potential threats that were going to be created in this country by democratic shifts but yet those voices often weren't heard.
Now, in this moment of reckoning, those voices offering important insights that we didn't have access to as a society, this reflects just the reality, we're always going to be smarter as a collective although we're coming out of a history that has caused people to see each other's voices as not having the same legitimacy or value. That's the challenge. How do we resurrect the value of the different understandings of the world recognizing that we can only fully comprehend the world when we have all voices present so we can render it from that more complex way.
So thank you for that question, Kevin.
I'm going to pivot over to Parris.
PARRIS: So one thing that stood out to me was I think it was like the second or third quote that was talking about the genes that we need to pass on and the ones that should not. It's interesting to think about how that narrative has evolved. And I'm thinking in particular with the shootings that happened in Atlanta and the shooter creating that statement of like these people, or these places are creating sexual temptation for me. And so I as a person who is deemed like good had the responsibility or have the privilege to take those places out. Take the place out and the people that belong in that place.
And then to have like the media enforce that and say, or even the police officer who said that it's not a situation dealing with race when it's like obvious to everybody else. Well, I would assume to most people that it is about race. But kind of like taking those kind of language, the explicit language, and then making it more implicit or blurring it even though the situation like calls for actually putting language to what's happening.
MILTON REYNOLDS: Yeah, no, I appreciate that pickup, Pars. I think this is where the language of Kim Crenshaw and others is important. One of the challenges of approaching race is too often we talk about it in a binary fashion, as black and white, rather than recognizing that we're all racialized, but again, in service of presenting hierarchies of value as normal.
So what we see in the situation in Atlanta is that you have the coalescence of not just gender but also race and space coalescing in a way that is illuminating targets to this man who felt like it was his job to silence people who were transgressing against him or making him struggle to maintain his sense of virtue.
What I found even more stunning though was how quickly law enforcement was able to pick up on that exculpatory narrative and almost excuse the man as though somehow he had said that his addiction, his sex addiction, as who he was gave him more value than the people that he ended up killing. So this is a really challenging thing. If this is the standard people hold themselves, to a lot of people will be held in racist behavior and won't get called out.
One other thing, going back to the earlier article, this notion of positing identity as universal was a strategy to move forward as a society. But this notion of us having a universal sense of identity is inherently abstractive, because from a historical perspective, our groups, our experiences of identification are fundamentally different and distinct. So when we lose the historical context, we lose the ability to follow those ideas in the present and to see how historically negative traditions can quickly happen. That's what we're seeing with the surge in anti-Asian violence right now. So it's important to be able to use history as a lens to better understand what's taking place in the present.
Looking at the chat. So we have a comment from Larry stating I found one other thing about the 1790 quote interesting. You can look at that in the context of today's discussion about immigration, where we have quotas of various kinds saying look at how easy it was, just show up and wait, so why was it easy in 1790. It was easy because we wanted immigrants as long as they were white.
And again, not so really different from today.
So one of the things I would pull out of Larry's post to me is that this country has always had a lust or thirst for labor, but it has oftentimes had a disdain for people's gametes or the commingling of gametes. So the ongoing preoccupation of having a labor pool from which resources can be extracted from, specifically labor, has to, you know, is oftentimes balanced with the desire for people not to set up shop. So what we tend to see in our patterns of immigration, certainly from a historical sense, is that we tend to create sort of bachelor societies, in which we might encourage the immigration of men but not women, heaven forbid they set up families. But there are demands of labor in society, and the skill sets that people may have or the desire to do the work. This is an ongoing challenge.
I won't suggest that immigration is an easy thing for any nation to grapple with, but I think it's something we're all going to have to consider when we begin to think about the implications of climate-induced global migration, some of which has already started. So all nations will have to reconfigure their understanding of who they are particularly to the extent that is rooted in a biological sense of identity.
So I see another hand up. Ulerio.
FRANLY: Hi, my name is Franly. The quotes were very interesting and really thought provoking. Certainly in regards to immigration and that whole journey where we're at and how the hierarchies have been established, especially in the field of immigration and of course vis-a-vis disability.
I think I was most struck by thinking about the founding of the country and then the Chinese Exclusion Act. And then it was sort of Europeans only. And sort of these waves of immigration and who was allowed in and who isn't allowed in, all couched as a natural process. It's a very interesting journey.
MILTON REYNOLDS: I appreciate your comments, Franly. And I'm wondering in your own experience going through school, did you have access to any of these stories or were these things you were able to get a purchase on as an adult? I'm just curious.
FRANLY: Yeah, it was probably in college years. I don't think it was directly really until the Black Lives Matter movement when some of this history became more explicit. And I think I didn't know, for example, the Calvin Coolidge quote. Those things were not explicitly taught.
MILTON REYNOLDS: Thank you for that. I think that your experience is fairly similar to mine, although I got on to these ideas before the Black Lives Matter movement, but it wasn't until college before I actually had the opportunity to begin to think about race in a critical way. And I think, again, one of the challenges that I think is not insignificant is that we have been socialized towards these color-blind frameworks for nearly 70 years. And so if we think about that as a process of underskilling, like our ability to understand the complexity of it is going to have to be reclaimed. As was said in the article by Glenn, one of the ways we're going to have to reclaim this ability and understanding is to leverage the voices of marginalized communities, because they have always had to contend with these ideas. So the intellectual labor that comes about as a result of navigating those different experiences of racialization are really treasures that we have an opportunity to mine and learn from as they may help us find a way forward as a society.
Now, of course that requires inverting our understanding of value and who matters, but isn't that always the work of social justice, is trying to reimagine the world in a way in which everybody has innate value rather than differential value.
So I appreciate that.
So I'm going to move us forward just a little bit, but there's a couple pieces in the chat that I want to pick up quickly. There is a suggestion that Atlanta shootings are also in ageism. Most were over 50. Race plays a super important part. When age is mapped into it, the story gets closer to disability.
So I appreciate that insightful comment, Cathy. I think one of the things that's interesting to think about age is about fitness and how notions of fitness or worth are tied to people's ability to work or to produce. And so as people are seen as aging in society, they may be seen as more disposable or less fit or less worthy.
One of the things striking about the pandemic early on were these notions of reclaiming respirators or ventilators from the elderly and disabled patients, with somehow the idea that their survival was less important because their productive years were, quote/unquote, seen as past or that they weren't able to be productive. So again, intersectionality is a useful concept because it allows us to see these patterns of identification and their consequences.
Somebody posted that Oliver Wendell Holmes quote from the Buck v Bell decision in 1927, it is better for the world if instead of waiting to let society starve for their imbecility, society can prevent their kind. The principle of mandatory vaccination is similar to cutting fallopian tubes. "Three generations of imbeciles is enough," 1927, Justice Holmes, delivered as part of the Buck v Bell decision, when Carrie Buck was done dirty by her legal team and the fix was in.
So the passage of a national sterilization law was basically brokered on Carrie Buck's back. I think it's important for folks who don't know that story, Carrie Buck was a young unwed white woman who was poor and lived in a mixed neighborhood. She had been transgressed against by the man at the house where she was staying because her mother was I believe also incarcerated at the time. So rather than holding the man who raped her or transgressed against her accountable, she was deemed as morally feeble minded and was later incarcerated I believe in Lynchburg, Virginia.
So again, when we see that these ideas get filtered through institutions, policies, and practices, we can see that the consequences are grave and that the implications can be far reaching.
So I've got a bunch more people popping up in the chat. It looks like Lucia can't raise her hand for some reason. Kevin is saying it's hard to have a seat at the table, and I agree with you, Kevin, so I apologize for the limitations of the technology. I apologize for that. I recognize that that is not ideal to be on the outside looking in. And that's the very conversation we're trying to avoid by having these and yet we somehow reinstituted. So my apologies for that.
What I would like to do now though is to move, if we can, into a few more ideas just to get a sense of some of the key assumptions of the eugenicist movement. And I believe these ideas will help us to draw some of the connective tissue that's critical for the conversations that you'll be having for the rest of the day and for the remainder of the week.
So let me share my screen one more time.
So I've been using the word "eugenics" with a set of assumptions that everybody knows it. That may not necessarily be true.
So what I want to share with you is a definition and that the definition of eugenics comes from Sir Francis Galton, the cousin of Charles Darwin. And it gives us this language in 1883. He states that "Eugenics is the study of agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations, whether physically or mentally."
I would love for people to think about the language in this quote that requires further interrogation, or that you would hope would be interrogated. I'll read the quote one more time (rereading quote on screen).
I'm going to copy this and pop this quote in the chat.
So thinking about that quote, what language in there do you think requires some consideration or interrogation?
What would you hope would get pulled out and explored more deeply?
So I see from Lucia, the study of agencies under social control. So that's a really important one. What are agencies under social control? If we imagine institutions, agencies, facilities, our structures that have some bearing on the governance of society, what are some things that we think are worthy or warrant some of our attention?
I know I said earlier that education was a race-making institution, and I think that that's one of them. But what might be some other institutions? And feel free to either pop them in the chat as some people are. I see prisons and government. Ideas mean nothing until they're translated into law. I see the healthcare system. And again, we start to think about rationing healthcare and using the system as a way of controlling the future, making sure that those deemed to be most fit are seen as getting resources, those seem to be less fit get less resources.
I'm going to come back to Cathy's question to say more about race because it doesn't automatically mean skin color. We'll come back to that. It will get teased out.
Franly is lifting up the concept of nonprofit organizations, which I think can be an interesting conversation to be had. If we were to look at the engagement with these ideas, maybe overly simplistically in terms of a left, right, or political frame, I would make the argument that the ideas of race inhabit the left more through a charity lens. So it may be okay to provide resources for those who are deemed to be fit to provide resources and for those who are deemed to be unfit. However, that relationship rarely enters the discussion of why some people are always in a position to give, quote/unquote, as though they actually have something to give and that some are always in a position to receive as though they don't have anything to offer themselves. So again, this notion is often in essentialist notions. Voting is one of these institutions that has the ability to shape the way society functions. As we see efforts to limit voting across the nation, we can understand that there is a power play underway.
So that's eugenics. And I think it's important to recognize that eugenics is a future-focused ideology. It is utopian in many respects although the outcomes and consequences are definitely dystopian. I want to be clear about that. Oftentimes the intentions don't align with the outcomes.
Kara is offering up a definition that relies on the study of rather than, say, practice of seems less harmful.
Right. So I think it is interesting to think about that linguistic framing, but let's be clear that the study of eugenic was definitely about the practice of eugenics, and because it was rooted in national survival, we can understand there are huge amounts of resources being funneled into this movement by many of the major philanthropic organizations of the time, not just on the local and national front but also internationally. So it's important to understand that the U.S. played a very particular role in the promulgation of this ideology around the globe, which runs counter to the narrative that most of us inherit that eugenics is inherently a German or Nazi phenomenon. I would argue, it's as American as apple pie.
So I would like to share a couple key ideas of eugenicists. I think it can be useful connective tissue. Again, I'm going to encourage us to think about anything that strikes us as new or significant or troubling. I'm also going to share that this list was distilled by a former colleague of mine in the process of writing a resource book for educators that was titled Race and Membership in the History of the Eugenics Movement, focusing on four primary areas of eugenic investment. So the book examines the history of marriage restriction. So it gives us access to our understandings of anti-miscegenation laws, looking at the history of sterilization.
It was reading through those materials at that time that this list was distilled.
So some of the key assumptions of the eugenics movement are the following. One is that race exists. So when Thomas Jefferson writes the notes on the state of Virginia that gets published in 1785, five years before the naturalization act of 1790, he posits the idea that he has a suspicion that there are distinct and fundamental differences in the races of this country. So by the time you get to eugenics, several years later, it's taken as a scientific fact. It's a given. So they move from race as a suspicion to race exists and that race is of critical importance to be considered.
They also believe that races are unequal and that some are superior and others are inferior along a continuum. The language of white supremacy has entered the lexicon in more of a normative way than it would have been even 2-3 years ago. People could have used the word but if they would have talked about white supremacy, it would have conjured up images of people parading around with conical hats and flowing robes in October.
Now we're realizing that white supremacy is a national commitment to some groups being dominant and others maintaining a subordinate, imposed position.
It also gives us this idea of a continuum. And I think that this notion of continuum is important because that's where we get the comparison. So one of the set ups of color-blindness, and it's not stated specifically in the article, but Glenn and I have discussed this, is that color-blindness essentially situates whiteness as normal but it doesn't name it. And what that does is it sets up a point of comparison where everything is compared against what is normal, and if that is one end of a continuum and let's say blackness is the far end of the spectrum, then anything in between gets compared to that which is ideal. So that's one of the challenges. If we assume to all be having the same experience and we're not, and yet we're being compared relatively, then what we can see is that there's always going to be default discrimination.
Eugenicists also believed there were physical and behavioral traits between and within races and that they were biologically determined, that environment has little to do with a person's development. So some of you are probably hearing ringing in your ears right now about the notion of nature versus nurture. So that's actually where this argument is rooted. Is it nature that gives us -- is biology destiny? Or does the environment matter?
So within eugenicists, there were two basic camps. There were the Mendelians who followed the principles of genetics. Some of you may remember from high school or middle school that Gregor Mendel had discovered traits with peas, smooth, wrinkled, and so forth. He found two shaped by a single gene allele, one single gene shaping those outcomes. Most are shaped by a variety of different genes in context with environment. So the Mendelians were one of the camps.
The others were the Lamarckians, who believed the environment had a significant influence on people's heredity.
In the United States, the Mendelian camp won out, so we live in a society that suggests that biology is destiny.
What's embedded in this statement here, number 3, is a little bit important to consider. Because if these traits are biologically determined, that is, if biology is destiny and that environment has little or nothing to do with a person's development, then there is an economic argument that's inherent in there. Right? Which is you don't throw good money after bad. And, in fact, if you give resources to those deemed to be unfit, it's actually counterproductive and dangerous for society. So when we start to think about the kinds of comments around rationing of resources, particularly for people who have disabilities, during the pandemic, or also in poor communities of color, we can understand that these ideas are still with us.
In fact, as was said by Kathy in the lunch keynote, this shapes various outcomes for communities, because if you can situate people within a confined space, and segregation has always been a tool, whether you're talking about reservations, internment of Japanese during WW II, the creation of ghettos or barrios, by sit waiting people in spaces, you can funnel out the resources. You can shape the way schools are funded by tying resources to the mean value of properties in those communities. So what we can see is that these notions of disposability are baked into a variety of systems and structures in such a way that we might look to a space and see that as deficient and decrepit and the people in there as being responsible for that. But what that obfuscates is the fact that the racialization of space was done through national policies and practices like the Federal Housing Administration loans and the VA loans, which basically became the period of time in which former European ethnics were amalgamated into the whiteness that we understand today, leaving communities of color in urban spaces bereft of resources in many cases that would have been necessary to thrive.
They also become in many cases environmental dumping grounds as we know through the issues of lead paint, lead in the water, but also in undue exposure to pollutants from traffic, freeways running through communities of color. There are many ways that these notions continue to be replicated by the systems as though those are natural outcomes and in fact they are politically imposed on communities.
So moving through these fairly quickly so we can open up conversation, these traits are passed down by unit character in the germ plasma of the blood. What we know is that as the concept emerged, many people pushing that concept were eugenicists. There's oftentimes a conversation in this country that eugenics is something that we did before the war. Science is pure afterwards. And the argument that many are making is that there is no partition between the prewar engagement with these ideas and the postwar. And, in fact, some eugenic institutions maintain their name up until the '70s. Many institutions simply pivoted in terms of the framing of these languages, but the sets of ideas remain the same. So we see in genetics oftentimes many of the promises of new genetic technologies are predicated on notions of deficiency, which are too often borne by the disability community. These notions of human improvement are rooted in unquestioned notions of deficiency which drive these narratives.
So that's an important one.
We can also see in cultural places these ideas of hereditary transmissibility of both excellence or deficiency are very much with us. Many of us have seen the bumper sticker "My child is an honor student." Again, not a problem with being proud of your children for being successful in school. But embedded in that bumper sticker is this notion that apples don't fall far from the trees, right? My children are successful because I'm successful.
Hear in the San Francisco Bay Area, we see the analogue that my child is an inmate at San Quentin. So you can see people on the other end of that spectrum with a push back against folks who might be sort of trying to elevate themselves.
Eugenicists were interested in criminality, the notion that some people were hereditarily criminal. Work out of Italy talks about the notion of the criminal mind. Probably most of us remember the Central Park time, the notion of crack babies and wilding. We know Donald Trump put out an ad in The New York Times, full page ad, asking for those Central Park young men to be I want to say be put to death or certainly incarcerated for life. And we know that both Bill and Hillary Clinton also trafficked in that area of hereditary criminality. So when we delve down into history and understand that as a way of connective tissue, we can see these ideas are with us in many ways.
Feeble mindedness say catch all term. I think it's loose construction. As we know, Carrie Buck was thought to be morally feeble minded and it was this that caused her to be transgressed against. Note that gender is playing a role in there and that she is being the one being blamed for being transgressed, not the actions of her transgressor.
We know these ideas are also still very much in play although being attended to. We know that rape shield laws now prevent a woman or a man from that point's past history to be used against them in a court of law but in the past, people's sexual history in the past could be used by the accused. Fortunately some things are changing, but those changes are relatively recent. You as lawyers would have a better purchase on that than I might. But my recollection is that's probably within the last 20 years.
It was said by some eugenicists some were born to be ruled and others to be ruled. So again, people's economic status was thought to be reflective of their hereditary assets or an absence thereof.
Last couple here. Sexual relations in marriages between, quote/unquote, superior and inferior types should be otherwise avoided. Otherwise the national culture would decline. Teddy Roosevelt was also known for trafficking in this narrative of race suicide. The basic idea is that if people from different groups commingle their gametes, there would be a regression against the mean. But it would be towards the lesser of those two people who were commingling their gametes. So this idea of race mixing was thought to be profoundly problematic.
So too are prohibitions against class couplings. So you marry up, not down. The notion is if you marry down, you're mixing bad genes with good genes. Again, people's social station was thought to be a reflection of their heredity, not the economic opportunities they were either afforded or denied.
We still see some of this being played out in terms of gay marriage, who can or cannot marry, who can or cannot adopt, so these notions of fitness are not limited to race and class but also sexual orientation as well.
Whoever is deemed to be, quote/unquote, non-normative is deemed to be non-fit.
So closing out, they believe that science could help to weed out bad blood through artificial selection. So in this country, among the things that we practice were sterilization. So in this country, over 60,000 people were sterilized under the official auspice of eugenics. California, where I live, has the dubious distinction of sterilizing over 20,000 people. Now, newer scholarship suggests the numbers might be significantly larger. So some of the early numbers are constrained by a pretty rigid definition of eugenics, but when we begin to look at some of the sterilizations that took place within California prisons or the Latinas being targeted for sterilization in southern California brought out in a recent case, we can understand that the specific and targeted sterilization has been an ongoing theme.
We know women have been targeted for sterilization in the displaced people's camps on the border presently. So this is still very much with us.
Immigration restriction, again, all nations or most nations have to grapple with immigration. But it's important to understand that our immigration restriction laws are tied to protecting the racial integrity of the society. Some of it is about resources, but I would argue from a eugenic perspective, this notion is one of the ways you maintain integrity of your society is to limit who gets in. What we can see through the patterns of immigration law is that this is very much preoccupied with notions of racial difference. But again, race is not just skin color. It's also about a broader set of ideas which would include gender, disability, any markers. All the isms is one way to think about it, the things we talk about in the diversity world, are all tied to these categorical assignments, just to cycle back to Cathy's question.
And lastly that society should observe and measure eugenic differences in order to facilitate this process. So some of the eugenic measuring processes we've all gone through are standardized tests. Standardized tests are directly linked to eugenics through IQ testing. What many people don't know about standardized tests is that many of them are actually norm reference tests, meaning that the bell curve is actually constructed by the preselection of test questions. So I'm assuming most of you went through the LSAT. So there's always a battery of unscored test questions. Same with SAT. They don't tell you which ones they are, and they do that so that you'll approach them as though you would any other questions. But what they don't tell us is that they use our demographic data as a way of identifying which test questions certain subgroups outperform Joe Block's, the mythical middle class white guy who resides at the top of the bell curve. So what people who create tests do is they analyze these test questions individually that are pretested, and then they construct the test. So the value of these tests is in their predictability. But the predictability is a function of the ways in which the test is structured, which may mean there are segments of these tests in which there may be no questions or only singular questions in which one of the subgroups actually outperforms Joe Block's, which determines which questions make it on the test.
I'm going to stop sharing right now and let's open up some conversation. Again, what is new, significant, or troubling.?
And I apologize for having to talk at you. But it's part of this adjustment, however imperfect it may be.
So I would love to open the floor. What is striking you as new or significant or troubling?
Seeing some things in the chat. Yes, race exists. It does but only as a construct. That's a hard thing to wrap our heads around. Many people can say that but they don't understand how race is constructed. To get to that, you need access to the history. So that's one of the things that we might think about as a community. How do we lift up certain histories so that we may gain access to a deeper understanding.
Yeah, somebody else is also mentioning that disability is, again, a construct. And it is indeed. Meaning is assigned, value is assigned. Value is communicated through assigning meaning or not. So that we have to contend with.
Non-Christian is seen as non-normative. I would agree with that. You can see with the Muslim ban how quickly a community was denied to make an entrance.
I see Felicia's hand up.
FELICIA: I guess a couple of statements. Race is unequal, some are superior, others inferior. And the other one about sexual relations in marriages between superior and inferior types should be avoided. Otherwise the national culture will decline. Those sort of punched me in the gut a little bit, just in terms of how profound a statement. And if people believe that, it's terrible for our country.
MILTON REYNOLDS: Yeah. And I think this moment of reckoning is really the realization that that is who we are.
I also think it's important to recognize that's not all of who we are. There's always this tension between the aspirational aspects of democracy and the daily practice reality.
I think it's worth stating that we've gotten this far in spite of ourselves, so imagine what might happen if we got into the right conversation and moved away from this problematic notion that diversity is a problem to be managed, when in the rest of the world, diversity is a strength. It offers a strength and resilience. That's what diversity is in a biological system. As members of a biological system, I would make the argument that diversity does offer us strength and adaptability and capacity, but we have to get people in to that conversation. And in order to do that, we have to develop a much more complex understanding of the idea of race and racialization and understand that it's not simply about skin color, but it is a commitment to what I would say is our low effort habits of mind which situate this notion that biology is destiny, which prevents us from gaining agency and interacting with the systems that are producing these outcomes.
So that pivot is a critical one, and it's a process. All of our thinking is iterative. So if you can imagine a Jenga stack where you're piling sticks on each other, the stability of that stack is contingent upon those sticks remaining in place. So when you start to pull these sticks out of that stack, which is what I would argue critical race theorists and activists have been doing for many years, is that that stack gets destabilized.
What then happens is people try to restabilize their stack because this isn't just about habits of mind; it's also about the material benefits or consequences of racialization. So right now as a nation, we have to understand that these habits in mind are causing a cannibalization in which we're actually underresourcing emergent majority populations in a way that limits our ability to care for ourselves and each other. And in many cases stifling the possibilities of our democracy.
I have faith in people. I have faith in the patterns that I see in history. And in the patterns I'm seeing in the present. That doesn't mean that it's going to be easy and it doesn't mean that a kumbaya future together will happen. It's not. We have to work for it. But that work will be easier and more efficient if we're in the right conversation. Part of that conversation will require reclaiming an understanding of how central this notion of eugenics is in American thought and political practice.
I think it's a legacy of the Cold War and probably a variety of other features that we think that eugenics is something rooted in Nazi, Germany. The Germans came here to study American laws. That's very apparent from a historical lens, though it is not a history most Americans are familiar with. Most Americans if they think about eugenics at all will situate it in Nazi Germany rather than the United States. Again, it's more American than apple pie. That's a bit of a gut punch but one we have to learn to deal with because that will give us access to changing these systems and structures so they honor our diversity rather than see it as a problem and a threat to the nation.
So thank you, Felicia.
I see something from Kevin Williams here. I'm a white male quadriplegic attorney. I had supremacy crammed down my throat like all of us. Therefore, I agree nurture is at stake. However, isn't it possible that some people are not programmed that way.
Kevin, if I'm reading this right, the programming is this idea that people are accepting these ideas of supremacy. So I just want to be clear that I don't think that -- I think that these are ideas that are taught. So people are introduced to these sets of ideas. And whether or not they are seduced by them or whether they're able to resist them as many people have is whether or not they're allowed opportunities to question them. And whether society itself is involved in the process of questioning them.
So I think this moment to me is critical because we're moving out of the stifling of conversation into the inviting of conversation as unruly and complicated and chaotic as it is. That's the conversation that I think is emerging and that's the conversation that we're likely to be in, because there's more people at the table right now.
And as we saw from the historic out pouring of protesters over the course of the summer, literally there was a protest happening in every state in the nation, and that they were diverse protests in many ways. Generationally, ethnically, religiously, and even politically. So I think that bodes well, and it's also fair to suggest that these protests were happening all around the globe. So I do think that there's a current awakening to this history and a reckoning that's beginning, and I think my hunch is we're just seeing the start of it. And so I would encourage folks to think about how do we foment these conversations, how do we create spaces to house these conversations, so as we think about, you know, this institution, how will this symposium become a place where these conversations are had. What does it look like on the home front when you go back to your law offices. Are there structures in place for people to continue to have these conversations. Because we will not sort this out through oversimplifying. It will take time to stitch together meaning. And that's going to require holding some tension. I don't think there's an easy way to do it, and it won't always be comfortable, but let's just be clear: It is a necessity. The inability to get this right is an existential threat not just for us but for the broader planet because the same sort of habits in mind that might impose a hierarchical notions of worth around the environment threaten all of us as we are becoming all too clear on with the rapid advance of climate change. So these ideas have a broad sense of application.
To your point, Kevin, some people don't inhabit these ideas. Our own experience of identification and positionality give us different purchase points or inroads into the conversation. And I think in your own specific definition of self, I would argue that in many cases your own experience of being a quadriplegic probably give you insights and access to experiences that may be unique to you or other folks that share that positionality.
Having said that, we actually need access to each other's thoughts because our different experiences of identification give us a different nuanced understanding of all the work that needs to be done. And thankfully there are people who have always done that work, and other people need to be brought in to that. That's the value of interrogating these values and reframing the problem statement.
I'm not seeing any hands. I don't know that that doesn't mean that there aren't any...
Some people reverted to the chat, which is perfectly fine. Although I would certainly welcome other voices other than mine. We have another 14 minutes or so.
So I'm seeing two comments from, actually three. I'll read them out. And then I'll show one other document briefly.
So looks like Lycette, the state has other mechanisms to control who can reproduce and raise children, imprisonment and commitment to institutions, removing children from parents deemed to be unfit.
Yes, so truth. The growth of the carceral state becomes a way, again, to sequester and isolate people. When we look at the history of institutionalization, it is that same history of segregation. That is, to take those deemed unfit and to sequester them in spaces where they're out of sight and out of mind but they can also be deprived of their rights, not the least of which is procreative rights, but also deprived of access to resources.
When we think about the school in Massachusetts, where there was a horrible history of exploitation and subjugation. We have to make sure that we're in the conversations about these ideas because I would argue that the carceral state is definitely connected to this history. As we see growths in populations, it's not surprising many of them are ending up in incarceration.
Silvia, how extensive is your thinking on state. Much of our thinking about worth and values comes from commercial/corporate manipulation that doesn't.
I think that's spot on. Many people are concerned about the rise of biogenomic technologies and the promising of scientific solutions to what are essentially social and human constructed problems. But this is a pattern that I think we see very consistent with eugenics, the overpromising and the testing in many cases, hyping or construction of markets by playing on people's hopes and fears, and then like eugenics, I think we will see a similar pattern in eugenics because of the connection and overpromise and underdeliverance and where the downsides are cloaked over and covered over and outpaced by the promises. So these are things, I live here in Silicon Valley, so these are very real concerns on this end. Not to mention the rise of the surveillance state, which is also part and partial with the technology.
Here's an example where underrepresentation comes up, with the questions about monetizing systems that are predicated on harvesting now our biogenomic data as the next pool of capital opportunities. So this is very real. Yeah, who gets to be a parent without interference from the state, BIPOC and disabled people aren't seen as fit parents by default, a continuation of the same eugenic principles from Caitlin. I agree wholeheartedly. With access to history, we can see this. And I think then we can attend to them. When we generate collective efforts in calling these things out, there will be opportunities to at a minimum mitigate harm, but hopefully over time create systematized care, access, and belonging because those people who have been excluded in many cases have the understandings of the world that we need to help fix our badly broken and damaged society.
I'm going to try to do one more share.
I'm trying to find this thing on my screen. Where did it go.
Can you see an image on my screen or no?
Let me stop sharing because I don't think it was showing. Let me try one more time here.
It was showing.
MILTON REYNOLDS: Okay. It looked odd on my end.
This is an interesting document. This document was produced for one of the human betterment or race betterment conferences. The image of the eugenics tree shows up in a lot of different countries and places. And I think for me part of its power is that it is a future-focused image. If a tree is healthy and well nourished, it should bear what? Fruit. It should bear fruit. So the idea that the nation is like a tree, if we are able to self-direct human evolution, it will bear healthy fruit. So the ubiquity of this image is powerful in and of itself, but I think what I am both intrigued about and terrified about this image is that we can see, as it says here, eugenics is the self-direction of human evolution. So what you see here is a large tree with a robust stock and about four or five main branches. Emblazoned across the top is the word "eugenics" on a scroll. And on either side of the trunk, it states eugenics is the self-direction, on the other side it says, of human evolution.
As we go down below the root ball which is pretty clearly marked in this image, it says "Like a tree, eugenics draws its materials from many sources and organizes them into a harmonious entity." What I appreciate about this image is that it actually helps us understand the range of different academic disciplines that we're engaged in, although this is certainly not comprehensive, the practice of eugenics or were influenced by eugenics. So just to share a few, we see medicine, surgery, psychology, psychiatry, sociology, education, genealogy, statistics, economics, ethnology, archeology, anthropology, mental testing, psychology, genetics, biology, physiology, and anatomy.
So these are just some of the academic disciplines that were influenced by eugenics. And as many of these disciplines were coming in to prominence themselves, one of the ways in which they gain legitimacy was by connecting to eugenics. And to go back to your point, Felicia, eugenics was very prominent, very mainstream. So when we understand the mainstream appeal of it, it gives us insights into how deeply embedded it is and actually how normalized it is.
One could argue, it's just so inextricably intertwined. So our task moving forward as a society is to begin to trace these ideas and to root them out and to confront them.
I'm going to say something that I believe that help is on the way. There is currently a number of efforts brewing. One that I'm involved in is actually global in scope. There's a project coming out of the United Kingdom called From Small Beginnings, actually rooted in the disability analysis of eugenics, coming out of the confrontation that was had at university college London about a mainstream eugenics conference taking place for several years there. So somebody blew the cover on that, and then there was a tribunal that was held.
There was a minority panel, actually the majority of the members of that panel, who said that the findings from the university were insufficient and in many cases did not attend to the post World War II preoccupation with eugenics. So among the things that was formed out of that is From Small Beginnings, what the team is doing, there's a series of conversations actually underway right now. What we're planning for is the anniversary of the second eugenics Congress held in 1919. I believe September 25-28. So there will be a conference held at the Museum of Natural History in New York.
There will also be a series of events happening around the country, some in California, some in New England, but they will also be swooping around the globe. Australia, Mexico, U.K., Canada, any of the countries, well, most of the countries that have a eugenic history, there will be some sort of recognition going on.
And the thing I'm particularly excited about is there was a subset conversation in which academics and educators in particular are in a transnational conversation. And what we're trying to do is to scope out the contours and ways in which certain notions, eugenic notions inhabit learning institutions, among them that are important to call out is that intellect is fixed rather than malleable. So eugenicists thought, again, people were either smart or not categorically.
What we're trying to do is look at the universal aspects of it so we can invite students in to interrogating these histories and hopefully bring them out into light and through that process begin to do the hard work of disentangling eugenics from our daily political processes.
So I think I'm going to probably wrap up the conversation here. But in the last couple minutes, I would just love to open the floor. Are there any thoughts or questions?
Actually I've got an interesting comment from Matt. He says he didn't want to distract from the group discussion but he says the tree in the picture is similar to the seal of the U.S. Department of Education.
I appreciate that, Matt. What happened to me is likely to happen to other people. As you become more familiar with the history of eugenics, you will literally see it everywhere, because it is everywhere. Right? It's hidden in plain sight. So for me the power of this moment of reckoning is to use the history of the past to call out this malignant ideology that does us all a disservice by asserting as fact the notion that we have differential value, and that is an absurd distortion of reality. Everybody has value. And, in fact, we will always be brighter, more capable, more resilient and more adaptable as a collective. We actually need each other. That's what this moment is illuminating, and I'm just delighted to be here with you today. And I'm hoping to sort of make another cameo appearance tomorrow at lunch with Cathy as you continue this conversation.
But I also want to thank folks for creating an opportunity for me to share these ideas, and hopefully to provoke some deeper conversations within the institution and organization over the course of the next couple of days.
There's a quick question about CRISPR. I think it's challenging. Again, overpromising, not enough conversation about offsite mutations. When we see CRISPR, what should concern us is if people are seeking to use it to create aesthetics that society already seems to value. They want kids that are smarter, that have certain phenotypic expressions, kids that can play music. We can see that this market driven preoccupation with essentialism is dangerous. That's not to suggest that CRISPR may not have some useful medical applications, but I think the red line people are showing up is around the use of CRISPR around sex cells. So anything that could have potentially heritable mutations is sort of a red line. So sematic cells. Yeah, but when you start getting into reproductive cells, you can't guarantee positive outcomes but you can always guarantee unintended outcomes, and when those become heritable, we are all set up to suffer the consequences. So I think we have to have some deeper conversations sooner rather than later because these technologies are with us now and we know that the market is fierce and it will drive conversations that put those of us that aren't at those tables in an even more dire state of vulnerability. And that time is now.
My time supervisor, so I will cede it back to the collective.
CLAUDIA: I just wanted to know how disability rights lawyers could stay in contact with this retrospective on eugenics as you described.
MILTON REYNOLDS: I will post something in the chat shortly. I'll do that right now.
LOU ANN BLAKE: Thank you very much, Milton. We really appreciate you guiding us on this important discussion on race and eugenics, and we look forward to your participation tomorrow during the lunch film discussion with Cathy.
Our next session will be starting at 3:55, Disability Identity and Intersectionality. I think it will be a great panel. So please be sure to be back in the room if you're going to be leaving by 3:50. And we will see you all then. Thank you.