'Act of genocide.' Eugenics program tried to 'breed out' Black people in NC, report says

[Judi Lynn]

BY HAYLEY FOWLER
JULY 22, 2020 05:43 PM , UPDATED JULY 23, 2020 01:26 PM

For more than four decades North Carolina’s statewide eugenics program forcibly sterilized almost 7,600 people — many of whom were Black.

That wasn’t a coincidence, according to a new academic paper.

Duke University professor William A. Darity Jr. co-authored a report published in the American Review of Political Economy that correlates 10 years of forced sterilizations in counties across the state with the number of unemployed Black residents, finding the program was all but designed to “breed (them) out,” according to a university news release.

“This suggests that for Blacks, eugenic sterilizations were authorized and administered with the aim of reducing their numbers in the future population — genocide by any other name,” the paper states.

From 1929 to 1974, North Carolina’s eugenics program sterilized close to 7,600 men and woman, making it impossible for them to reproduce or conceive, according to The Justice for Sterilization Victims Foundation.

More:
https://www.newsobserver.com/news/state/north-carolina/article244411987.html

[soothsayer]

1. 1974? Holy cow

[The Jungle 1]

9. yea my same reaction

So in 73 we legalized abortion. Then in 74 NC decided to stop mutilating women and men.

Abortion bad, mutilation good. I bet the same people do not want money spent on birth control pills.

[bobbieinok]

2. Add Tuskegee Experiment---black men left untreated for syphillis so white drs could 'study' disease

There is a book Medical Apartheid that details the appalling number of 'medical' ways whites have used blacks

Eta----Experiment was run from 1932 to 1972 by the US Public Health Service, according to Wikipedia. Source also says Tuskegee University (at that time Instititute) aided the study

Also, the 'subjects of the study' were poor black share croppers from AL

[appalachiablue]

3. Also used in many other states incl. CA, PA, VA (until 1970)

Puerto Rico and others for minorities and people deemed mentally disabled even on the say so of a social worker.

[appalachiablue]

4. In Peru, the state began a forced sterilization program

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-34855804

targeting indigenous women in 1996 that impacted thousands of women.

[bobbieinok]

5. NC didn't repeal its involuntary sterilization law until 2003!

Info in the article

Day 17: Mississippi Apendectomies and Reproductive Freedom, 2014, by Sara Kuglar

According to this article, NC sterilized more than 3000 Native American women

[jimlup]

6. Wow

This kind of stuff shouldn't be real but I'm sure it is. The racism in my family's home state is horrible.

[bobbieinok]

7. 'Mississippi Appendectomies'--black women would be involuntarily sterilized during medical visit

[bobbieinok]

8. James Marion Sims, the Father of Modern Gynecology, got info by experiments on slave women!

He performed the experiments without anestheology.

IIRC, he often repeated his experiment several times on the same slave

[wnylib]

10. Eugenics targets were people deemed

"unfit" to reproduce. Targets were minority groups - Blacks, Native Americans, immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, and very poor people. America's own "master race" program.

[Igel]

11. Also criminals, Jews, and those mentally "unfit".

This was the state of the science and it wasn't in some dark corner. It overgeneralized the facts but wasn't something that almost everybody hated. There were programs at Harvard, for instance. Eugenics weren't necessarily the reigning paradigm but it wasn't denounced by all. (It was denounced by some, but so was the idea of quantization of EM energy and even different acid-base theories had their detractors ... and if you want fun, look at Wegener's "drifting continents" ideas and how they were denounced. In other words, denunciation of eugenics wasn't always on purely moralistic, quasi-theological grounds.)

The ultimate reaction against eugenics was also no scientifically better. Flip. Flop.


As for the Nazi reference, it is where Hitler got a lot of his "science". From US, British, and other sources. (This wasn't part of "American Exceptionalism," the positive or negative view of it.) By the time Hitler was getting going, Boas and others were kicking eugenics' butt in the US and it never ramped up here like in some other places.


Oddly, a prime thread for somebody mentioning Uighurs and China. Oddly, nobody wants to mention Uighurs and China.

[wnylib]

12. Thanks for the reminder that American eugenics

included Jews and people with mental diagnoses. The mental diagnoses themselves were higly questionable.

I had read that Hitler was influenced by American and British eugenics programs. Also by American reservations to round up and isolate Native Americans. It used to be a crime, punishable by prison or death, for Native Americans to leave reservations. Not to mention the bounties paid by the federal government for the deaths of Native American children, women, and men found not living on reservation land.

I have said nothing about the Chinese and Uighurs because I am less familiar with their situation.

[appalachiablue]

13. News of sterilization of minority Muslim Uyghur women

in China was fairly prominent in the media. I saw the first reports; it's horrifying, in the past and now in the 21st century.

- China Forces Abortion, Sterilization On Uyghurs, Investigation Shows, ABC News, June 30, 2020,

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-30/china-forces-birth-control-on-uyghurs-to-suppress-population/12404912

The campaign, over the past four years in the far west region of Xinjiang, is leading to what some experts are calling a form of "demographic genocide".

The state regularly subjects minority women to pregnancy checks, and forces intrauterine devices (IUDs), sterilisation and even abortion on hundreds of thousands, the interviews and data show.