The Racism of Eugenics
At the moment, it is probable that the indirect effect of civilization is dysgenic instead of eugenic; and in any case it seems likely that the dead weight of genetic stupidity, physical weakness, mental instability, and disease-proneness, which already exist in the human species, will prove too great a burden for real progress to be achieved.
― Julian Huxley. UNESCO: Its Purpose and Its Philosophy, 1946.1
We have seen that eugenicists in general focus entirely on a person’s physical characteristics when gauging their perceived usefulness to society. This purely utilitarian thinking has culminated in the attempted extermination of entire classes of people — the handicapped, the elderly, other ethnicities, and Jews. The only difference between eugenics practice a century ago and in our current day is that now, those who are deemed non-productive or “unwanted” are killed individually instead of en masse — usually by the people who should be protecting and caring for them.
A 1930’s poster of the Eugenics Society, courtesy of Wellcome Library (CC BY 4.0)
From its beginning, the leadership of the eugenics movement has been drawn exclusively from influential white elitists.2 And those targeted by eugenics measures have invariably been minorities, the poor and the powerless.
Julian Huxley’s quote above, made the year after World War II ended, shows that the eugenicists learned nothing from the Nazi horror. And now that we are well into the 21st Century, we have witnessed that absolutely nothing has changed. The eugenic evil has been camouflaged and perfumed — but it is still as great a danger as it ever was.
Eugenics and Racism
In his vividly‑titled 1922 book The Rising Tide of Color against White World‑Supremacy, eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard described what he considered “the root of all our problems.” He demonstrated beyond a shadow of reasonable doubt the intimate connection between eugenics and goal‑oriented racism which is also the motivating force behind the worldwide population suppression movement:
None of the colored races shows perceptible signs of declining birth‑rate, all tending to breed up to the limits of available subsistence….It can mean only one thing: A tremendous and steadily augmenting outward thrust of surplus colored men from overcrowded colored homelands….But many of these relatively empty [Northern] lands have been definitely set aside by the white man as his own special heritage….
His [“colored” man’s] outstanding quality is superabundant animal vitality. In this he easily surpasses all other races. To it he owes his intense emotionalism. To it, again, is due his extreme fecundity, the negro being the quickest of breeders. This abounding vitality shows in many other ways, such as the negro’s ability to survive harsh conditions of slavery under which other races have soon succumbed….black blood, once entering a human stock, seems never really bred out again….The grim truth of the matter is this: The whole white race is exposed, immediately or ultimately, to the possibility of social sterilization and final replacement or absorption by the teeming colored races.
For race‑betterment is such an intensely practical matter! …We or the next generation will take in hand the problem of race‑depreciation, and segregation of defectives and abolition of handicaps penalizing the better stocks will put an end to our present racial decline.3
Stoddard’s prediction has unfortunately been fulfilled. The Culture of Death in our time that has eagerly taken up the task of “abolishing handicaps” with the devastatingly effective weapons of amniocentesis, abortion, and infanticide. And they are targeting other races on a worldwide scale; two-thirds of all population control dollars expended by the West over the past two decades have been directed towards suppressing the populations of African nations.4
It is interesting to note that Stoddard sat on the board of Margaret Sanger’s American Birth Control League, and his book was promoted by Sanger’s magazine The Birth Control Review. Stoddard’s books won him wide acclaim in Nazi Germany, and, when he visited that country, he was allowed access to the highest elements of the Reich’s hierarchy. He had cordial meetings with Heinrich Himmler, head of both the Nazi secret police and the Schutzstaffel [SS], with Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German Minister of Foreign Affairs, and with Adolf Hitler himself. He also met with leading Nazi racialists and eugenicists, including Hans F.K. Gunther, Eugen Fischer and Franz Lenz, and visited their institutions.
The famous war historian William L. Shirer noted that Stoddard was given preference by the German brass because his racist writings were “featured in Nazi school textbooks.”5
Eugenics and Racism during the Civil Rights Movement
The eugenics mentality is not only prevalent among the elite, it is steadily spreading into the general populace as well. In 1970, the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence found that “the overwhelming majority of White Americans would be ‘good Germans’ if the government turned to massive racial repression.”6
There was ample cause for the Commission’s concern, because “racial repression” was happening on a wide scale at the time. Experts testified that there had already been many cases of outright propaganda and coercion directed against minorities by governmental and quasi‑governmental agencies in numerous states.
For example, in the 1960s, the Chicago Planned Parenthood Association sponsored birth control “coffee parties” all over the black sections of the city—but none in the white-dominated suburbs.7 In Pittsburgh, representatives of federally financed “family planning” programs sent a brigade of “home visitors” and public assistance workers to the homes of thousands of black women in order to convince them to make use of family planning clinic services. If a woman did not immediately comply, workers directly threatened her with a cutoff of all public assistance if she had any more children. When black citizens exposed this coercion and called it “genocide,” the Pittsburgh Antipoverty Board voted down funds from the United States Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) that would have continued Planned Parenthood clinic operations in six of the city’s poorer neighborhoods.8 The OEO, in fact, had actually funded thousands of the involuntary sterilizations of poor black women across the South in the 1940s and 1950s.9
During the same period, the South Carolina and Delaware legislatures considered laws that would mandate the sterilization of all welfare mothers after they had borne two children out of wedlock. In New York, municipal judges commonly offered women the choice of sterilization or a cutoff of welfare benefits.10 These laws directly targeted black women.
These racist programs did not escape the notice of civil rights activists. Dr. Constance Redbird Uri testified before her state legislature, “What is family planning for Indians? The highest priority is abortion. We have been controlled by your government for 200 years now, but you have another weapon [abortion]. We often doubt whether we will be here in another 200 years.”11 And Raoul Silva testified, “California is waging a war of genocide against Blacks, Latins, and Indians. They offer abortions to minority women who don’t even ask ― and they get teenage girls to decide for abortion before they’re pregnant. That’s how they play the genocide game in Los Angeles County.”12
Racist Eugenics Live On
The corrupt and racist theory of eugenics, which seeks to create a “race of thoroughbreds” through birth control, abortion, and sterilization (without consent, if necessary) certainly did not die in a bunker with Adolf Hitler in 1945. Many of the world’s most distinguished and influential scholars and social engineers still advocate the widespread use of eugenics to rid society of its ever‑present “undesirable elements.”
Two‑time Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling has suggested that those who carry “dysfunctional genes” have information on their disabilities tattooed in code onto their foreheads.13 And renowned biologist John Maynard Smith would like to give tax breaks and bonuses to the educated and intelligent who have children and heavily penalize others (i.e. minorities and those with “dysfunctional genes.”14
Perhaps not surprisingly, the omnipresent population controller Garrett Hardin weighed in with his eugenicist views in the June 1992 issue of Omni Magazine:
It would be better to encourage the breeding of more intelligent people rather than the less intelligent. ZPG’s [Zero Population Growth, now Population Connection] entire attraction has been among the college population. So in effect, ZPG is encouraging college‑educated people to have fewer children instead of encouraging reduced fertility among the less intelligent.15
A Washington state doctor, Bruce Tracy, urged the state Senate to provide sterilization bounties for women on welfare. The measure, Senate Bill 6379, sponsored by Senator Scott Barr, would pay $10,000 to a woman if she agreed to be neutered after her first child, and $5,000 if she agreed after the second child. The bill would also give $500 to men who got neutered after fathering a welfare child.16
In a classic example of racist eugenics, deputy editorial page editor Donald Kimelman of the Philadelphia Inquirer stated in an article ominously entitled “Poverty and Norplant: Can Contraception Reduce the Underclass?”:
As we read these two stories [about Norplant and black poverty], we asked ourselves: Dare we mention them in the same breath? To do so might be considered deplorably insensitive, perhaps raising the specter of eugenics. But it would be worse to avoid drawing the logical conclusion that foolproof contraception could be invaluable in breaking the cycle of inner city poverty ― one of America’s greatest challenges.17
Kimelman continued by suggesting that welfare mothers could be implanted with Norplant for free and perhaps receive increased welfare benefits as a reward. He apparently failed to realize that this was one of the first elements of the coercive Chinese population program that features mandatory sterilization and forced abortions even in the ninth month of pregnancy.
As one more example, Anthony Bouza, a former Minneapolis Police Chief and columnist for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, wrote a Mother’s Day editorial with the incredibly oxymoronic title “A Mother’s Day Wish: Make Abortion Available to All Women.” He described the “at risk” population as “poor, Black and Indian,” and said that their offspring are “marked for failure.” Then he went on to say:
When abortions are illegal, poor women deliver and keep their babies. Then they plunk them in front of a TV set, watch them get abused and conditioned to violence by parades of males, and expose them to all the factors the criminologists describe as the precursors to a life of crime….Making abortions freely available to the impoverished young women who produce our criminals is very likely the most important crime‑prevention measure adopted in this country in the last 25 years.18
In short, eugenics and racism are very much alive today, working closely together against minority races and the lower classes.
Final Thoughts
The idea of negative eugenics, or preventing “lesser” people from reproducing, is sadly still at play in modern society, intimately connected with true racism.
We are witnessing the growth of a branch of positive eugenics that might be called “self-directed evolution.” This mania has lost sight of who we truly are as human beings, and of God’s plan for our lives. We are by now all familiar with transgenderism — but it has gone far beyond that, from trans-racialism, trans-speciesism and transablism, to the strangest phenomenon of all, transhumanism. But those are subjects for another article.
Endnotes
[1] Julian Huxley. UNESCO: Its Purpose and Its Philosophy (London: Preparatory Commission of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), 1946, page 21.[2] A few influential blacks, including W.E.B. DuBois and some professors from historically black colleges such as Howard and Tuskegee, supported a refined strain of eugenics, holding that the best blacks were just as good as the best whites, and that the top ten percent of all races should freely mix.Marilyn M. Singleton. “The ‘Science’ of Eugenics: America’s Moral Detour”; Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, Winter 2014 (Volume 19, Number 4); Gregory Dorr and Angela Logan. “Quality, not Mere Quantity Counts: Black Eugenics and the NAACP Baby Contests”; In Paul Lombardo. A Century of Eugenics in America: From the Indiana Experiment to the Human Genome Era (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), pages 68 to 92.
[3] Lothrop Stoddard, Ph.D. The Rising Tide of Color against White World‑Supremacy (New York City: Charles Scribner’s Sons), 1921. Reprinted in 1971 by Negro Universities Press, Westport, Connecticut. Pages i, 8, 9, 90, 231, 298, 301, 302, 308, and 309 in the reprinted version. A classic racist book that clearly and vividly demonstrates the kind of thinking that led to eugenics, the current‑day racist abortion program in the United States, and the Nazi mentality.[4] The “developed” world has spent $109.8 billion on population suppression programs in the developing world during the time period 1991 to 2016. $71.8 billion of this has been spent in Africa, or 65.4% (The Facts of Life Excel spreadsheet F-18-B.XLS, “Population Control Expenditures in the Regions and the Nations of the World, 1991-2016.” Available in the Human Life International store).[5] William L. Shirer. Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent (New York City: Alfred Knopf), 1941, page 257.[6] Rodney Stark and James McEvoy III. “Middle‑Class Violence.” Psychology Today, November 1970, pages 34‑38.[7] America Magazine, November 6, 1965, page 511.[8] R.Z. Hallow. “The Blacks Cry Genocide.” The Nation, April 28, 1969, page 535.[9] Rebecca M. Kluchin. Fit to Be Tied: Sterilization and Reproductive Rights in America 1950–1980 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press), 2009, pages 17 to 20. Black leaders had good reason to believe, as they said, that “federal programs were underwriting eugenicists who wanted to impose their views about population quality on minorities and poor women.”[10] Erma Clardy Craven. “Abortion, Poverty, and Black Genocide.” T.W. Hilgers and D.J. Horan. Abortion and Social Justice (New York City: Sheed and Ward), 1972.[11] Dr. Constance Redbird Uri, quoted in Peggy Cuddy. “Abortion and Racial Genocide.” A.L.L. About Issues (American Life Lobby), October 1983, pages 23 to 26.[12] Raoul Silva, quoted in Peggy Cuddy. “Abortion and Racial Genocide.” A.L.L. About Issues (American Life Lobby), October 1983, pages 23 to 26.[13] Linus Pauling. Foreword to “Reflections on the New Biology.” UCLA Law Review, February 1968, page 269.[14] John Maynard Smith. “Eugenics and Utopia.” Daedalus, Summer 1989, page 91.[15] “Interview: Garrett Hardin.” Omni Magazine, June 1992, pages 56 to 63.[16] “Rural Doctor Proposes Sterilization Bounty.” The Oregonian, February 8, 1992, page B2.[17] Don Kimelman. “Poverty and Norplant: Can Contraception Reduce the Underclass?” Philadelphia Inquirer, December 12, 1990.[18] Anthony Bouza, a former Minneapolis Police Chief and columnist for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, in a 1990 Mother’s Day editorial entitled “A Mother’s Day Wish: Make Abortion Available to All Women.” Quoted in Mary Ann Kuharski. “Aborting the ‘At Risk’ Population: Racism Rears its Ugly Head.” ALL About Issues, Winter 1991, pages 16 and 17 (Bouza described the “at risk” population as “poor, Black and Indian,” and said that their offspring are “marked for failure”).
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