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Eugenics support from "non-white" population groups (history of junk science)

#1
C C Offline
Philippa Levine on Eugenics Around the World: Early in the twentieth century governments all over the world thought they had found a rational, efficient, and scientific solution to the related problems of poverty, crime, and hereditary illness. Scientists hoped they might be able to help societies control the social problems that arose from these phenomena. From Mexico to Maine, from Switzerland and Scandinavia to South Carolina, from India to Indiana, the science-turned-social-policy known as eugenics became a base-line around which social services and welfare legislation were organized. In laboratories and college classrooms eugenic research and teachings were advanced and enthusiastically funded by institutions such as the Rockefeller Foundation. In many countries – Germany, the Soviet Union, Denmark, Belgium, and Britain, among others [China, Iran] – scientific institutes devoted to eugenic research emerged.

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African-American support of eugenics: "Some African-Americans have been proponents of eugenics. Thomas Wyatt Turner, a professor at Howard University and a well respected scientist incorporated eugenics into his classes. The NAACP founder asked his students how eugenics can affect society in a good way in 1915. W.E.B DuBois, a historian and civil rights leader had some beliefs that lined up with eugenics. He believed in developing the best versions of African Americans in order for his race to succeed."

The Black Politics of Eugenics (excerpt): During the early twentieth century, African Americans of different socioeconomic classes embraced the possibilities of eugenics for racial improvement. While their participation was not unanimous or monolithic, their investment in eugenics challenges the ways we think about how people understood and mobilized it. Scholars Shantella Sherman and Michell Chresfield have explored some of the ways in which African Americans used eugenics for racial improvement. My own work argues that African Americans crafted their own theory and practice of eugenics as part of broader struggles for racial justice.

African American physicians, biologists, and social scientists used the language of eugenics and reproductive control to frame their scholarship on racial improvement. Famous scholar and activist W.E.B Du Bois borrowed eugenic language in his 1903 essay on the Talented Tenth, in which he stated “The Negro race, like all other races, is going to be saved by exceptional men.” Du Bois was also a strong proponent of birth control for African American women. In an article for the June 1932 issue of Margaret Sanger’s Birth Control Review entitled “A Negro Number,” Du Bois argued that birth control for poor African Americans was necessary for the race and that people “must learn that among human races and groups, as among vegetables, quality and not mere quantity really counts.”

African American scholars and activists also mobilized eugenics as a strategic response to scientific racism. Physician and physical anthropologist William Montague Cobb argued against assumptions of black inferiority in his work. In his 1939 article, “The Negro as a Biological Element in the American Population,” Cobb stated that though the race previously had some inferior elements, those had actually been destroyed by American life:

"Not only the conditions surrounding his arrival but those under which the Negro has lived in America must have had a selective effect on improving his stock. Pre-emancipation exploitation must be credited with a mass elimination not alone of the weak and unfit, but also of those who were lacking in that individual shrewdness which is a vital essential in self preservation."

Cobb actually argued that the collective stock of the race had improved as a result of racial oppression! (MORE)

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Progressive eugenics is hardly history - the science and politics have just evolved (intro): Eugenics has been science’s toxic brand since the end of World War II. [...] However, this is not the most useful way to think about eugenics, either in terms of its history or its lessons. Historically, eugenics was primarily embraced as part of a “progressive” political agenda across the world – not only in regions under Western imperial rule. As the excellent "Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics" demonstrates, Mexico, Iran and China have been among the most enthusiastic eugenically oriented nations without any trace of white supremacist ideology. I believe that we should understand eugenics in the context of what the original “progressive eugenicists” were trying to achieve, in spite of their ill-chosen means, because it is not so clear that our own political and, increasingly, personal ambitions are so different from theirs. (MORE)

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Eugenics in Mexico (intro): Following the Mexican Revolution, the eugenics movement gained prominence in Mexico. Seeking to change the genetic make-up of the country's population, proponents of eugenics in Mexico focused primarily on rebuilding the population, creating healthy citizens, and ameliorating the effects of perceived social ills such as alcoholism, prostitution, and venereal diseases. Mexican eugenics, at its height in the 1930s, influenced the state's health, education, and welfare policies.

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China, history of eugenics: Eugenics was one of many ideas and programs debated in the 1920s and 1930s in Republican China, as a means of improving society and raising China's stature in the world. [...] The Beijing Genomics Institute does whole genome sequencing of very high IQ individuals around the world. Geoffrey Miller claims that the Chinese may use this genetic data to increase the IQ of each subsequent generation by five to fifteen IQ points through the use of preimplantation embryo selection.

Geoffrey Miller (intro): China has been running the world's largest and most successful eugenics program for more than thirty years, driving China's ever-faster rise as the global superpower. I worry that this poses some existential threat to Western civilization. Yet the most likely result is that America and Europe linger around a few hundred more years as also-rans on the world-historical stage, nursing our anti-hereditarian political correctness to the bitter end. When I learned about Chinese eugenics this summer, I was astonished that its population policies had received so little attention. China makes no secret of its eugenic ambitions, in either its cultural history or its government policies. (MORE)

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Modern Eugenics: Cyprus, China, Japan, Russia, USA, Israel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of...evaluation
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#2
Syne Offline
So sad that W.E.B Du Bois won the argument against Booker T. Washington. Basically Du Bois argued that blacks should send their elite to petition the white man on their behalf, who would earn a good living as a token while achieving little for their people, while Washington argued that blacks should just strive to actually be better than whites, accepting meritocratic competition. If Washington had won, we might have seen a work ethic in the black community commensurate with Asians.
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#3
stryder Offline
(Mar 17, 2019 06:31 AM)Syne Wrote: So sad that W.E.B Du Bois won the argument against Booker T. Washington. Basically Du Bois argued that blacks should send their elite to petition the white man on their behalf, who would earn a good living as a token while achieving little for their people, while Washington argued that blacks should just strive to actually be better than whites, accepting meritocratic competition. If Washington had won, we might have seen a work ethic in the black community commensurate with Asians.

If you try to be "better" than someone, then you are already capitulating to the belief that they are already better than you. It should really have been about striving to be no less than those who are seemingly advantaged (be it the advantage here during that time period was colour and status)
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#4
Syne Offline
(Mar 17, 2019 03:19 PM)stryder Wrote:
(Mar 17, 2019 06:31 AM)Syne Wrote: So sad that W.E.B Du Bois won the argument against Booker T. Washington. Basically Du Bois argued that blacks should send their elite to petition the white man on their behalf, who would earn a good living as a token while achieving little for their people, while Washington argued that blacks should just strive to actually be better than whites, accepting meritocratic competition. If Washington had won, we might have seen a work ethic in the black community commensurate with Asians.

If you try to be "better" than someone, then you are already capitulating to the belief that they are already better than you.  It should really have been about striving to be no less than those who are seemingly advantaged (be it the advantage here during that time period was colour and status)

So you think Asians feel inferior to whites, or are they just striving to be the best they can? The fact that someone could strive to be better implies that they CAN actually be better, whereas having to wait for your elites to ask for things like welfare and reparations implies that you can NEVER be better, and must always require outside help. Being better despite a disadvantage, like race, would naturally overcome the disadvantage itself.
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#5
Magical Realist Offline
The fact that you strive to be better than some other class of people symptomizes an inability to accept oneself in one's own indemic identity and a reliance on comparison to others to give yourself a pseudo-identity. As long as one strives to be better than someone you are acknowledging that you depend on that someone to give yourself value and meaning instead of finding it on your own in your own life. It is a fallacy that one can obtain meaning in life thru some valued social status. It's much more personal and subtle than that. It has to be achieved independently of the arbitrary societal standard that is being enforced upon you. You cannot find your true identity while conforming to what your society and culture defines as great and successful.
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#6
Syne Offline
Meritocratic competition doesn't imply that you are singling out any particular class of people to best. Just in the context of blacks at the time, if you were willing to compete at all, whites were the competition. It was a reality any intelligent person would be hard-pressed to deny. And what part of not competing directly is a genuine identity? That sounds like the racism of low expectations.

Booker T. Washington, educator, reformer and the most influentional black leader of his time (1856-1915) preached a philosophy of self-help, racial solidarity and accomodation. He urged blacks to accept discrimination for the time being and concentrate on elevating themselves through hard work and material prosperity. He believed in education in the crafts, industrial and farming skills and the cultivation of the virtues of patience, enterprise and thrift.
...
Du Bois advocated political action and a civil rights agenda (he helped found the NAACP). In addition, he argued that social change could be accomplished by developing the small group of college-educated blacks he called “the Talented Tenth:”

“The Negro Race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men. The problem of education then, among Negroes, must first of all deal with the “Talented Tenth.” It is the problem of developing the best of this race that they may guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of the worst.”
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/artic...ashington/


So Washington advocated hard work, self-development, and self-reliance despite what others thought or did (discrimination), while Du Bois abandoned the vast majority of blacks to elevate the "Talented Tenth", who would then be the supposed messiahs of black culture...pretty much people like Al Sharpton. Washington didn't derive value from whites; he derived value despite of whites. While Du Bois' Talented Tenth would only have value due to the status of being the educated, "well-spoken" blacks (as Joe Biden described Obama, "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy")...as deemed by whites...and in contrast to the rest. You know, tokenism.

Those who follow the sentiment of Du Bois don't take responsibility for finding their own value in life, always blaming others for their lot. Those who follow the sentiment of Washington are too busy being successful to worry about who might not like blacks.

And if you don't think blacks suffer from their culture pressure, that glorifies crime and derides education, you are blind.
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