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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)- - -
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