Eugenics: Thwarting a Racist Science

In the age where scientific breakthroughs and development are achieved, scientists have devised some ways in which selective breeding is used in plants and animals to boost the opportunity of survival of species. Of course, they did not throw away the thought of applying the same process of improving humans and remove undesirable characteristics in them. British biologist Francis Galton (1822–1911) coined the word “eugenics” in 1883, though the underlying ideas could be found in earlier works of Plato, the Greek term literally meant “excellent in birth”. Due to the fact of these new scientific techniques, eugenics has given room for the advancement of racism and other varieties of social divisions like class systems. Galton believed that marital unions between people of what he regarded as “superb genetic stock” could be expected to generate offspring with the identical or comparable qualities (Last, 2007). Even so, the eugenics movement was frowned upon by many men and women simply because it was used by the Nazi regime in Germany, as it pushed to increase human race by eliminating the individuals they despised – the Jews (anti-Semitism). Therefore, eugenics and racism are linked by the truth that every person will have their own rights and it is prone to be abused by individuals who want to dominate the weak.

As a cousin of Charles Darwin who introduced to the world the theory of evolution, Galton incorporated Darwin’s thought of survival of the fittest into his notion of eugenics. The goal of eugenics was the improvement of the human species by means of the careful selection of parents. Galton identified two main processes to achieve this end. Positive eugenics encouraged people who were above average both mentally and physically to create much more offspring. Negative eugenics proposed that people who were below average ought to have fewer or no children. This second proposal could be achieved by way of institutional segregation, marriage restrictions, or sterilization (Berson &amp Cruz, 2001, p. 300). His precise words for these processes were eugenics’ very first objective is “to check the birth-rate of the unfit … the second object is the improvement of the race by furthering the productivity of the fit.” Galton utilised the word race in its nineteenth-century sense to designate the population of the nation state and not in the broader twentieth-century sense. Galton appears to have believed that the reason why it would be desirable to improve the genetic high quality of a nation’s population is that this determines the top quality of its civilization and the economic and military strength of the nation. Lynn (2004) writes that:

In his book Hereditary Genius (1869), Galton proposed that the population of classical Athens had the highest intelligence of any human population and that this was responsible for the high level of civilization. He also contended that when the intelligence and the moral character of a society deteriorate through dysgenic fertility, the quality of its civilization declines. He cited the decline of Spain in the seventeenth century as an instance in which the deterioration of intelligence, which he attributed to the extensive celibate priesthood, had been responsible for national decline in the high quality of civilization and of economic and military power…. [In this case,] Eugenics, in Galton’s view, is primarily concerned with promoting the very good of the population, not that of the individual. This concept that the well-being of the population is a lot more crucial than that of individuals fell increasingly into disfavor in the second half of the twentieth century and is one of the key factors that eugenics became almost universally rejected (p. 48).

Given that racism is a form of prejudice based on perceived physical differences and generally refers to unfavourable or hostile attitudes toward folks perceived to belong to one more race, eugenics would certainly fall in this category simply because racism typically results in a belief in the superiority of one’s own race. The trigger of prejudice and racism is the “human tendency to form stereotypes, generalized beliefs that associate entire groups of individuals with certain traits”. Racial stereotypes are “exaggerated or oversimplified” descriptions of any person’s “appearance, personality, and behaviour” (Cavalli-Sforza, 2005).

Actually, Galton and his cohorts were properly intentioned and progressive in their concept of suggesting eugenics due to the fact they were just concerned with bettering humanity. Soon after all, this was in the course of the Progressive Era, characterized as a time of hope and reform. Gerald Grob (1991) pointed out that eugenics advocates had been acting on behalf of a noble cause that would benefit humanity. They believed that medical and scientific knowledge, combined with a new technologies, had reached a point in time in which the eradication of inherited defects was feasible.

With all that intention, eugenics was welcomed in the United States. As Rosen (2004) writes:

Beginning in the early years of the twentieth century and spanning the decades of the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s, eugenicists in the United States referred to as for programs to control human reproduction. They urged legislatures to pass laws to segregate the so-known as feebleminded into state colonies, where they would live out their lives in celibacy they supported compulsory state sterilization laws aimed at men and females whose “germplasm” threatened the eugenic vitality of the nation they led the drive to restrict immigration from countries whose citizens may well pollute the American melting pot. Their science filtered into common culture by means of eugenics advice books and child-rearing manuals, eugenics novels, plays, and films, and scores of magazine and newspaper articles (p. 6).

With the growing presence and perceived virility of African Americans, immigrants in the early 1900s, and the working class—as well as the increasing visibility of working-class “females adrift, this threatened white middle-class male authority in both power and numbers, proponents of eugenics in the United States targeted a factor in middle-class decline: the limited fecundity of this new woman. As Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed in the 1900s, white middle-class womanhood had willfully abandoned its fertility. The white birthrate was rapidly declining: whereas the average American family members of 1840 had produced six young children that of 1900 generated only 3 kids. Roosevelt propelled sociologist Edward Ross’s term race suicide into the public arena. In a 1901 address, “The Causes of Race Superiority,” Ross warned that the advancement and progress of the “superior race” could lead to its demise manhood had grow to be over civilized, decadent, and impotent. However, Roosevelt, considerably, placed the blame on white womanhood. Girls of “very good stock” who chose not to have young children, he declared, were “race criminals” (Paul 1995, p. 102).

Yet, the shocking turnout the eugenics movement was that in 1902, when an Indiana physician named Dr. Harry Sharp urged passage of mandatory sterilization laws that would need all men in prisons, reformatories, and paupers’ houses to be sterilized. Prior to any such law was passed permitting it, he had involuntarily sterilized more than five hundred men. Following Dr. Sharp’s lead, in 1907 Indiana became the first state to pass a eugenics-based sterilization law. By 1912, eight states had sterilization laws. Eventually nearly thirty states followed suit (Paul 1995, p. 81-82).

In the course of the rise and fall of eugenics, we can see that there are obvious troubles with it. The 1st is that there is far more at stake in developing a superior human than in making a superior species of vegetable. Vegetables do not have rights but humans do, and these human rights are possessed by all persons because they are human human rights do not cease to exist if an individual is “imperfect” in 1 or far more approaches. At its core, eugenics tends to cancel out the right of the less than ideal individual to existence and this type of presumptive arrogance is inherently immoral and racist. A second harmful outcome of eugenics could be that via screening programs privileged groups may well act on their prejudices against, for example, Black people becoming linked with criminality. Given that being Black is neither a crime nor a defect, it would be a grave injustice for advocates of eugenics to attempt to eradicate such classes of men and women from the human gene pool. Another possible harm of eugenics is that those who promote it do so at the expense of the harmony of the human community. This community, as we know it, is made up of individuals of all kinds, some far more gifted than others, some much more troubled than others. The solidarity and prosperity of the human community depend on cooperation and respect amongst all members, not on a screening policy, like eugenics, through which some members lose their correct to membership based on the values and biases of those in influential positions. The biggest difficulty with eugenics is almost certainly the fact that, even if the program were embraced and employed, it would not be probable to carry it out. Humans are the most complicated of all the species and, even with carefully orchestrated breeding programs, individuals with physical, mental, social, or psychological limitations would still be born.

Works Cited

Berson, Michael J., and Barbara Cruz. “Eugenics Past and Present.” Social Education 65.5 (2001): 300.

Grob, Gerald. Introduction, in the Surgical Solution: A History of Involuntary Sterilization in the United States, ed. Phillip R. Reilly, Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.

Last, John M. Eugenics. A Dictionary of Public Health. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Lynn, Richard. Eugenics: A Reassessment. Ed. Seymour W. Itzkoff. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001.

Paul, Diane B. Controlling Human Heredity: 1865 to the Present. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1995.

Rosen, Christine. Preaching Eugenics Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Oxford University Press