America’s Unfinished History of Scientific Racism

October 27, 2009 by Jill Garvey
Filed under: American Identity, Immigration 
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The first half of the 20th century told of shocking practices by our state and federal governments. One such practice was the forced sterilization of over 60,000 people. These horribly cruel acts were advocated by a group of so-called scientists who thought they had the right to control evolution. They called themselves eugenicists and believed that if they could not control the world’s population, they could at least control our nation’s. At the heart of their studies and political ambitions was the belief that they could build a superior race of human beings.

Whenever I hear or read about eugenics I can’t help recalling the final scenes of the James Bond movie, Moonwraker (1979), when the villain Drax vocalizes his plot to repopulate Earth with a super race of his own making. Perhaps the most telling shots are those of Jaws (Bond’s over-sized nemesis) as he realizes that he is probably not considered a ‘desirable’ repopulater , and will be eradicated with the rest of humankind. Thank goodness Jaws decides to switch sides from evil to good and joins forces with James Bond to save the world. I guess being excluded from the ’superior race’ can do that to a person.

This Bond movie, although one of the worst possibly, was no doubt exploring the motives behind the international tragedies humankind had inflicted upon itself in decades past.

According to the author of War Against the Weak, Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race, Edwin Black,

American eugenic crusades proliferated into a worldwide campaign, and in the 1920s came to the attention of Adolf Hitler. Under the Nazis, American eugenic principles were applied without restraint, careening out of control into the Reich’s infamous genocide. During the pre-War years, American eugenicists openly supported Germany’s program.

The same eugenicists who openly supported Nazi Germany also appeared as witnesses before Congress to advocate against immigration in the 1920s. It is believed that they helped pass laws that ranked immigrants based on ethnicity – at the time Nordic and Anglo Europeans being the most desirable and Asian immigrants the least. Eugenics movements have found genetic fault with nearly every physical trait and ethnic group outside of the “Nordic race” – brunettes, Gypsies, Africans, Jews, brown eyes, Southern and Eastern Europeans, Chinese, Japanese, etc. These have been considered the undesirable immigrant masses just over the past 100 years.

Despite being almost wholly renounced and reviled around the world after World War II, eugenics did survive. Sterilization programs remained intact into the 1980s in some states. The eugenics movement of the 20th century robbed untold numbers of Americans of their right to control their own futures. Perhaps its biggest influence can be seen amongst the leaders of the modern-day anti-immigrant movement. One doesn’t have to look further than the leading ‘immigration restrictionist’ groups to see strong connections to eugenics. According to the Center for New Community, the founder of such influential groups as Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and Center for Immigration Studies, John Tanton is mirroring his early-century mentors and using eugenics to fuel an anti-immigrant crusade.

The founder of FAIR has financially supported platforms to debate pseudo-scientific research (racial eugenics) purporting to show that African Americans and Latinos are mentally inferior to whites because of their genetic makeup. Tanton’s activism with regard to racial eugenics is based on the disturbing belief that those identified as the most productive “gene pool of the human stock” should be the ones with access to and control over scarce resources.

It is time for elected officials and mainstream media to scrutinize more closely the motives behind these so-called ‘immigration restrictionists‘. It’s time for the rest of us to look in the mirror and ask, do we stand with the anti-immigrant movement or would we rather be counted as one among the undesirable masses?

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