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eugenics



  • The Children of the Nazis' Genetics Project

    While much of Nazism was associated with destruction, it's racist ideological core was also preoccupied with creating or restoring racial purity, including through the Lebensborn program which viewed officers of the SS as the fathers of a new Aryan vanguard. 



  • Margaret Sanger's Ghost and the Antiabortion Movement

    by Melinda Cooper

    The anti-abortion right's invocation of eugenics in the Dobbs case and in their public rhetoric might seem cynical. But it could be effective, unless the history of Sanger's relationship to eugenics and reproductive freedom is better understood. 



  • Will the Era of the Butt Ever End?

    Heather Radke's "Butts: A Backstory" isn't (just) a provocation, but a carefully researched study of how bodily ideals and attractiveness are constructed and reproduced in societies. 



  • "Nature" Editors Acknowledge Journal's Contributions to Scientific Racism

    The leading cross-disciplinary science publication acknowledges that it has given a platform to the scientifically discredited writings of eugenicists and has an ongoing obligation to ensure that it does not offer further support for oppression justified by the authority of science. 



  • The Coming Pregnancy Surveillance State Will Bring "Homeland Security" to Women's Bodies

    by Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz

    The Dobbs ruling puts longstanding racist and nationalist beliefs that white women's reproductive labor is the price of their citizenship, and punitive controls on women of color, on collision course with the modern capacity of digital surveillance, threatening the criminalization of any miscarried pregnancy. 



  • The Eugenic, Anti-Black History of the "Brazilian Butt Lift"

    by Daniel F. Silva

    Brazilian doctors developed the procedure in the wake of a eugenics movement that assimilated some stereotyped attributes of Black women's bodies into a new set of beauty standards that marginalized Afro-Brazilians. A similar dynamic occurs today on worldwide social media.



  • The Court's Abortion Decision is Based in White Nationalist Myth

    by Samira K. Mehta and Lauren MacIvor Thompson

    The durable image of "motherhood and apple pie" is central to the myth of white Christian nationalism and part of the ideological impulse to strip away reproductive freedom. 



  • "The Last Refuge of Scoundrels": E.O. Wilson's Support for Scientific Racism

    by Stacy Farina and Matthew Gibbons

    Evolutionary biology has long been used to promote the ideology that "races" are real and meaningful divisions of the human species. A recent controversy about a recently-deceased leader in the field shows that there is more work to be done to ensure that science no longer lends credibility to racism. 



  • Daddy Issues

    by Bethany Moreton

    White American Christians have embraced aggressive patriarchy as access to social and economic power has become more concentrated in fewer hands. 



  • The Trouble with Charlotte Perkins Gilman

    by Halle Butler

    The resurrection of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's literary stature in the 1970s ran counter to the author's own self-understanding, summed up in her statement "I abominate being called a feminist." It also obscured her racist nativism.