eugenics 
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SOURCE: AMA Journal of Ethics
7/10/2023
The Body Mass Index Grew out of White Supremacy, Eugenics and Anti-Blackness
by Sabrina Strings
Beneath the statistical and scientific imprimatur of the measurement lie a host of assumptions that the bodies of affluent white people are normal and those of others are deviant and deficient.
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SOURCE: Washington Post
5/31/2023
Major Genealogical Group Apologizes for Past Associations with Eugenics and White Supremacy
The National Genealogical Society acknowledged that its founding in 1903 accompanied the rise of the eugenics movement, and that early leaders viewed genealogical study as way of demonstrating and protecting racial purity.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
2/22/2023
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.
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SOURCE: Dissent
1/11/2023
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.
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SOURCE: Undark
12/14/2022
With its Eugenics Roots, does Standardized Testing Have Any Place in Education Today?
by Deborah Blum
A researcher discovered a pattern in the experimental vetting of SAT test questions in the 1990s: questions on which Black students outscored White students in trials were usually excluded from future tests. This practice is linked back to the roots of IQ testing in the eugenics movement.
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SOURCE: New York Times
11/28/2022
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.
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SOURCE: Nature
9/28/2022
"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.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
9/20/2022
US Neglect of Puerto Rico is in the News, but the Main Historical Relationship has been Abuse
by Jaquira Diaz
From forced disruption of native industry through mass sterilization and forced austerity, one writer argues that the only escape from mainland abuse is full Puerto Rican independence.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
8/4/2022
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.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
8/1/2022
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.
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SOURCE: Washington Post
7/24/2022
A Survivor of Forced Sterilization Fears its Return as a Consequence of Overturning Roe
Without a recognized privacy right to reproductive freedom, legal precedents like the Buck v. Bell decision could allow states to resume forcibly sterilizing women they deem unfit for motherhood.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
6/24/2022
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.
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SOURCE: Science for the People
2/1/2022
"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.
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SOURCE: Washington Post
9/30/2021
The Historical Line Between Carrie Buck and Britney Spears: Labeling Women "Unfit"
by Gillian Brockell
Historians Elizabeth Catte, Audrey Clare Farley, and Keisha N. Blain give context to the discourse of unfitness that connects the conservatorship imposed on Britney Spears with institutionalization and forced sterilization of women in the 20th century.
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SOURCE: WNYC
9/27/2021
The Brian Lehrer Show: Reckoning with History of Eugenics
Historian Jack Tchen and organizer Cara Page discuss the way eugenicist ideas are deeply embedded in American Culture and how to move to a post-eugenics future.
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SOURCE: Dissent
8/30/2021
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.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
8/20/2021
Both the Right and Left Need to Remember Demography is Not Destiny
by Adam Serwer
The 2020 Census has fueled optimism on the left and panic on the right about American demographics. But past periods of ethnic change have shown the fluidity of racial categories defies expectations.
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7/25/2021
The Legacies of Un-critical Race Theory at Berkeley
by Tony Platt
For most of its history, the University of California has been a bastion of un-critical race theory from Manifest Destiny to The Bell Curve.
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SOURCE: New York Times
4/17/2021
Head of Planned Parenthood: We’re Done Making Excuses for Our Founder
by Alexis McGill Johnson
"Margaret Sanger harmed generations with her beliefs. In our second century, Planned Parenthood has a chance to heal those harms," says the organization's current leader.
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SOURCE: Nursing Clio
4/15/2021
“Containment and Control, Not Care or Cure”: An Interview with Elizabeth Catte on Virginia’s Eugenics Movement
by Sarah Calise
"I decided to have a 'turn to the camera' moment in Pure America and just explicitly say that I think the eugenicists I write about are rotten people, not particularly smart or even interesting, and that I’d present evidence they lied and bluffed and enjoyed hurting people."