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May 26 - June 20, 2025
Darwin addressed variation within the human species in a subsequent 1871 book, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. Refuting the creationist ladder that placed Africans between Europeans and apes, Darwin argued that all humans and apes shared a common ancestor. Next,
the end of the nineteenth century, American anthropologists, anatomists, and statisticians eagerly embraced the Darwinian notion of survival of the fittest to explain the slaughter of American Indians and forced regression of blacks to a servant class.
At the turn of the twentieth century, American scientists embraced a theory known as eugenics, which held that intelligence and other personality traits are genetically determined and therefore inherited. This scientific theory about heredity, coupled with Progressive Era reforms, produced a campaign to remedy America’s social problems by stemming biological degeneracy.
In 1883, Galton coined the word eugenics—from a Greek root meaning “good in birth”—to “express the science of improving stock” by giving “the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had.”30 Galton replaced the Darwinian reliance on natural selection for the inevitable extinction of inferior groups with an argument for affirmative state intervention in the evolutionary process. “What Nature does blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly, and kindly,” he proposed.31
Imposing sterilization as a solution for antisocial behavior had long been practiced in the castration of black men as punishment for rape, beginning during slavery. The territorial legislature of Kansas passed a law in 1855 making castration the penalty for any Negro or mulatto who was convicted of rape, attempted rape, or kidnapping of any white woman.
36 In 1913, the Kansas legislature authorized sterilization of state inmates.
This long history of sanctioned torture inflicted on black bodies prepared Americans to accept the compelled sexual surgeries performed by state officials on people deemed genetically unfit.
Eugenics was mainstream, and it was financed by the nation’s wealthiest entrepreneurs, including the Carnegie, Harriman, and Kellogg dynasties.
the early 1900s, southern and eastern Europeans were considered a racial threat by whites of Anglo Saxon origin. Dressing up racial typologies in the new scientific garb of heredity, Davenport assigned particular behavioral traits to different races of immigrants. He observed that Poles were “independent and self-reliant though clannish”; Italians were prone to commit “crimes of personal violence”; and “Hebrews” fell “intermediate between the slovenly Serbians and Greeks and the tidy Swedes, Germans, and Bohemians.”40 Davenport advocated preventing the reproduction of bad stock through a
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Better Babies contests.
Meanwhile, Harry Hamilton Laughlin, superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office and an active public lobbyist for the movement, turned biological theory into public policy. In 1914, he prepared a two-volume report that proposed a schedule for sterilizing 15 million people over the next two generations, as well as a model sterilization law to accomplish this plan.43 The defective “10 percent of our population,” Laughlin claimed, “are an economic and moral burden on the 90 percent and a constant source of danger to the national and racial life.” It is estimated that 65,000 persons were
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single day in March 1924, the Virginia legislature passed two laws that jointly promoted the state’s eugenicist and racist agendas. The first, “An Act to provide for the sexual sterilization of inmates of state institutions in certain cases,” authorized the forced sterilization of people confined to government asylums because they were deemed to be “feebleminded.” The second half of Virginia’s eugenicist scheme was the Racial Integrity Act, which banned interracial marriage.
The Racial Integrity Act required the racial classification of every person at birth and made marriage between whites and anyone with a trace of Negro ancestry a crime.
Laughlin’s 1922 survey, Analysis of America’s Melting Pot, studied the ethnic background of the institutionalized population in order to demonstrate that recent immigrants made up a disproportionate share of the nation’s socially degenerate members. Laughlin’s conclusion that “the recent immigrants (largely from southern and eastern Europe), as a whole, present a higher percentage of inborn socially inadequate qualities than do the older stocks,” helped persuade Congress to pass a 1924 law severely restricting immigration. 51 The Johnson-Reed Act, which set numeric quotas for immigration from
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A year after Laughlin’s survey was issued, a new edition of the popular book The Passing of the Great Race, by New York eugenicist Madison Grant, appeared. Grant, resident anthropologist of the American Museum of Natural History, similarly warned that the Nordic stock in America was threatened by racial intermixture with blacks and inferior immigrant groups, which inevitably produced children of the “lower” type. Portraying inferior stocks as public enemies, he described racial intermarriage as a “social and racial crime of the first magnitude.”
Grant was regarded as an important scientist, while his detractors were labeled “Bolsheviks and Jews” who were biased against scholarly investigation of racial difference.
Grant intended readers to learn the central political lesson of eugenic science: that egalitarian social programs are incapable of improving society.
Eugenicists’ motto was “Nature knows no equality.”57 These scientists argued that inequality is natural: the unequal conditions in which people live are dictated by nature and trying to change them is folly.
“Integration represents darkness, regimentation, totalitarianism, communism and destruction,” declared Robert “Tut” Patterson, founder of the Citizens Council Association, an organization of white businessmen dedicated to preserving white supremacy.58
Nobel Prize–winning scientist James Watson expressed this sentiment when he told a London newspaper in 2007 that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours—whereas all the testing says not really.”59
By the 1940s, eugenics had been discredited both as bad science and as an excuse for racial hatred.
Carnegie Institute rescinded its support for eugenic studies at Cold Spring Harbor in 1939, and Harry Laughlin resigned as secretary of the Eugenics Record Office in 1941, marking the end of eugenics as an official social program in most of the United States.
Renowned scholars such as Columbia anthropologist Franz Boas and his prestigious cast of students, including Margaret Mead, Otto Klineberg, Ruth Benedict, Ashley Montagu, and Melville Herskovits, had demonstrated scientific errors in eugenicists’ theories about inherited traits. Raised in a German Jewish home, Boas began teaching at Columbia University in 1896. Within three decades, he and his students had established anthropology as a respected discipline focused on studying culture instead of race.
Ashley Montagu, author of Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race; black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, author of Black Bourgeoisie and The Negro in the United States; English humanist Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World; Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal, author of An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy; and geneticists Theodosius Dobzhansky and Leslie Dunn, whose 1946 book Heredity, Race and Society exposed the genetic fallacies underlying racial classifications.
the same time UNESCO issued its statements on race, the NAACP was waging a legal campaign to overturn segregationist state policies. The federal government, now engaged in international competition with the Soviet Union over the spread of communism, felt pressure to reduce blatant racial discrimination in order to gain allegiance from developing nations breaking free from colonial rulers.
Origin of Races, by Carleton Coon, a University of Pennsylvania professor and the president of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, claimed once more to provide definitive proof that human races had separate origins. Coon identified five major races in hominid fossils and, based on cranial capacity, theorized that each had evolved toward modern Homo sapiens separately and at different rates—Caucasoids (Europeans) and Mongoloids (Asians) advanced the fastest, while Congoids (Africans), Capoids (the Bushmen of South Africa), and Australoids (Australian aborigines and nearby
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Later, Berkeley psychologist Arthur Jensen, Harvard psychologist Richard Herrnstein, and Nobel laureate William Shockley, a Stanford physicist, argued that since genes determined intelligence and intelligence determined social achievement, racial inequality resulted from blacks’ cognitive inferiority. The combination of black people’s lower IQ scores and higher birth rates, they warned, rendered public programs not only futile for improving blacks’ socioeconomic status but a threat to the nation’s welfare.
untenable.
Nevertheless, it is important to note that eugenics never really went away. While mainstream geneticists increasingly condemned what they referred to as “eugenics’ excesses,” North Carolina’s eugenic sterilization program actually expanded after World War II and continued until 1974.71 An investigation by the Winston-Salem Journal in the 1990s uncovered records documenting decisions by the Eugenics Board of North Carolina, a panel of five bureaucrats who enforced the state’s 1929 eugenics law (revised in 1933) authorizing compulsory sterilization for epilepsy, disability, and feeblemindedness.
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Scientists at Wake Forest University School of Medicine also played a key role. Dr. C. Nash Herndon, chair of the department of medical genetics at the university’s medical school, helped to promote the state’s involuntary sterilization program by serving as president of the Human Betterment League and issuing academic reports advocating eugenics. He also conducted his own eugenic studies with funding from Wickliffe Draper, a wealthy segregationist. Draper was so committed to the merger of Jim Crow and eugenics that he traveled to Germany in 1935 to attend a Nazi eugenics conference. After
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In all, the program counted close to eight thousand victims. During the eugenics era, a majority of...
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1965, a social worker told Nial Cox, a pregnant teenager living at home, that her family would lose government aid unless she was sterilized. A doctor performed the surgery because she was black, on welfare, and had had a baby out of wedlock. The program ordered sterilizations of two thousand children, including a ten-year-old boy who was castrated.
Republican congressman Mark Kirk of Illinois (elected in 2010 to fill the Senate seat vacated by Barack Obama) stated on the House floor during deliberations over a 2007 foreign family-planning provision that slowing the rate of growth of Mexico’s population would “reduce the long-term illegal immigration pressure on America’s borders.”
74 Like eugenicists of old, Kirk argued for fixing a social problem by reducing the fertility rates of people believed to embody it. In reality, birth rates in Mexico have dropped over the last twenty-five years to 2.5 children per couple, very close to the 2.1 birth rate in the United States. But what really matters was the lawmaker’s message: America can solve its immigration crisis by decreasing births of undocumented immigrants.
To understand what it means to map the entire human genome, it is helpful to start with the biological unit being mapped: our genes. Genes are conceived as segments of a six-foot-long molecule called deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, that encodes instructions for making proteins. Each nucleus of the trillions of cells in the human body contains two copies of twenty-three DNA strands, one from each parent, composing forty-six chromosomes. Although each cell has a complete set of DNA, only the portions that are important to the cell’s particular function are activated.
How does one gene differ from another? DNA is composed of four kinds of units called nucleotides—adenine, cystosine, guanine, and thymine (A,C,G, and T)—that are strung together like beads on a necklace in different combinations. The sequence of these nucleotides functions like a code using four different letters that are arranged in an infinite variety of spellings. The cell uses part of the DNA code to help determine what sequence of amino acids to build into a protein and another part to help determine when and where to turn on or off a protein. Each person’s genome—the complete set of
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Consider how, in the United States, people with any amount of African ancestry are grouped together in one race. Yet the greatest amount of genetic diversity in the world exists in sub-Saharan Africa. Homo sapiens originated in Africa and remained there for almost 200,000 years before spreading relatively recently throughout the rest of the globe, about 70,000 or 80,000 years ago.
African populations vary the most because most of human genetic diversity evolved in Africa, and groups living there had more time to accumulate genetic differences. The people who migrated from Africa and dispersed throughout the globe carried in their genomes only a portion of variants found in the ancestral inhabitants. “From a genetic perspective,” writes anthropologist Deborah Bolnick, “non-Africans are essentially a subset of Africans.”
In fact, the entire range of human variation for some genetic traits can be found on the African continent.77 A person from the Congo, a person from South Africa, and a person from Ethiopia are more genetically different from each other than from a person from France.
It turns out that the genes contributing to these phenotypic differences represent a minute and relatively insignificant fraction of our genotypes and do not reflect the total picture of genetic variation among groups.79 What’s more, these phenotypic differences do not even fall neatly into the categories known as races. Rather, the physical features are “discordant” among groups—they are assorted randomly and do not come assembled in racial packages.
The American Anthropological Association endorsed this view in a 1997 statement: “genetic data also show that, no matter how racial groups are defined, two people from the same racial group are about as different from each other as two people from any two different racial groups.”
Groups of people across the globe have varying frequencies of polymorphic genes, which are genes with any of several differing nucleotide sequences. Molecular biologists can use the frequency of alternate alleles, or versions of genes, to trace the geographic ancestry of populations.
There is no such thing as a set of genes that belongs exclusively to one group and not another.
See generally Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell; Laura E. Gómez, Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race (New York: NYU Press, 2008).
