Not "A Nation of Immigrants": Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion

by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Proponents of eugenics argued that the genetic makeup of a person and that person’s station in society were interrelated; that is, if a person was poor, it meant they were genetically defective. Their Puritan Calvinist forefathers had embraced the notion of the “elect,” who were predestined to join the Christian God in heaven, those whose worldly wealth and success reflected their destined status. In US culture, with its deep racial coding from its founding, race and eugenic theory were inseparable, although, as Theodore Roosevelt argued, poor whites were included as genetically inferior.57 Roosevelt advocated sexual sterilization of criminalized individuals and those with cognitive differences from the norm, alleging that otherwise the United States would be committing “race suicide.” Roosevelt-appointed Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes upheld compulsory sexual sterilization laws, which gave the state of Virginia, thereby all states, the power to regulate the breeding of its citizens.58 A few years after the Supreme Court decision, the Nazi regime that took power in Germany in 1933 adopted US race law and eugenics as a fundamental platform for their governance, as well as embracing US continental imperialism and ethnic cleansing as the basis for their program of Lebensraum, which led to death camps for Jews, Roma, communists, and the disabled.59