The Gary Null Blog

On December 10, 2011, the New York Times ran a front-page article exposing the painful legacy of one of America’s hidden social crimes, forced sterilization. The article examines how the policy played out in one state, North Carolina, and the on-going effort to address the suffering of the approximately 3,000 still-living victims of the state’s eugenics program.

The program was in effect for over four decades, from 1933 to 1977, and some 7,600 people suffered sterilization at the hands of the state.

In 2002, and after decades of grassroots organizing, NC’s Governor Bev Purdue issued a formal apology to those who had been victims of the program.  The Times article focuses on the current campaign to offer compensation (i.e., reparations) to the still-living victims so as to bring this ugly phase of state history to an end.

Today, the notion of race purification is associated with Nazi Germany.  However, the theory of race improvement was originally put forth in 1893 by the noted British scientist Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, as the science of “eugenics.”

Galton argued: “Eugenics is the study of agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations, whether physically or mentally.”  From the turn-of-the-20^th century until the late-70s, eugenics found a welcoming home in the good-old U.S. of A.

Eugenics is an ideology of the Gilded Age and its aftermath.  This was a period when the American elite championed a belief in Social Darwinism, a self-serving misreading of Darwin’s biological “survival of the fittest” hypothesis onto social relations, hierarchy.  They believed that biology was destiny and that the white race sat atop the thrown of human evolution, civilization.