Historical

How did this come to be? What were the conditions, struggles, and contingencies that produced the current arrangement?

See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes.

This lens has the same advantage as the school’s settler theme: the people who did it wrote it down, and were proud of it. Eugenics was not a fringe. It was Carnegie and Rockefeller money, Ivy League professors, state fair fitter-family contests, and an eight-to-one Supreme Court. The Court did not hide its reasoning; Holmes wrote a sentence he expected to be admired for. The Public Health Service published papers about Tuskegee for forty years, in journals, while it was going on. The General Accounting Office audited the Indian Health Service and found what it found. California’s own auditor documented sterilizations in 2010.

The work of this lens is mostly to put those documents in front of a room and let the state describe itself.

Anchor questions

• Buck v. Bell was decided eight to one, by a Court including Holmes and Brandeis. What does it mean that this was not controversial?
• It has never been overturned. What is it still doing on the books?
• American eugenicists advised the German programme and were thanked for it. Why is that not the story most people learn about eugenics?
• Tuskegee ran for forty years and was published in journals throughout. Who was supposed to stop it, and why did nobody?
• The IHS sterilizations were found by a federal audit in 1976. California’s prisons were sterilizing women in 2010. What is the difference between history and the present here?
• Sims is called the father of modern gynecology. Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy are called nothing. Who names the field?

Materials

Free unless marked otherwise. “Free to borrow” means a free Internet Archive account and a renewable one-hour loan.

The law

• Buck v. Bell (1927). Read it aloud. It is short, and Holmes is not being coy: three generations of imbeciles are enough. Carrie Buck was neither the third generation of anything nor an imbecile; she had been raped by her foster family’s nephew, and the institution wanted the problem gone. The Court authorized it eight to one. It has been narrowed and never overturned, and Clarence Thomas cited it approvingly in 2019. Free, from the Library of Congress: tile.loc.gov
• Eugenics Record Office archive (Cold Spring Harbor). The movement’s own charts, pedigrees, and fitter-family contest photographs, funded by Carnegie and Rockefeller. This is a respectable American science describing its programme for an audience it expected to approve. Free: eugenicsarchive.org

The American export

• Edwin Black, War Against the Weak (2003). The American movement, and the American money that funded German race science before the war. Journalistic and heavily documented. Free to borrow: archive.org
• Stefan Kuhl, The Nazi Connection (1994). The scholarly account of the same traffic, and clear that the influence ran west to east first. Free to borrow: archive.org

The sterilizations, in the state’s own audits

• GAO, HRD-77-3 (1976). The federal government audits the Indian Health Service and finds Native women sterilized without adequate consent, across four of twelve IHS areas, in three years. Free: gao.gov (blocks automated checks; live)
• California State Auditor 2013-120 (2014). Women sterilized in California prisons without lawful consent, as late as 2010, documented by the state’s own auditor. Put this page next to Buck v. Bell in the same session. Free: information.auditor.ca.gov
• Ana Maria Garcia, La Operacion (1982, 40 min). Puerto Rico, where roughly a third of women of childbearing age were sterilized, told by Puerto Rican women. No authorized free copy exists and the distributor still sells it. Paywalled: store.cinemaguild.com
• Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body (1997). The control of Black women’s reproduction as a continuous American project: breeding under slavery, sterilization, welfare policy, and the prosecution of pregnant women. Paywalled: penguinrandomhouse.com. Her free fifteen-minute TED talk on race-based medicine carries the present-tense half: youtube.com
• Angela Y. Davis, Racism, Birth Control and Reproductive Rights (1981). Reproductive freedom means the right to have children as much as the right not to, which is the point the mainstream movement kept missing. A chapter of Women, Race and Class, shared with the gender theme. Paywalled: penguinrandomhouse.com

Medicine done to people

• Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid (2006). The history that makes Tuskegee an episode rather than an aberration, by a Black medical ethicist. Paywalled: penguinrandomhouse.com
• Tuskegee, from both ends. The CDC’s own account of the study it ran for forty years, withholding penicillin after penicillin existed: cdc.gov (blocks automated checks; live). And the Final Report of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study Legacy Committee (1996), eleven pages, chaired by Dr. Vanessa Northington Gamble with Macon County community members on it, which demanded the apology that came in 1997: tuskegee.edu. Read the second one first.
• Rachel Dudley, The Foremothers of Modern Gynecology (2012). Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy: the enslaved women J. Marion Sims operated on again and again without anesthesia, on the theory that they did not feel it. Dudley names them and calls them the field’s foremothers, which is a different sentence from the one on the statues. Free: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

A note on method

Do not run this lens as an atrocity tour. The point is not that these things were shocking; it is that they were normal, funded, published, audited, and legal, and that the reasoning was written down by people who expected to be thanked. The right question is not how could they, but what is being written in that register right now, and who will read it in eighty years and ask the same question about us. Roberts’s talk on race correction in clinical algorithms is the bridge: it is still in the machines.

End with the reckonings, not the harms. The Legacy Committee is in this lens deliberately: it is the people the study was done to, setting the terms of what would count as an apology. That is a different thing from a victim list.

Further reading

For resources behind a paywall, see the note on access.

• Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010). The book that made HeLa famous: cells taken without consent, an industry built on them, and a family that could not afford health care. Skloot is a white journalist writing about a Black family, which is worth naming; the Lacks family’s own book below is the counterweight. Not free: penguinrandomhouse.com
• Ron Lacks, Victoria Baptiste, Henrietta Lacks: The Untold Story (2020). Her grandson’s account, written partly because the family felt the famous book was not theirs. Read against Skloot: same events, different custody of the story. This host blocks automated checks but is live. Not free: store.bookbaby.com

Status

First pass, and it may be a while before there is a second. It is built on primary sources, because the state and the movement documented themselves. Named gaps. Fannie Lou Hamer has no free primary source here: her Mississippi appendectomy is famous, and the sterilization remarks come from a 1965 speech that could not be verified in free authoritative full text, so she appears secondhand through Roberts and Davis, which is not good enough for a woman who could speak for herself. Prenatal screening and the present-tense eugenic argument are thin, carried mostly by Roberts’s talk. Psychiatry and institutionalization are absent. Contributions welcome.