1916: Eugenics

1900-1999: A New Divide
Written By Stephanie Brizee

Big Idea

The pseudoscience of eugenics became the platform for White scholars to defend their racists ideas furthering segregation and the ongoing dehumanization of African Americans across the United States. Black scholars continued to refute this pseudo-science and assert the reality that race has and always will be a social construct not a scientific fact.

Social Darwinism and Fake Science

Winning family of a Fitter Family contest stand outside of the Eugenics Building[1] (where contestants register) at the Kansas Free Fair, in Topeka, Kansas.

Source: Wikipedia

With the increasing acceptance of social Darwinism, scientists began exploring genetics as a pathway to creating a better society. At the turn of the twentieth century, debates regarding urban health, social advancement, and the creation of a stronger society dominated white academic literature. With the increasing acceptance of social Darwinism and “survival of the fittest,” scientists began exploring genetics as a pathway to creating a better society.

What emerged from this pursuit was the “pseudoscience” of eugenics. Leading scientists, philanthropists, and religious leaders fell under the influence of eugenics arguments, embracing the assertion that “regardless of context, immigrants, persons of color, and the socially unfit were what their heredity made them” (Seldon, 2005, pp. 202-203). 

As education scholar Steven Seldon noted,

Under the broad promise that eugenics would lead to the ‘self direction of human evolution,’ its supporters used biological metaphors to shape social policies regarding immigration restriction, the segregation of those judged socially unfit, and state-sanctioned sterilization (Seldon, 2005, p. 201).

This “new science” rested on old racialized ideologies that continued to assert the superiority of the White race: if God had not cursed the Black race, thereby making them inferior, then science would prove that their hereditary make-up was the reason for their inferiority. 

The rise of social policies based on eugenics added to the dire situation for Black families during the early and mid-twentieth century. In commenting on the wide impact of eugenics theory on American life, journalist Antero Pietila (2010) wrote that “[e]ugenicists advocated selective breeding. Birth control, castration, forced sterilization, and in extreme cases, euthanasia, were among the methods discussed and practiced for weeding out the “unfit”” (p. 42). Eugenicists in the United States “opposed ‘racial mixing’ because it destroyed the racial purity of whites” (Feagin, 2014. p. 78). 

Eugenicists combined their pseudoscience with problematic and biased research studies on the differences between the human races’ physical attributes to (re)conclude falsely that African Americans were inferior to Whites. In 1916 New York lawyer Madison Grant published The Passing of the Great Race.  In this book, he developed a ranked list of races with the Anglo-Saxons at the top and Blacks at the bottom. While he was not the first to create such a ranking system, he went so far as to articulate a history of the world that argued the “rising and falling civilizations [were] based on the ‘amount of Nordic [Anglo-Saxon] blood in each nation” (Kendi, 2017, p. 310). 

Psychologists also embraced eugenics theories and used them to inform standardized intelligence tests (IQ tests). Despite receiving criticism from some scholars, the majority of psychologists embraced eugenics and the intelligence testing protocols based upon it. One of the leading authors of the IQ test, Lewis Terman, argued that his test would demonstrate “enormously significant racial differences in general intelligence, differences which cannot be wiped out by any scheme of mental culture” (Kendi, 2017, p. 311).

Unmasking the Pseudo-Science

Black and White Photo of Horace Mann Bond

Horace Mann Bond

Image Source: Wikipedia

While some African American writers embraced parts of eugenics as a tool to convince the White population of their “development and advancements,” many others spoke out against its bad science and racist underpinnings. One such African American was Horace Mann Bond (1904-1972).

Horace Mann Bond was born in Nashville, Tennessee, the sixth of seven children born to college educated Black parents. He excelled in his studies. He earned his bachelors degree from the historically Black college in Pennsylvania, Lincoln University and earned a masters and doctoral degree from the University of Chicago.

Bond published a number of critiques of emerging intelligence tests, particularly pointing out the illogic behind the conclusions drawn that African Americans naturally had lower IQs. His most well known refutation was published in the 1950s as “Racially Stuffed Shirts and Other Enemies of Mankind” (Blackpast.org). His parody assumed the position of a segregationist and then utilized their own logic against them to show the absurdity of the intelligence arguments they were seeking to make.

Bond (1958) also wrote an article in The Journal of Negro Education where he began by noting, “Never before has the literature of psychology witnessed so determined an effort to establish as a fact, the proposition that there are ‘native differences between Negroes and whites as determined by intelligence tests” (p. 519). He goes on to note the errors in the latest scholarship coming out. “Suffice it here to say, that this method carries the classic concept of the scientific method in the physical sciences, and animal experimentation, to an application to research carried out under other philosophies of causation, in a degree that neither Niels Bohr nor W. Heisenberg would not find acceptable in interpreting research in physics” (p. 520).

Bond was not the only African American to repudiate the eugenics-based intelligence tests and the shoddy “science” behind it. Howard University graduate and later president of Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland, Martin Jenkins, also wrote stinging refutations of the intelligence “science” (African American Registry).

It was only at the conclusion of World War II, when the horrors of the holocaust and Hitler’s eugenics labs were uncovered, that the world realized the devastating effects eugenics could have and begin to lesson pursuit of “the perfect human race.”

Your Turn

What was the implication of believing that there were “better” races or ways to improve a race? How would this have impacted people with disabilities and what would it have suggested about their inherent value? Why was the pseudo-science of eugenics so appealing? Are there ways today that people manipulate science to serve their own purposes?

    • Read about one of the influential leaders in the eugenics movement who graduated from Truman State University in Missouri.

    • Lael, R. L., Brazos, B., and McMillen, M.  (2007). Evolution of a Missouri Asylum:  Fulton State Hospital, 1851-2006.  University of Missouri Press.

    • Lantzer, J. S., and Stern, A. M. (2007). Building a Fit Society: Indiana's Eugenics Crusaders. Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History 19, 1: 4-11.

    • Jackson, J. P., Jr. (2004). "Racially stuffed shirts and other enemies of mankind": Horace Mann Bond's parody of segregationist psychology in the 1950s. In A. S. Winston (Ed.), Defining difference: Race and racism in the history of psychology (pp. 261–283). American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/10625-010

    • Bond, H. M. (1958). Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The Journal of Negro Education, 27(4), 519–525. https://doi.org/10.2307/2293800

    • Price, G. N., Darity, W. A., Jr., & Sharpe, R. V. (2020). Did North Carolina Economically Breed-Out Blacks During its Historical Eugenic Sterilization Campaign? American Review of Political Economy 15 (1).

Stephanie Brizee
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