Eugenics, conceived of by Sir Francis Galton from Greek roots for “good” and “origin”, was a perversion of new ideas in science and statistics. The ostensible goal was to apply principles of genetics and heredity to breeding the human race. Many horrible things were done in the pursuit of this goal. Including a court case that should be in every history book right along with the Dred Scott decision, Plessy v. Ferguson, and almost a dozen other times SCOTUS* dropped the ball. In Buck v. Bell (1927) in a decision written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and upheld by a shocking 8 to 1 the Supreme Court of the United State decided that forced sterilization by the state of Virginia of those with “intellectual disabilities” was just dandy. Justice Holmes is quoted as saying that “three generations of imbeciles are enough”. The scariest thing is that, technically, this decision still stands as good law.
Eugenics is seductive because it absolves society of both blame and responsibility for its marginalized citizens. It’s not us. It’s their genes. Nothing we can do. An attitude often internalized by the marginalized themselves. This is something I also see a lot in the Black led FB groups I belong to. People will quickly overlook systemic issues and focus on the bad, individual decisions that they see people make every day. Those individual choices become individual, internalized issues.
Throughout America’s past class and race have been intertwined and this holds true in the American embrace of eugenics at the turn of the twentieth century. Over half the states passed laws allowing forced sterilization or other procedures to regulate and reduce the “genetically inferior”. These unfit folks tended to be the usual suspects: Black and Jewish Americans, the mentally ill, immigrants, and those deemed deficient in morals. This meant anyone who challenged social norms, even if it was simply by being poor. Like Jim Crow, America’s sterilization policies inspired Nazi Germany’s leaders. This did much to end the fervor for such programs in the US.
Poor white folks may have been an affront to the good, hardworking, normal white people but one of the biggest reasons for the animosity was the same reason that routinely pops up when we peek under the skirts of the nation’s injustices. Money. Much of the quashing of the civil rights and liberties, not to mention the physical abuse, of poor whites had to do with the elite’s ability to exploit them as labor. The 19th and early 20th century saw violent clashes between labor and the monied class. Many times, that labor was made up of a coalition of multiple races but a single class.
American business and, by extension, American government did not support labor. In 1918 a group of African Americans organized the Progressive Farmers and Householders Union. The next year in one of too many incidents during the Red Summer,** a white mob of men from inside and outside of the county and even the state attacked members of the union. Consisting of both law enforcement and vigilantes the white mob killed at least 200 people including men, women and children in what became known as the “Elaine Massacre”.*** During the roaring 1920s some gains were made by unions, but the Great Depression meant millions of unemployed people being offered work in appalling conditions for even more appalling wages. Once again when labor tried to organize business pushed back. On “Bloody Thursday,” the state in the form of the San Francisco police attacked striking longshore workers in the process killing two men and injuring over a hundred.
San Francisco’s broad Embarcadero ran red
-Anonymous witness to “Bloody Thursday,” July 5, 1934.
with blood yesterday.
The color stained clothing, sheets, flesh.
Dripping. Human blood, bright as red
begonias in the sun.
A run of crimson crawled toward the curb.
Most of us came to hate the sight of red.
There was so much of it.
Newspapers and their advertisers colluded to support corporate interests. The press in San Francisco denounced the strikers as vultures feeding off of the city. In Elaine, local media reported outrageous fictions claiming the Progressive Farmers and Householders Union was, in fact, an organized conspiracy against whites. Despite the pressure of the press, corporations, and their government stooges, organizations like the North Carolina Communist Party (NCCP) continued to form and to fight. The NCCP fought to unionize industries, push for civil rights, for judicial and prison reforms, an end to segregation and more. In Arkansas, the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU) formed in in 1934 as an interracial union. By 1935 the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) was working to move beyond racial restrictions and actively organize industrial workers of all ethnic backgrounds.
In the US people in power realized as long ago as the 17th century that the quickest way to undermine a populous movement is to pit the people in it against each other by playing the race card. To that end the Powers That Be have been separating the two subjects of class and race in a form of identity politics that wedges them apart. The corporate run press generally speaks of race and class as though they were two distinct things. They link “the poor” with “minorities” in every headline. They speak of how People of Color, particularly Black people, are disproportionately affected by this or that without mentioning class at all. In the process they continue the erasure of poor whites and reinforce the misperception of “normal” white people and everyone else. But the fundamental reality of economic inequality in the US is that class and race are like conjoined twins that share vital organs. In America race and class have been deeply, deliberately, and irrevocably, entangled.
Sources
https://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/2016/us-elections-2016-who-can-vote/index.html
https://calendar.eji.org/racial-injustice/jul/02
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https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/origin-white-trash-class-still-issue-u-s
http://picturethis.museumca.org/timeline/depression-era-1930s/political-protest/info
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*https://blogs.findlaw.com/supreme_court/2015/10/13-worst-supreme-court-decisions-of-all-time.html
**https://www.thirteen.org/wnet/jimcrow/stories_events_red.html
***A dozen men, all of them Black, ended up being tried for the deaths of the five white men who died in the massacre. The NAACP ended up championing the case managing to bring it all the way to the Supreme Court. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/death-hundreds-elaine-massacre-led-supreme-court-take-major-step-toward-equal-justice-african-americans-180969863/