Eugenics

[liv]

Most of the stuff that's in my head is Jewish-related, which isn't surprising because I'm a rabbinic student. But wise people have observed that it's good for community building to post links to other content, so here are a few things I've read recently that are worth reading.

Two pieces on "race science" (note the extremely scary scare quotes). If you're not aware I was a genetics researcher / educator before I was a student rabbi and I gradually came to the realization of how the field is built on absolutely rotten foundations. And the eugenics crap persists today, it's not just that back in the 19^th century people didn't know any better.

This is not why I left the field; I'm not naive enough to think the rabbinate is somehow untainted by colonialism! But it is why I am extremely aware that you have to be constantly vigilant against people trying to use sciencey-sounding language to justify racism, or even worse, using genetic technology to improve the master race instead of for the actual benefit of humans. There's a really seductive argument that goes, well, all scientific enquiry should be neutral, there should be no taboo topics. And if someone publishes some data that seems to prove a racist point, it should be countered through peer review and doing experiments to demonstrate the opposite and... Just. No. It isn't sincere, it's deliberate FUD with explicitly racist aims. Scientifically it's been debunked a million times, there is no benefit to being just a little bit racist just in case this time it really turns out that there's a genetic basis to some people being more worthy than others.

Race science really is an invidious conspiracy.

And it's in both the scientific establishment and popular culture. This piece by Millie on Fascist-coded food and consumption as identity is a bit rambly but it makes some really important points. It connects the dots between scientific racism, and some of the anti-public health cult that has become really prominent in the Covid era. Not everybody who is antivax or who campaigns vociferously for their right to breathe dirty, infected air is racist, but a lot of the underlying ideas very much are. I don't need vaccines / I'm not vulnerable to Covid because I have a "healthy lifestyle" or a "strong immune system". These are polite ways of saying, I come from a superior race. I'm thin, I'm white, I'm one of the "fittest" who is going to win at survival.

Eugenics is more than just racism. It's always, always antisemitic as well. And it's actively dangerous to other groups of people who are regarded as racially impure, particularly trans and disabled people. Regardless of whether a person's disability or trans identity is in any way genetic, once you have internalized the idea of a master race, people who strongly differ from the constructed ideal are seen as threatening. I realize this is controversial because it's dogma that racism doesn't harm white people. But it seems pretty clear to me this is all connected. Eugenic thinking, perhaps especially unconscious eugenic thinking, leads directly to discrimination and violence against white Jews, white disabled people, and white trans people, as well as intersectionally harming Jewish, disabled and trans POC.

Here is a really strong piece by May Peterson on trauma, transition, and transgender autonomy. People are upset about medical intervention in puberty for precisely eugenic reasons. There's a "normal" way that people are "supposed" to develop, and it's based on genetics as destiny. Look at all that panic about the possible, completely undocumented but hypothetically possible, effects of medically supported transition on future fertility, while at the same time many countries still legally require trans people to be sterilized before they can be legally registered as their target gender.

Alice Wong is, as always, brilliant. I can't recommend enough her piece on Disability, pleasure and ageing. It's both deeply personal (including explicit details of her sexuality as a disabled woman) and unquestionably political. It reclaims the right to pleasure for people who inhabit bodies that others find "disgusting". That disgust isn't just a random emotion, it's cultivated by a culture that is riddled with eugenic thinking.

And ok, this one is Jewish. But it's also awesome, a conversation between two amazing Jewish scholars and activists, R' Julia Watts Belser, a disabled cis woman, and Joy Ladin, a trans woman who as far as I know doesn't identify as disabled. They're talking about the connections between their work and generally being amazing together, in the same article.

General content note: some of these articles are hosted on sites that you may object to. The article about the race science conspiracy is in the Guardian. Millie on Fascist-coded food is on Substack. Peterson on Medium. And some people are boycotting Jewish cultural organizations which might be suspected of supporting Israel. Your choice whether to give them clicks or not, I'm not the boss of you.

Comments

[naraht]

Eugenics is more than just racism. It's always, always antisemitic as well. And it's actively dangerous to other groups of people who are regarded as racially impure, particularly trans and disabled people. Regardless of whether a person's disability or trans identity is in any way genetic, once you have internalized the idea of a master race, people who strongly differ from the constructed ideal are seen as threatening. I realize this is controversial because it's dogma that racism doesn't harm white people.

Putting the trans and disabled question to one side, I feel like this is only controversial if you don't understand that Jews, Poles, Slavs, Roma and others can be constructed as racially "other." Certainly there's a strand of racial thinking particularly popular in America at the moment that sees Jews as uber-white exemplar Europeans (which I would argue is also antisemitic). But if it's really controversial to say that eugenics led to, not just discrimination and violence, but genocide against European Jews, then honestly I despair of humanity.

[liv]

It's the thing I get yelled at on social media about most. (Covid politics possibly a close second.) Jews are white. Racism doesn't affect white people. If I point out that the corollary is that racism doesn't harm Jews, I either get told that Jews are only "conditionally" white (so, not actually white, then!) or that antisemitism isn't real racism, it's made up by Jews in order to gain sympathy for Israel. Or maybe Jews were non-white in the 1940s, but that's ancient history and doesn't apply any more. Or I shouldn't compare other oppressions to racism, which is sort of true, but I'm not comparing oppressions, I'm saying that the same mindset contributes to lots of different kinds of oppression.

[naraht]

Social media is a cesspool right now. I'm staunchly left-wing and that's not going to change, but the lack of allyship with Jews from left-wing people who purportedly care about social justice has been one of the most disillusioning experiences of my life to date. Sorry, I'm probably ranting now.

[altamira16]

This type of white but not white racism impacts a lot of people. That includes Jewish people, a lot of Middle Eastern people, and various Latino groups.

There is a book called "The Limits of Whiteness" that is pretty academic that has to do with the self-perception of Iranian Americans. The author spoke to a lot of Iranian American students. After September 11, 2001, a lot of Iranian Americans started to perceive themselves as less white than they had perceived themselves before the attack on the World Trade Center.

[altamira16]

I think that the anti-vaccine or more general anti-medicine thing is more complex than race science.

In the US, some of the anti-vaccine and more general anti-medicine stuff comes out of not being able to afford a basic level of care and justifying decisions that come out of not being able to afford a basic level of care. Sure, there are health departments that are supposed to be a way for people to freely access vaccines, but some folks may be opposed to this because they are suspicious of anything the government does because they are so unaccustomed to the government actually doing useful stuff.

Some of the anti-vaccine stuff was stuff people were picking up in church, and I wonder if there were more churches linked to white supremacy doing this or not.

I would imagine that there is some suspicion of the medical establishment from folks that have seen the medical establishment treat people in a racist way, so I would not be surprised if people of all races are avoiding medical practitioners.

[adrian_turtle]

I agree that there's a lot more to the anti-vax and anti-medical stuff than simply racism or white supremacy. I used to describe one side of it as "Every time a doctor lies to a patient, they give ammunition to the anti-vaxxers," but of course that's vastly oversimplified. I had been thinking of the lies like "Don't worry, if anything was really wrong it would show up on the x-ray," but lies like "Your insurance will pay for that," and "This doesn't have any side effects," also make people distrust mainstream medicine.

Some of the anti-vaccine stuff was stuff people were picking up in church, and I wonder if there were more churches linked to white supremacy doing this or not.
Could be. But not necessarily. For a non-trivial number of people, church is the only social thing they do.

I don't think the anti-medical pressure starts with racism. I think it usually has other causes, and some of those causes might even be anti-racist. It doesn't start with racism, but it goes there eventually. Beyond the fact that any disasters tends to be harder if you're already suffering from racism, anti-medical conspiracies hand weapons to white supremacists.

[kass]

Oh, that Alice Wong piece. Wow.

[matsushima]

I think because I read your commentary about eugenics before I clicked through the links but this stood out to me in the essay on fascism and food consumption: … exercising your inalienable right to make stupid decisions that only harm yourself is fun, and if they haven’t heard of natural selection by now, they’ll soon get to know. There is a sort of eugenicist "they'll die off eventually [kill themselves off unintentionally]" vibe on the left, huh?

I guess it got me thinking about leftists/progressives/etc mocking people who were taking ivermectin to treat C-19 and so on, too.

Thank you for these links and your thoughts on them. It's given me a lot to think about. I've got the "Disability and Trans Torah" article up for my lunch break - my rabbi assigned me Loving Our Own Bones as my first "official" conversion study book.

[silveradept]

The contextualization of all of these under the idea of "commentary on the way society sees some bodies as desirable and others as impure" is a good one.

The piece on food as virtue signal is interesting, because of the ways that the eugenecist framing pops up so often, even if it's never fully acknowledged as such: these foods bring you closer to a specific (white) ideal, these foods prove that you are properly invested in the "right" (white) culture, these foods and/or preparations are a way of signaling your health and virility by consuming things that have not been "altered" to make them safer to consume, so you can be certain your genetics have not been "altered" by nefarious forces.

(If someone believes that racism cannot hurt white people, that should be accompanied with an understanding that what counts as whiteness can and does shift significantly, and that there are degrees of closeness to whiteness and expected behaviors to increase that closeness or maintain the current position.)

I saw stronger threads in the piece on puberty as about consent, and all the ways that the consent of the trans person is ignored or never sought, because the cis person believes they know best, or better, or that there is a certain way of things. I can see how that belief can be bent to eugenic ends, especially if the cis person who believes they know better believes that transness is a deficiency that has to be remedied in some way or else must be excluded.

Alice Wong's piece is fantastic, and she's right about how a body that's been medicalized is very rarely going to be allowed to seek pleasure, or for anyone to think about pleasure for such a body.

And the two scholars finding an eventual message of acceptance by society for different groups using the same story is impressive, and also well-argued.

[azurelunatic]

I figure that racism harms white people in ways similar to how sexism harms men. As a white person, I'm not the main target of racism, but there's always splatter. And as others have said here in this comments section, any "inconvenient" group can get racialized.

All of the crimes done due to racism are somehow now societally acceptable, if done to an "acceptable" target, and it never ever ever stops at race. Everyone suffers moral injuries when anyone around them does those crimes, and some people are injured more materially.

I'm white. Nobody using the definitions of my social circles would disagree -- I am very light skinned, my hair is 2c or 3a, my eyelids are hooded but definitely double, my eyes are round. But how far back in my family tree is that one Black ancestor that my uncle makes racist jokes about? Is it far enough away that the forces of violent racism in the US would say "nah, that's fine", or ... not? My daughter is Asian. One of my partners is biracial. There are at least two Black authors where teenage me thought "He looks exactly like my dad, except for skin color." Where did the [Lunatic] family nose come from? (There's a particular photo of my grandparents surrounded by family, where you can tell who is a genetic relative to Grandpa and who isn't by looking at noses.)

But mostly -- if I accept a society where race is used as an excuse to do violence and theft, then I am complicit, and that is a moral injury even if I never become a target.

[fyreharper]

“it's dogma that racism doesn't harm white people”

…it sure is interesting that ‘removing someone’s ability to see the full humanity of those around them’ is considered *not harm* >_>

[lokifan]

Thanks for the links!