As a student and music and theater performer, I’ve come up against eugenic ideas in art and education far too many times to list here. I have memories of being told I was too fat or my facial features were too dark to play certain theatrical roles. I recall music and theater directors aggressively drilling choreography and musical scales, their top performers receiving bragging rights for having “perfect pitch,” or being a “triple threat” (knowing how to dance, act, and sing well). Once I began theater directing, I found myself echoing the same standards to my cast and crew, demanding a certain level of normalized perfection that is guaranteed to suck the fun out of the work. As a teacher, I recall times when I’ve fallen into the pathologized and categorized trap when dealing with a difficult student because it’s easier to reduce someone’s challenges to an ADHD checklist than it is to examine all the dimensions of systemic inequities that are failing to support the student.
With the number of insurmountable tasks thrust on teachers, it’s understandable that there would be a desire to streamline this responsibility into something reductive, such as a checklist or a standardized test score. The logic behind the benchmarks we assign to our students may seem like reasonable metrics, but these ideas and practices have perilous roots. As James Baldwin said, school is where a child learns “the shape of his oppression.”1 If we aren’t upfront about our methods of instruction and how they are rooted in this insidious past, and how we’ve internalized these ideas, we run the risk of perpetuating psychological and physical harm to our students. Unlearning behaviors that were ingrained in us both consciously and unconsciously is one of the greatest challenges of our lives. Still, this continuous effort to reflect on our patterns will hopefully lead us towards a more liberational kind of education and a collective.
In my practice, there is a foundation of empathy and love, constant learning, reflection, and political praxis. It involves daily reflections on my lessons and conversations with students, assessing the impact of my words and any hidden biases in my interactions. My pedagogy involves being a student myself- continuously learning new ideas, researching history, and getting outside of my comfort zone when it comes to critical analysis. Researching the history of the eugenics movement for years has made it easier to identify its residual effects in our modern world, but there is also a burden in knowing. Once you’re aware, you have to do something to change it; so again, being a student of life is an essential task for me in this work.
By the time my high school students arrive in my classroom, I’ve noticed their sense of awe and wonder has been stifled. Honestly, that’s what I enjoyed about teaching middle schoolers- they still get excited about learning. To address that, in my classes, I have deemphasized traditional grading and learning for the test. Instead, I focus on fostering authentic connections with my students and returning that passion and excitement for learning to the foreground. I achieve this by listening to my students’ lives and interests and finding ways to weave their identities into the curriculum, and emphasizing providing qualitative feedback that will be useful in their future learning.
Context:
The eugenics movement dominated discourses throughout the modern world throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In almost every aspect of public life, eugenics established an us-versus-them solution and perpetuated racial and social hierarchies to limit agency and self-determination. From deportations, coerced institutionalizations, and sterilizations to proposed executions of people with disabilities, eugenic policies ran rampant in scientific, academic, and medical spaces. Eugenics thrived in this era because of an increasingly industrialized, secularized society, an influx of immigrants from Southern and Eastern European countries stoking nativism, and the expansion of liberal individualist ideals. A term coined by English polymath Francis Galton in 1883, eugenics was to Galton the study of how to control and arrange reproduction to “breed” or “breed out” heritable characteristics deemed desirable or undesirable.
Experts did not have a specific and coordinated strategy to reproduce a new society; rather, it gradually transpired in day-to-day practice. Doctors and researchers created a discipline that categorized human behavior into standardized arrangements, which designated and dictated what were normal and abnormal ways of being. Providing a hereditary explanation for social and racial hierarchy ensured that any critique of these systems was an attack on scientific reasoning itself. In recent years, there has been an increase in scholarship on the history of the American eugenics movement, exposing the institutional and governmental systems that facilitated the oppression of people with disabilities, people of color, immigrants, women, and LGBTQ+ people. Currently, however, there is limited information and curriculum for teachers to help students examine the eugenics movement’s role in American arts and culture.
Before instruction, it is vital for teachers to personally examine how racialized histories sculpted our modern educational frameworks and directly shaped the way we teach, the content we teach, and the way we assess mastery of skills. To effectively teach about the legacies and afterlives of eugenics in any classroom setting, teachers need to be explicitly rooted in an anti-eugenic and anti-racist framework of instruction. Teachers must focus on the impact of racial hierarchy and the cultural experiences that students face both inside and outside the classroom. Moving away from individualistic narratives of suffering, exceptionalism, or excellence, teachers are encouraged to center their instruction to facilitate a critique of institutions and systems as well as community resilience and resistance.
Individual accounts, both positive and negative, can potentially frame this history as an exception to the rule, which is both inaccurate and detrimental. Examining the dimensions of racism beyond isolated narratives, teachers bring the discourse into the systemic foundations that allowed eugenics to thrive and become embedded in modern society. Teachers must dispel misconceptions about eugenics and scientific racism writ large. Below are some common myths surrounding eugenics, but this unit will further dispel these claims beyond the quick facts listed:
Myth: Eugenics was a niche pseudoscience, a product of its time, and is no longer relevant in society.
Fact: Eugenics was not a fringe movement; the nation’s leading scientists, academics, and politicians provided international acceptance of eugenics as “good science” and had the institutional backing of the most prestigious academic institutions, including (but not limited to) Harvard, Yale, and Stanford University. The racist, ableist, and bigoted ideologies promoted by eugenics have survived well into the 21st century. Modern technologies such as standardized and IQ testing in schools, genetic testing, embryo screening, gene editing, forced or coerced sterilizations, the targeting of immigrant communities, and the control of reproductive autonomy reverberate in the United States today. Eugenics never died; it has evolved and reproduced itself into every modern institution, domestically and on the world stage.
Myth: Eugenics originated in Nazi Germany and was firmly discredited after World War II.
Fact: While Nazi Germany executed eugenic practices to their fullest extent, resulting in the genocide of at least six million Jewish people, as well as Romani (250-500,000 people), disabled (250,000-300,000 people), and LGBTQ+ (5-15,000 people), they did not design the theories behind eugenics. The United States and U.K. scholars were the central drivers of the eugenics movement. For example, Yale alumnus and eugenics advocate Madison Grant’s book, The Passing of the Great Race, was referred to as “Hitler’s Bible.” During the Nuremberg trials after World War II, Nazi officials referred to the book as evidence, defending the assertion that Germany wasn’t the sole originator of eugenics and that the United States was culpable. 2
Myth: Only scientists and science teachers should be concerned with understanding the history of eugenics.
Fact: Eugenics is embedded in every modern institution and almost every field of instruction. Every person in the United States is harmfully impacted by these systems, which solidify a hierarchical caste system that reproduces these structures with each generation. Eugenics is not simply about genetics (though it is rampant in that field as well); eugenics is a vehicle for categorizing the haves and the have-nots. It is an ideology based on shame and dehumanization, and was given a veil of authority for justification. It behooves us all to understand and critique how these ideas persist.
