(1-2 class periods)
Lesson Objectives:
By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:
- Identify characteristics of anti-eugenic art.
- Analyze how artists and communities resisted eugenic narratives through music and photography.
- Synthesize concepts around identity, rejecting purity standards, community strength, and cultural survival, to begin constructing a personal understanding of anti-eugenics.
Warm-Up Activity: (10 min.)
Prompt students to respond, either written or class discussion:
- What do you think it means to resist a system through art? What do you think makes a piece of art or music anti-eugenic?
Students share out their responses, and the teacher may want to chart their ideas on a visual display. Highlight ideas like community resilience, reclaiming identity, practicing agency and voice, and emotional truth.
Short Instruction: (5-10 min.)
The teacher can emphasize that anti-eugenic photos and media can fall under the following approaches:
- Reclaim: uplifts identities, sounds, or images that were silenced, excluded, or erased.
- Reimagine: imagines a world without eugenics and its logics
- Refuse: critiques systems of control, exclusion, or idealization
- Reveal: Tells a personal, familial, or ancestral story that challenges dominant narratives
Expert Panel Jigsaw Activity (30-35 min.)
Students are placed in Home Groups (4 students per group), then each student is placed in an Expert Panel (1 person per Home Group). Students will examine a specific case study in their Expert Panels. They will later return to teach each other to synthesize their ideas into a shared “Anti-Eugenics Toolkit.”
Expert Panel Group A: Photography- W.E.B. Du Bois & 1900 Paris Exposition
Sources: Photographs and charts created by Du Bois and his team to represent African American life in Georgia. Displayed in the “Exhibit of American Negroes” at the 1900 World’s Fair. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/search/?sp=1&co=anedub&st=grid.
Guiding Questions:
- How do these photographs and data charts push back against eugenic narratives?
- What values are communicated in the composition, setting, or presentation of the photographed subjects?
- What might Du Bois be communicating about intelligence, beauty, and human potential through this exhibit?
- How is this work a form of resistance through imagery?
Expert Panel Group B: Digital Portraits- Disability Visibility Project
Sources: Modern digital art that centers disabled bodies and perspectives. Rejects notions of normalcy and the medicalized gaze. https://disabilityvisibilityproject.com/community-as-home-portraits/.
Guiding Questions:
- How do these images defy eugenic ideas of "fitness" or “value”?
- What do the images seem to be communicating through pose, context, or expression?
- What role do agency and autonomy play in these images?
- How is this work a form of resistance through imagery?
Expert Panel Group C: Music- Nina Simone
Sources: Civil Rights activist and jazz/soul singer, Nina Simone. Songs: “Mississippi Goddamn,” “Four Women,” “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” and “Strange Fruit.” All songs can be found on YouTube.
Guiding Questions:
- What are the themes found in the lyrics of the songs? How do these themes relate to anti-eugenics?
- How does Nina Simone use music to push back against racial and cultural oppression?
- How does Simone engage with music in a way that Seashore-style testing could never measure?
- How does her voice itself resist control or categorization?
Expert Panel Group D: Deaf Musicians and Artistry
Sources: Deaf musicians Sean Forbes https://youtu.be/lXchQ_uZhUY?si=rX1eSyiLBasQfiYs, Warren “Wawa” Snipe https://youtu.be/fU4OwFYlAL0?si=AtgAR8ZPyF6fAS7G, and Christine Sun Kim https://youtu.be/mqJA0SZm9zI?si=OK05QlSHF35oTEyt.
Guiding Questions:
- How do these artists redefine music beyond hearing?
- How does their work resist eugenic ideas of sensory “normalcy”?
- What new ways of storytelling emerge in their art?
- How are these works forms of resistance?
Home Group Synthesizing: (15-20 min.)
Students return to their original Home Groups. Each student presents their case study, answering:
- What makes the work you analyzed anti-eugenic?
- What emotions or messages are being expressed in these works?
- What are the common themes and messages across the sources?
- What do these pieces reclaim?
Each group creates a visual or written “Anti-Eugenic Toolkit”:
- 3–5 qualities or strategies that music or photography use to resist systems of control
- Short phrases, themes, or visual motifs that they observed
Closing Activity (10 min.)
Closing discussion with students brainstorming how they will use these sources as inspiration to create their anti-eugenic works of art/media.
