Within the popular imagination, Eugenics tends to be thought of as a thing performed and justified by fascists and racist doctors, judges, and bureaucrats. While this observation is true, it tends to also miss the way in which eugenic logic is baked into our daily lives, especially as educators.
Every day within our classrooms, we are told to rank, categorize, and prescribe worth unto students based upon their perceived intellectual abilities. We are told to ignore any systemic factors that deprive students of the potential for a better life. Likewise, we are trained to ignore the way in which some students lack the means to attend college and avoid questioning whether the current schema of traditional education is not itself deeply ableist in several crucial ways.
While we accommodate on an individual level, such accommodations never go so far as to result in the restructuring of the system of schooling itself. In doing so, students never fundamentally learn to critique the system that ranks and makes certain demands of them. As a result, they often do not learn how to critically think about the hierarchies that they currently inhabit. Instead, they learn to view such hierarchies of imposed value and control as natural and inevitable as opposed to the ever-shifting and ever-challenged social creations that they are.
Therefore, these processes of sorting human worth go largely unaddressed. Students are channeled into different tiers of value and either given additional resources such as grants or scholarships based on academic performance, leaving those who cannot test as well to be deemed unworthy of resources. As students get older, they are gradually weaned off the social supports that they had as children and left to fester in cycles of structural poverty. Students are cast out into a society that exploits their labor and does not value or empower their lives, instead leaving them alienated from their work and community. Capitalism and its constituent systems of domination go unquestioned in favor of simply accepting the systemic abandonment of students as an inevitability.
Attempting to understand these issues within an individualized framework that focuses solely upon changing methods as opposed to the relationships that institutions have with those who labor within them, be they students or staff, remains an eternal impediment to truly understanding such degrading systems. In many ways, not only does this logic reflect eugenics through its sorting of people along alleged hierarchies of social worth, but it also reflects some of the differences between the medical and the social models of disability.
The medical model of disability treats each individual patient as though they are suffering from a disease or impairment that causes them to be “abnormal.” Consequently, it is the responsibility of medical professionals to fix the defects that another person’s bodily system is experiencing in order to lead a more conventional life. An example of this would be blaming a person’s inability to walk as the reason why they struggle to find employment.2
Meanwhile, the social model of disability views the patient as someone who is being disabled, not merely by a given condition, but also by the environment in which they exist within. As such, the core focus of this model is for people across multiple fields (including the disabled themselves) to come together to alter the manner in which society operates so as to create circumstances that are less disabling for each person. An example of this would be blaming the lack of accessibility and support for bodily diversity in our social and economic system for why a person who cannot walk struggles to find employment. While the medical model blames the individual for their alleged “defects,” the social mode seeks to emphasize the inherently oppressive dynamics of our own society that often result in the increasingly desperate circumstances of those who exist within with bodies that are different from what is considered to be “normal.”
On this note, it becomes apparent that educators need to address the origins of how we define “normality” itself. It becomes important to ask questions like:
- What does it mean to be “normal”?
- What tasks are people expected to perform in order to remain “worthy” of life?
- What “resources” (bodily, material, and social) are people expected to have access to in order to perform these tasks?
- Who and what systems decide how resources are accumulated, exploited, and distributed?
Furthermore, popular discussions of eugenics tend to fail to contextualize both its origins and its ongoing practice in society at a systemic level. While much focus is given to the connection between eugenics and the mass atrocities committed by fascist regimes such as that of Nazi Germany, the groundwork for these atrocities goes ignored. Specifically, the underlying colonial and patriarchal socio-economic logic that was first created under European colonialism and capitalism goes uncontested. It was within this context that both “disability” and “whiteness” as categories of social being emerged in their contemporary sense just as the subjugation of that which was deemed “feminine” was exported to colonized populations overseas.
“Whiteness” was first constructed in order to justify the dehumanization of indigenous populations of the Americas and Africa so as to impose a new hierarchy of worth that served to divide the poorer, laboring Europeans from forming alliances with these newly colonized populations against their mutually exploitative employers and imperialist kings.3
“Disability” was created as a means of normalizing the social conditions born of both imperial and capitalist social relations, as they served to individualize and alienate those whose bodies were deemed less capable of producing labor to the benefit of capital and colonial nation-state alike.
As Shaun Grech writes in the book Disability and Colonialism, “…any serious materialist disability offering cannot possibly bypass the colonial encounter, because it is the ‘crucial moment in which modernity, coloniality, and capitalism, as we know them today, came together’ (Mignolo, 2008, p. 248).”4 Further, Grech noted that colonialism only valued colonized people based upon their ability to perform work for the empire, thereby creating a broader cultural norm of “compulsory ablebodiedness.”5 Meanwhile, many indigenous populations found themselves forced to acquiesce to restricting their society in accordance with sexist policies enforced upon them by colonizing forces. Indigenous women who had previously played more flexible roles in their communities were then expected to mirror the subordinate positions that European patriarchy had imposed upon its citizenry.
Given that what we consider to be “normal” is always a product of our history, it becomes increasingly important to dissect and analyze how our society created such dreadfully limiting and dehumanizing frameworks for understanding disability and the worth prescribed unto different forms of human life. In addition to this, critical disability scholars have elucidated upon the ways in which “disability” as a social category was constructed within the confines of patriarchal societies, oftentimes being used to police the reproductive abilities of women whose lives and abilities to resist such persecution were further degraded along racist and colonized lines.
Overtly eugenicist promotional campaigns of the early to mid-1900s ran alongside government sponsored efforts to sterilize both poor whites and non-white women that resulted in the forced sterilizations of over 70,000 people and, at one point in the mid-20th century, roughly 1/3rd of all Puerto Rican women. Furthermore, there still exists ongoing disparities in the rates of sterilization of Native American, Black, immigrant and imprisoned women within the US, which continues to showcase how eugenics has always been a project rooted in patriarchy and born of the colonial expansion of European power.6
Consequently, to effectively engage with eugenics and the study of the politics of those who would deem another’s life “unworthy” of existence, it becomes crucial to apply an intersectional, analytical lens to all considerations of the topic. This is crucial if we are to properly historicize the process whereby these hierarchal societal logics coalesced into the form we recognize today as “eugenics.”
