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Widening the Story - Artifact 2a

Eugenics Slide: Social Control

Context

Eugenics has been defined in varying ways. Those with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo tend to actively deny the continued existence of eugenic thought, so they define it in ways that indicate it no longer exists or that it refers to something that happened somewhere else and in the past.

Eugenics, as defined by Sir Francis Galton, is the study that aims to socially engineer the improvement of the human race through biology, heredity, and controlled reproduction.

By using this slide to teach his eugenics courses, Dr. McConkey cited Sir Francis Galton as the primary expert in eugenics.1(footnote) Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911) founded the eugenics movement in Britain with his publication Hereditary Genius (1869). The term “eugenics” comes from the Greek word for “wellborn.” Galton’s eugenics was a modification of Darwin’s idea of natural selection. Darwin observed that organisms that adapt best to their environments tended to survive and produce more offspring. Positive eugenics aims to improve the human population’s genetic composition through controlled selective breeding. Examples include policies and practices that encourage selected families to have children through financial incentives. Negative eugenics discourages human reproduction by those outside the prescribed social norm. Eugenicists believe that so-called “unfit” people can be bred out of the gene pool. As such, they promote institutionalization, prohibitive marriage laws, restricted immigration, birth control measures, assimilation, Indian Residential Schools, and training schools.

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Image Transcript

Some people continue to argue that race explains differences in measurements of intelligence and health. Some still use biology to justify value-laden and racist assumptions about what it means to be human. As a recent example, University of Western Ontario psychology professor and eugenicist Philippe Rushton used racist pseudo-science to support his belief that efforts to create equality would fail because the inequities were genetic as opposed to systemic.2(footnote)

Artifact 2b

Eugenics Slide: Classification Chart

McConkey’s eugenics course slide called “Eugenical Classification of the Human Stock” (circa 1920s)3(footnote) teaches learners to distinguish the “Fit” from the “Unfit.” The chart is an example of a settler colonial, and eugenic approach to controlling people through hierarchical categorizations. It is a tool that teaches dehumanizing constructions of difference.

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This chart was displayed at the Second Eugenics Congress, held at the American Museum of Natural History in 1921. The chart shows the eugenic traits of those deemed to have superior human traits. For example, Cecil Rhodes (1853-1902) is classified as a person of “Genius.”

In 1921, Rhodes was celebrated for his strong colonial and white supremacist agenda in southern Africa. Today, Rhodes is recognized as an architect of apartheid. Apartheid was the systematic dehumanization of South Africa’s Black population from 1948 to 1994. What the classification chart hides is the ways in which the actions of Rhodes created the conditions of inequality and poverty that led to a greater devaluing of difference and the dehumanization of people.

The Eugenics classification chart also shows the traits of those deemed to be “inadequate,” such as the supposedly feebleminded, poor (pauperous), criminalistics, and epileptic — all of whom eugenicists wrongly thought were the products of “defective” genetic inheritance that was dragging down society and the human race.

The subheading, The Task of Eugenics, located at the bottom of the classification chart, states the tasks of positive and negative eugenics: “a) To encourage fit and fertile matings among those persons most richly endowed by nature, and b) to devise practicable means for cutting off the inheritance lines of persons of natural meagre or defective inheritance.” These “practicable means for cutting off inheritance lines” became, for example, policies of segregation, extermination, institutionalization, and sterilization.

The categories of “fit” and “inadequate” gave agents of eugenics a powerful tool to apply eugenics policies.

Note the colonial language used in parenthesis at the top of the chart “Since civilization began there have been born and reared in civilized countries approximately thirty billion (30,000,000,000) persons).” And the side: “Eugenically fit from sterling inheritance – the families which produce the socially valuable tip of humanity among civilized people.”

Artifact 2c, d, e

Eugenic Slide: Disembodied and Faulty Tools to Objectify Life and Lives

Context: Faulty Methods Used by Eugenicists

In addition to teaching Macdonald Institute students how to establish differences between superior and inferior humans, the larger objective of the eugenics course was to show how physical, mental, social, and moral human traits were heritable and, thus, controllable through racial hygiene, or population control, policies, and measures.

Eugenicists examined patterns in family traits across generations to establish hereditary relationships. Pedigree charts, such as the ones represented here, were built to track the presence or absence of a given trait (phenotype and genotype) in living family members based on the oral reports of their relatives.4(footnote)

Pedigree charts used lines, numbers, shapes, and letters to represent information. Squares represented males, and circles represented females. Squares and circles that were filled-in indicated individuals displaying a certain trait (phenotype). Lines joined parents and children. Dotted lines joined parents with children born out of wedlock.

Pedigree charts made by eugenicists are now viewed as deeply flawed for several reasons. Eugenicists came to genetic conclusions based on charts formed by guess work made from information provided by family members and traits they identified. To add to this, much of the information that was collected was incomplete and improperly reported by second and third-hand reports. In addition, eugenicists focused on traits that are unmeasurable since they are subjective, visually observed behaviours as well as traits that are not heritable. Nevertheless, eugenicists used pedigree charts (as well as statistics) to create the impression that subjective and non-hereditary behaviours were, in fact, scientifically determined and hereditary.

In his book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire discusses the way oppressive education generates false understandings of human beings as objects. Oppressive education is death-making in the way it turns life into inorganic mechanical things. Once this is achieved a person begins to relate only to those things that can be possessed. As such, loss of possession and control threatens a loss of oneself and the world. Freire refers to this act of control as death-making in that it stops life.5(footnote)

First Nations, Black, racialized, disabled, D/deaf, Mad, aging, e/Elder, fat and 2SLGTBQ+ peoples are “routinely represented as non-vital, a representation that often produces alienating, violent, and even deadly effects.”6(footnote) Such representations justify barriers to access and imagine narrowly defined futures. Disability rights activists, such as Peter Park, disrupt such non-vital representations and death-making by establishing their own essential humanity and insisting that the present and future be full of human variation and difference.

Footnotes

  1. McConkey’s Eugenics slides courtesy of University of Guelph McLaughlin Library Archival & Special Collections, Ontario Agricultural College, Dept. of Field Husbandry Oswald Murray McConkey Papers, RE1OACA0066 Regional History Collection, Box 15B, Genetic Slides. ↩

  2. For more on current applications of scientific racism, see (1) Andrew S. Winston, “Neoliberalism and IQ: Naturalizing Economic and Racial Inequality,” Theory & Psychology 28, no. 5 (October 2018): 600–618, https://doi.org/10.1177/0959354318798160, and (2)Andrew S. Winston, “Why Mainstream Research Will Not End Scientific Racism in Psychology,” Theory & Psychology 30, no. 3 (June 2020): 425–30, (Source). ↩

  3. McConkey’s Eugenics slides courtesy of University of Guelph McLaughlin Library Archival & Special Collections. Ontario Agricultural College. Dept. of Field Husbandry, Oswald Murray McConkey Papers, RE1OACA0066 Regional History Collection, Box 15B, Genetic Slides. ↩

  4. McConkey’s Eugenics slides courtesy of University of Guelph McLaughlin Library Archival & Special Collections. Ontario Agricultural College. Dept. of Field Husbandry, Oswald Murray McConkey Papers, RE1OACA0066 Regional History Collection, Box 15B, Genetic Slides. ↩

  5. Paulo Freire, Donaldo P. Macedo, and Ira Shor, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos, 50th anniversary edition (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018). ↩

  6. C. Rice, E. Chandler, L. Fisher, T. Tidgwell, N. Changfoot, I. Mündel, & S. Dion, “Bodies in Translation: Principles of Governance and Engagement.” Bodies in Translation: Activist Art, Technology, and Access to Life, Re•Vision: The Centre for Art and Social Justice, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada, 2018, 1. ↩