President Trump’s racist rant against immigrants hides under the language of eugenics

President Trump’s racist rant against immigrants hides under the language of eugenics

Written by Daniel Vergano

Former President Donald Trump has made at least one contribution to the cause of honesty in his unique way. In his ramblings, he regularly exposes the racism that still scars America and its pseudoscientific cousin, eugenics.

“You know, now they’re murderers. It’s in their genes.” “And now we have a lot of bad genes left in our country,” he added.

This line comes directly from eugenics, a very dishonest scientific doctrine that led many people in the early 20th century to believe that crime, poverty, and many other diseases were all inherited. It has been accepted by many scientists and the following publications have been published. scientific american, “The science of raising better men” led to rampant state sterilization of poor women and the Nazis who murdered Jews, Roma, Poles, Ukrainians, and others in extermination camps during World War II. Influenced rationalization.

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Although eugenics has been discredited in science, words associated with eugenics remain in popular culture, with the psychological categories turned insults such as “stupid,” “idiot,” and “incompetent” now This is clear from the fact that it is woven into everyday language. And it can be seen in the racial designations we live with today, so deeply embedded in places like the U.S. Census Bureau that it is almost taken for granted. The broken notion that people all fall into different racial categories has fueled the division of people into genetically meaningless groups of “us” and “them.”

Much of the ugly rhetoric in modern American politics is unfortunately explained away by unacknowledged, but terrible, failed science. President Trump’s claim that immigrants are “tainting the blood” of America is explained by eugenics, a corruption of medical terminology. Or that his political opponents are “low IQ” and that IQ science is notoriously racist. And the same eugenic cry lies at the heart of vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance’s assertion that childless women are less valuable than mothers, whether they own a cat or not. Both claims include the “perpetuation of a hereditary criminal class,” that southern and eastern Europeans are congenital criminals, or the stigma and shame attached to childless women at the time. It follows the pattern of arguments made more than a century ago. It was all nonsense then and it is now.

At the time, the politics were disturbingly familiar, and the rationale for the 1924 law that drastically curtailed U.S. immigration (infamous for barring Jews from the United States before World War II before World War II) was based on racist considerations. was provided by eugenicists. 1927 Buck vs Bell With this decision, a biased Supreme Court declared itself the arbiter of women’s reproductive rights based on the testimony of eugenicists.

Eugenics was widespread in the scientific community of the time, and focused on producing more children from Anglo-Saxon parents and eliminating “non-Nordic” immigrants. of genetic journalpublished by the American Genetic Society, began e.g. american breeders magazine Run by passionate eugenicists. of New England Medical Journal It was only in 1948 that the publication of eugenics reports was discontinued. The mainstay of its reporting was to protect the “spiritual integrity of the people” and to ban the entry of “contaminated stocks” from the “deficient and morally deficient population currently inundating this country.” The idea was to support immigration restrictions for “foreigners”. NEJM Editors. The non-primariness of science has left its mark on American law. “The entire system of legally mandated racial segregation[in the United States]was reinforced by eugenic ideas,” legal historian Paul Lombardo wrote in a 2018 review published in the magazine. genetics in medicine. Immigration laws derived from eugenics, which allowed entry only to individuals from certain countries, were not repealed until the mid-1960s, along with the overturning of racial laws during the civil rights era.

While eugenic ideas and attitudes still pervade the worst parts of popular culture, relics from the last century include President Trump’s call for more immigration from Norway, and immigration from Haiti in Vance and Pennsylvania. This is evident in the attacks on Mr. Trump. The racist nostalgia for Jim Crow that is baked into the “Make America Great Again” movement has followed a continuum since the era of eugenics and has taken on its language. So is the claim that immigrants will “replace” white voters, a moral panic born out of the era of eugenics.

The ugliest part of the specter of eugenics is why Trump and his fellow immigrant-hating partisans continue to spout that dead, discredited nonsense. That’s because it’s popular. To everyone’s shame, racism is so prevalent among a significant portion of the population that it masks prejudice within the remaining word eugenics. Just like that, Trump and his allies are deploying that disgraceful science of denigrating immigrants as murderers with “bad genes.”

“This is eugenics,” said Beth Shapiro, a paleontologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and president of the Genetics Society of America.It was bought, ironically, by Elon Musk, himself an immigrant plutocrat. He spoke on social networking platform X (formerly Twitter). Disingenuous hate speech about immigration. “I reject this. We are better than this,” Shapiro said this month.

I can only hope so.

This is an opinion and analysis article and the views expressed by the author are not necessarily those of the author. scientific american.