Levka on Nostr: #eugenics #immigration #déjà_vu "In May 1921 The Saturday Evening Post, America’s ...
#eugenics #immigration #déjà_vu
"In May 1921 The Saturday Evening Post, America’s most popular magazine, warned its readers of the grave 'immigration problem' threatening to bring about 'racial degeneration' in the United States. Yet happily, scientific advances based on the discoveries of Gregor Mendel would ensure Americans need never 'forfeit their high estate and join the lowly ranks of the mongrel races.' Poor Mendel, quietly cultivating his peas sixty years earlier, never said a word about racial degeneration, but that didn’t stop anti-immigration campaigners like the Post’s editor, George Horace Lorimer, from claiming that Mendel’s work on heredity corroborated a new science validating ancient bigotries—namely, eugenics. In offering a supposedly scientific foundation for nativism, eugenics kicked off a national epidemic of confirmation bias."
http://web.archive.org/web/20190923163547/https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/09/26/american-immigration-century-racism/
"In May 1921 The Saturday Evening Post, America’s most popular magazine, warned its readers of the grave 'immigration problem' threatening to bring about 'racial degeneration' in the United States. Yet happily, scientific advances based on the discoveries of Gregor Mendel would ensure Americans need never 'forfeit their high estate and join the lowly ranks of the mongrel races.' Poor Mendel, quietly cultivating his peas sixty years earlier, never said a word about racial degeneration, but that didn’t stop anti-immigration campaigners like the Post’s editor, George Horace Lorimer, from claiming that Mendel’s work on heredity corroborated a new science validating ancient bigotries—namely, eugenics. In offering a supposedly scientific foundation for nativism, eugenics kicked off a national epidemic of confirmation bias."
http://web.archive.org/web/20190923163547/https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/09/26/american-immigration-century-racism/