How to Be an Anti-Eugenicist
By Marina DiMarco, Alexandra Fair, and Benjamin Maldonado
Harden’s narrative is simple and obfuscates the complexities that have allowed eugenics to survive - even flourish - within the field of genetics.
1. Introduction
In her recent sociogenomics manifesto The Genetic Lottery, Kathryn Paige Harden sets out to rescue behavior genetics from the spectres of racism and eugenics. Sociogenomics, like behavior genetics, studies the possible role of genes in explaining complex human social behaviors. Critics have charged this area of study with fueling biological determinist theories of human social inequality.
Photo by Thomas Ried, National Cancer Institute on Unsplash
Harden purports to offer a refreshing take on this old debate because she claims that such critics are blind to the role that genetics play in the very thing they aim to secure: social equality. She argues that, in fact, we must use genetic information to promote truly egalitarian social policy. Styling herself after 20th century anti-racist geneticists such as Theodosius Dobzhansky, Harden offers the new sociogenomics as an explicitly anti-eugenic synthesis of genetics and equality.
Harden is right that the legacies of eugenics haunt behavior genetics. The field’s findings have been used to argue that biological differences between social groups explain social inequality and to undermine the possibility of egalitarian interventions. Human behavior genetics and its successor, sociogenomics, have thrived on controversy about the alleged biological relationship between race and IQ and the alleged futility of educational interventions in closing achievement gaps. Harden’s particular focus—the notion that biology can explain population differences in educational attainment and cognitive performance—has been a pillar of eugenic discourse and white supremacist ideology. But Harden believes that it is possible to “[reclaim] genetic science from the legacy of eugenics, realigning it with egalitarian aims.” Harden’s “new synthesis,” she argues, is not only different from eugenics, but self-consciously anti-eugenic.
Harden draws an analogy between her critics’ “genome blindness” (her term for the failure to “see” genetic causes) and color blindness (the failure to “see” race). Just as color blindness undermines antiracism because it fails to grapple with the effects of racism, Harden argues that genome-blindness threatens egalitarian aims because it fails to grapple with genetic causes of inequality. But this analogy breaks down when the entanglement of behavior genetics with eugenics is taken seriously. Resisting eugenics depends on an understanding not of how genes work, but of how eugenics works. Anti-eugenic science demands an expansive and nuanced understanding of how eugenic thought developed. In this essay, we show that Harden’s account of eugenics seriously undermines her claim to rescue behavior genetics from its clutches.
2. Eugenics is Not a Monolith
Harden characterizes eugenics as (1) the creation of a hierarchy of social value on the basis of biology, and as (2) the attitude that biologically determined outcomes cannot be changed via social policy. Harden argues that this attitude follows from the notion of hard heredity which conceptualizes genes as immutable to social influence. According to Harden, this hard heredity undergirds eugenic science.
“Anti-eugenic science demands an expansive and nuanced understanding of how eugenic thought developed”
Harden portrays eugenics much like a trait in a pedigree chart: passed on from eugenicist to eugenicist, predictably uniform, easily traceable, and unchanging over time. To promote her monolithic portrayal of eugenics, Harden’s narrative is simple and obfuscates the complexities that have allowed eugenics to survive - even flourish - within the field of genetics. However unflattering, this portrait is still a caricature. Eugenics is better understood as a shape-shifting ideology which has, in many times and places, aligned itself with Progressive policies. Eugenicists have neither confined themselves to a single concept of heredity nor taken a unified approach to environmental influences on health and behavior.
In fact, 20th century eugenics was often aligned with Progressive social reform of the day. Progressive reformers believed that scientific expertise could be a tool for social change. These scientifically informed policies ranged from temperance, to labor reform, to food and drug safety, and, indeed, eugenics. This complicates Harden’s account of eugenics in three ways. First, hard heredity itself was aligned with Progressive social reform. Second, not all eugenic social reform was predicated on hard heredity. Third, the eugenics movement contained factions with different and conflicting relationships to politics and science, both of which changed over time.
2.1 Sterilization
“20th century eugenics was often aligned with Progressive social reform of the day”
Eugenic reform was - and is - fundamentally about social control of reproduction. As Harden acknowledges, Progressive ideas about reproductive fitness undergirded coercive sterilization practices in American hospitals, state youth homes and psychiatric facilities. In 33 states, between 1907 and 1977, state eugenics boards oversaw the forced sterilization of patients by doctors who, because of eugenics, presumed authority to order sterilization on the same grounds that the state used to mandate compulsory vaccination. Although the written record from state eugenics boards is sparse, what material survives tells a haunting story of the disproportionate forced sterilization of Black and Latina women, whose resistance is documented in court cases from the Carolinas to California.
What is important to understand about this is that sterilization was Progressive social reform in the eyes of its eugenic supporters. In fact, this policy reflects the idea that hard heredity made reproduction a viable motivation for a host of policies: as legal scholar Dorothy Roberts demonstrates in Fatal Invention, “eugenic science went hand in hand with Jim Crow laws”, racial segregation, and voter suppression: “all progressive reforms intended to strengthen the social order.” Such policies had, at their core, anxieties about reproduction, as they equated racial segregation with racial ‘purity’. Notions of racial purity spawned many different carceral systems. Eugenic social orders predicated on racism and reproductive control also influenced Progressive immigration policy. The xenophobic Johnson Reed Act of 1924 severely limited the number of immigrants from Asia and Eastern Europe allowed into the United States. (Sound familiar?) Hard hereditarian eugenics were perfectly compatible with - and often motivation for - a “scientifically informed” approach to social change.
2.2 Nutrition, Parenting, and Housing
Furthermore, not all eugenic social reform was committed to the notion of hard heredity. As historian Sarah Richardson details, some early advocates of both eugenics and euthenics saw the environment as an important cause and a valuable target for intervention in addressing or overcoming hereditary deficits, and tailored their pregnancy advice accordingly. Likewise, Better Babies contests, which used a standardized scorecard to measure babies like livestock, emphasized child nutrition, hygiene, and parenting strategies in addition to hereditarian influences. In the 1920s, their successors, Fitter Family contests, judged whole family pedigrees, but with continued attention to environmental factors like diet and exercise. Similarly, historian Laura Lovett argues that the home itself became a target of eugenic intervention: “American eugenics in the 1930s saw housing programs as a vehicle for a new form of reproductive regulation promoting large families for the so-called fit while limiting family size among the so-called unfit.” Housing developers, federal agencies, and real-estate agents promoted racist housing discrimination and the creation of suburban housing developments as “tools for discriminatory reproductive control.” Eugenics was (and is) compatible not only with social reform, but also with reform aimed at features of the social environment, such as legal and environmental protections. These examples evince the depth, breadth, and heterogeneity of eugenic social reforms and rebut Harden’s characterization of eugenics as a monolith of hard hereditarianism, isolated from social reforms.
Harden’s book
Kevles’ book
2.3 Reform eugenics
Like the eugenics movement, individual eugenicists often held multiple, conflicting, and unstable views about heredity and politics. Yet Harden flattens eugenic scientists into caricatures devoid of depth, into villains to be easily denounced but not complex actors to be grappled with. As a particularly grievous example, Harden spends much of the first chapter exploring the work of Karl Pearson, the mathematician, statistician, and zealous eugenicist. She draws from historian Daniel Kevles’ 1985 book In the Name of Eugenics to denounce Pearson’s eugenical science and the great harm his research has caused. This critique includes emphasizing Pearson’s conservative opposition to social reform on the ground that welfare allows for the breeding of undesirable populations.
If true, this would be a perfect example of Harden’s portrayal of eugenics as fundamentally anti-reform. Yet, Kevles himself presents a more complex story. On the same page that Harden cites, he goes on to say that Pearson, later in life, adopted a more neutral attitude towards reform, seeing it as circumstantially necessary. This is, of course, not to say that Pearson was passionately pro-reform. Rather, it is to demonstrate that even Karl Pearson, the eugenicist most in line with Harden’s definition of eugenics, is simplified through a twisting of sources in support of Harden’s monolith. Pearson is made static, an atemporal data point in Harden’s argument, rather than an example of the ways in which eugenics, like all things, changed over time.
In fact, Kevles’s In the Name of Eugenics is a testament to the heterogeneity of eugenics. It argues that a new faction of eugenicists arose during the 1930s: scientists such as Julian Huxley, Frederick Osborn and J. B. S. Haldane. According to Kevles, these eugenicists rejected the broad categories of the earlier eugenicists in favor of a more explicitly scientific approach. They were equally as eugenical but more open to social reforms such as the development of housing and community centers, minimum wage, and access to birth control. Some of the more radical voices even called for the complete reorganization of society and rejected the notion that social hierarchy was biologically determined, a defining feature of Harden’s portrayal of eugenics. Kevles calls these scientists, appropriately, reform eugenicists. While Kevles may overstate their differentiation from the earlier old guard eugenicists (the reform eugenicists were often just as racist and hierarchical as their intellectual progenitors), this generation of eugenicists are vital to its history. As Kevles argues, it is this generation that laid the foundation for genetics as an institutionalized science and built their eugenical beliefs into its foundations. Despite this, scientists associated with reform eugenics are conspicuously absent from Harden’s narrative. They are not the only faction of eugenicists to be ignored: Harden neglects Leftist eugenicists as well, for example. Their absence is especially odd, though, given Harden’s reliance on Kevles, for whom the reform eugenicists are central. Is it because they, as promoters of social reform, run counter to her definition of eugenics? Or are they, as respected and foundational geneticists, a bit too close to home, when compared to the more easily denounced Francis Galton and Karl Pearson? Whatever the reason, the silence is telling.
3. Conclusion
There have been an abundance of critical responses to The Genetic Lottery, from biologist Kevin Bird’s detailed riposte in Massive Science to Brenna M. Henn and co-authors’ critical analysis in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Our aim here is to add to this conversation by troubling Harden’s claim to an anti-eugenic sociogenomics.
“We call on sociogenomics to develop a far more ethically and politically substantive vision of anti-eugenic science”
Harden is absolutely right to denounce eugenics and its influence on her field. Such a clear condemnation is praiseworthy. However, flattening eugenics into a one dimensional caricature does no favors to her argument, nor to a wider project of anti-eugenics. The Genetic Lottery obscures how eugenics has adapted, thrived, and laid down complex foundations for institutional science beyond the obvious. Today, restricted access to reproductive technology, the rhetoric of reproductive “choice,” and the misuse of polygenic testing on embryos (none of which Harden meaningfully engages) reconstitute these eugenical and racist modes of thought. Without fully confronting these legacies of eugenics, how can Harden’s new synthesis effectively oppose the science of racial hierarchy in its contemporary context?
We call on sociogenomics to develop a far more ethically and politically substantive vision of anti-eugenic science. Like antiracism, true anti-eugenic science requires an awareness of the many reforms and coercions of eugenics. It demands that social geneticists and other scientists attend to the effects of science in the real world, in which we must grapple with both historical and contemporary eugenic policies. And it requires not only constant vigilance, but a robust moral imagination of the relationship between science and the promotion of social equality.
HOW TO CITE THIS BLOG
DiMarco, M., Fair, A., and Maldonado, B. “How to Be an Anti-Eugenicist.” GenderSci Blog, 24 Jan. 2022. genderscilab.org/blog/how-to-be-an-anti-eugenicist
STATEMENT OF INTELLECTUAL LABOR:
Marina DiMarco, Alexandra Fair, and Benjamin Maldonado authored this piece and all views expressed are theirs. Sarah Richardson and Marion Boulicault offered helpful guiding suggestions and contributed substantial edits to earlier drafts.