Eugenics is not an idea from another time.

It’s not a Nazi thing.

North American eugenics has been tremendously influential and deadly effective.

It’s not an early twentieth-century thing. 1/13

It never went away. Because it appears whenever we make biological arguments about the value of bodies. It thrives within sexism and racism and xenophobia. These are a few of its hosts, they help keep it alive. Nationalism and protectionism are accelerants, they speed it up. 2/13

Keep your distance when you see a combo of biological and national essentialism (IE that COVID-19 is a “Chinese Virus”). This is eugenics. When blame is what links the biological and the racial, be afraid. Eugenics argues that some people deserve to live with greater risk. 3/13

In the coming weeks/months eugenics will become very contagious. Eugenics doesn’t need to be implemented as a government program to kill people. It is most deadly as an idea, one that people can privately agree with, a way that people gradually come to see the world. 4/13

One just needs to float a eugenic idea and it can become larger and larger, until it has the effect of a law.

(One need only release a “draft” of a triage protocol, for example, for the idea of ranking bodies to take hold.)

https://aoda.ca/major-disability-organizations-unite-to-voice-serious-fears-about-supposedly-draft-ontario-protocol-for-rationing-critical-medical-care/

5/13

Eugenics makes arguments about populations, but works most lethally on individuals: stripping people of their supports, removing everyday checks/balances. Eugenics flourishes amid disempowerment. Structural inequities become a eugenic effect but begin as a eugenic cause. 6/13

Eugenic ideas in the coming weeks will be most dangerous in medical and penal settings, because eugenics was already circulating in these hallways, in their curricula, in the ways we have been taught to look at disease and disability.
Medical and penal settings will expand. 7/13

Eugenic ideas also act as a sort of protective equipment: if we can insinuate the inferiority of some other group, we feel we might be protecting ourselves and our loved ones. This is a deadly trick. 8/13

At any time, eugenics is looking for ways to kill people.

Eugenics also wants crises: it is opportunistic. It will take every inch it is given and will fight against giving back the rights and values it has stripped away. 9/13

This has all always been the case: the fact that more people might pay attention now, because more people feel threatened, should be sobering. 10/13

Finally, despite the ways it has been characterized so far, eugenics is not a virus. It doesn’t operate autonomously. It is a human invention, implemented by human actors who know what they are doing. 11/13

But this means it can also be identified and halted by other humans. The last thing we can do is hide from it or ignore it. 12/13

I am hoping that some of the experts on the history of eugenics can add any other details or links they can think of. The goal is to better define eugenics so that we can see it and stop it now @Karmachavez2 @jaivirdi @AimiHamraie @pamela_block @RGarlandThomson 13/13