**STRAP THE FUCK IN YALL ABOUT TO GET A HISTORY LESSON**

TW Genocide Ableism

Lets be honest, no one is surprised by police violence anymore. In a country with systemic and cultural racism problems lasting all the way to the country's inception, it is impossible to deny that..

what we are seeing today is a byproduct of white supremacy built into every aspect of our community. But surprisingly, what I thought was common knowledge about NCs vile history regarding genocide, was new knowledge to even some of the older NC natives i’ve spoken to...

It's a deeply disturbing period in NCs history and one that was so evil it inspired H*tler… So without further ado, here goes…

You may be familiar with the n*zi’s sterilization program during their reign of terror both before and during WW2...

During this time the n*zis sterilized or outright killed over 700,000 people for perceived genetic inferiority. But this all didn’t start with H*tler or even in germany for that matter…

The inspiration for Germany's eugenics policy started in America, was exported to Germany and even funded by American scientific institutions.
“The American and German eugenics movements were one in 'the identification of human beings as valuable, worthless, or of inferior...

value in supposedly hereditary terms.' As one authority has noted, this 'was the common denominator of all forms of Nazi racism.' Eugenics was synonymous with 'race hygiene,' and its most fundamental program was to purify the 'race' of 'low grade' and 'degenerate' groups...

Thus, American and European eugenicists created a generic racism and sexism - the genetically inferior. Not surprisingly, the victims always turned out to be the traditional victims of racism - Jews, Blacks, women, and the poor.”
http://www.ferris-pages.org/ISAR/archives/eliminating-inferior.htm?fbclid=IwAR3ZH41IP3dY2Oqo6nb8-b6u4tzfssL6lCSP_pF4bFxMs81M6I0UKdwLy7s

Now seeing that it's finals week and I have homework and tests, I won’t get into a broad explanation of America’s eugenics program. However I want to point your attention to where our state comes in. In order to do that we need to start with when it began...

North Carolina had the longest lasting state authorized eugenics board that lasted from 1933-1973 (while some argue that it started even earlier in 1929) AND was one of the best documented state genocide programs in all of the United States...

While North Carolina didn’t end up sterilizing the greatest number of people, out of the 32 states that had sterilization laws (yes read that number again THIRTY-FUCKING-TWO). The state eugenics board was infamous for its aggressiveness...

During its existence it is estimated it sterilized over 7,600 people, and that number does not include the times it could have occurred at a local level by doctors and hospitals.
While it first began as an ableist genocide...

it quickly moved to a systemic racial genocide with over 5,000 sterilizations being perfomed specifically on Black people.
https://socialequity.duke.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/7.21.20-Duke-today.pdf

Most of these sterilizations were done under coercion methods and targeted a majority of women at 77% of the affected population...

Even worse was some of the reasoning behind it..

“Women, including wives, daughters, sisters and unwed mothers, were overrepresented. They were labeled as either “promiscuous, lazy, or unfit”, or more commonly as “sexually uncontrollable””...

“Many women were brought in under the pretext that they might have been exhibiting behaviors that were sexual in nature and thus increasing the possibility of sexual promiscuity and warranting eugenic sterilization”

“Women that were deemed “subnormal” intellectually were also likely to be forcibly sterilized”.
“Women that exhibited no outward sign of incompetence but simply didn’t do well on IQ tests because these women’s “charm of personality and conversational...

ability posed a greater social threat than more obviously disabled persons since their very attractiveness would lead to more opportunities for illicit sex or marriage and , thus a, the likelihood of starting a “family of future liabilities to the State”...

These horrible atrocities didn’t even end for some of the women that managed to escape NC for example take the case of Emma Suggs, “Women were not safe even if they somehow managed to flee the State of North Carolina either. Such women could be chased all the way to Florida”

(all accounts above and more can be found here:
https://www.uvm.edu/~lkaelber/eugenics/NC/NC.html )

The repercussions of such a vile and disgusting time period in North Carolina's history ended thousands of peoples dreams of starting families, and destroying generations of future Black Americans. Those families and people affected weren’t compensated until 2013...

But at the end of the day Can you put a price on reproductive ability? What's the point of monetary payments, especially when it won't right the wrongs?

This country is rotten to its core. You need look no further than your home to realize the injustices this state has...

inflicted upon its minority populations. Know your history. And realize that the fight to end injustice in America is nowhere near the end. While there may not be a eugenics program for black and disabled people here in North Carolina anymore there are still...

police killings, gentrification, and hundreds of other initiatives that are rooted in prejudice at their best, and outright malicious and evil at their worst. We have every reason to be upset.

We must keep fighting, for all that we’ve lost. And we must keep fighting for all that we could lose.