Thread by @aubreyclayton

With this news out of Canada that doctors have been sterilizing indigenous women without their consent, it's a good time to recap some of the history of eugenics/racism and its relationship to statistics. Mute/unfollow if uninterested; this is long.

theguardian.com/world/2018/nov…

Francis Galton, the founder of modern statistics, was a huge racist who also invented the word “eugenics.” One of his first statistical works, Hereditary Genius, was about the degree to which genius runs in families. He also tried to use statistics to rank the various races.

He believed almost every characteristic of people was hereditary, and that society could be improved by encouraging selective breeding among the “best” people, meaning, for Galton, Anglo-Saxons.

Galton invented the ideas of standard deviation, the correlation coefficient, and linear regression, all in the service of understanding what traits of people went together, and under what conditions a population would drift toward mediocrity.

Galton’s intellectual heir, Karl Pearson, was somehow even more racist. He believed the best way for societies to improve was through race wars, and that genocide was a good thing if it meant a “superior” race replacing an “inferior” one.

(Just trust me that there are quotes to back all this up, but they’re too long to paste into a tweet.)

Pearson also developed a lot of the tools of modern statistics: the chi-squared test, the p-value, principal component analysis, and the method of moments, among others. His primary goal was to use these to discern biological differences between populations/races.

Pearson & Galton founded the journal Biometrika, which, as the name suggest, focused mainly on measuring people and applying statistical methods to that data. Many of these studies were things like the difference in intelligence or disease rates between races.

Pearson was also incredibly antisemitic, on what he considered to be racial grounds. He founded a journal, Annals of Eugenics, just so he could publish a “study” he did on Jewish children, claiming they were genetically inferior to their non-Jewish counterparts.

Eugenics was spread to America by people like Charles Davenport, a Harvard professor who learned statistics directly from Galton & Pearson and was briefly a co-editor of Biometrika. Davenport founded the Eugenics Record Office in New York.

The ERO collected massive amounts of data from hundreds of thousands of people on traits like personality, talent, ability, incidence of disease, alcoholism, etc., often through shoddy and prejudiced assessments.

They used the tools of statistics to analyze this data and advocate for racist/eugenic policies like restricting immigration from the “wrong” countries, anti-miscegenation laws, and forced sterilization of the “feeble-minded” and people of low moral character.

The ERO was one of a number of professional organizations pushing this agenda; they were amply funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Institution, and the Harriman railroad fortune. Another such prestigious org was called… the Galton Society of America.

A lot of Galton Society members, like Davenport (a founder and its first president) were also members of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Powerful men with influence in science.

Their research work gave “scientific” weight to the ideas of eugenics, which turned into legislation and practice, like forced sterilization of prisoners, residents of mental institutions, and others deemed “defective.”

The 1917 California law basically said anyone “abnormal” could be forcibly sterilized at the discretion of a State Commission, often without the person’s knowledge. Between 1909 and 1963 about 20,000 people were forcibly sterilized in California alone.

The Nazis took great inspiration from these American programs. In Mein Kampf, Hiter wrote how jealous he was that the U.S. was doing more than Germany to limit undesirable immigration. And he was quoted as saying he had studied the forced-sterilization laws of the U.S. in detail.

The Nazis tried to justify their atrocities scientifically, and their research was supported by many of the same funders of the American eugenics program: e.g., the Rockefeller Foundation gave $250K (~$3.5M today) to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Psychology.

The director of that institute was Ernst Rüdin, one of the chief architects of the scientific basis used to support the Holocaust. Rüdin’s primary thesis, echoing Galton, was that all mental illnesses are hereditary, and that Nordic people are genetically superior.

The American eugenicists maintained connections with their German counterparts and envied what the Nazis were able to do. Leon Whitney, executive secretary of the American Eugenics Society, said, "While we were pussy-footing around... the Germans were calling a spade a spade."

Charles Davenport, in particular, held editorial positions at two influential German journals after Hitler’s rise to power and was president of the International Federation of Eugenics Organizations, succeeded by Rüdin. They used the IFEO to share research and “best” practices.

At Nuremberg, the Nazis in their defense quoted Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes from the Supreme Court decision legalizing forced-sterilization laws (Buck v. Bell), which, BTW has never been expressly overturned.

After the Nazis had shown the world the horrors of eugenics-at-large-scale, the IFEO at least had the good sense to disband. But eugenics programs in the U.S. and Canada continued under various official and unofficial guises.

E.g., A common practice in the Deep South in the ‘60s and ‘70s was for doctors to perform hysterectomies or tubal ligations on women, mostly African American women in rural communities, without their knowledge, if they went under anesthesia for another procedure.

This was so common that it was called a “Mississippi appendectomy,” a term popularized by the Civil Rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer, sterilized without her consent during surgery to remove a tumor. States also withheld welfare from women unless they underwent sterilization.

Various court cases and changes in public sentiment ultimately led to states and provinces repealing their sterilization laws, some surprisingly recently. West Virginia didn’t repeal its eugenic sterilization law until 2013.

But even now the practice of doctors coercing women into sterilization for what they think are eugenic reasons and/or just performing the procedures without consent isn’t a criminal offense. As Senator Yvonne Boyer says in that article, it’s probably more widespread than we know.

So the next time you’re feeling sanctimonious about beating the Nazis, remember: they modeled their policies on ours and learned their racist “science” from us, funded by the same people funding similar projects here, many of which continued even after the war.

And that agenda was first promoted by the same geniuses we celebrate for inventing modern statistical methods, which they did primarily in an attempt to justify their racism scientifically.

(Some of this I learned only recently. Sorry for any mistakes.
For more about the history of eugenics, check out eugenicsarchive.ca
For the history of eugenic forced sterilization, particularly of women of color, mississippiappendectomy.wordpress.com has a lot of great resources.)

Anyway, happy Thanksgiving! /end