Ghosts of eugenics’ past: ‘Childhood’ as a target for whitening race in the United States and Canada

ABSTRACT

While in modernity childhood was increasingly invested with emotional and intellectual energy, it also became a site of scrutiny and intervention, so that philosophers, scientists, and humanitarians pursued the improvement of humanity and the human condition through management of ‘the child’. In the first half of the twentieth century, such attention settled on children deemed to present both problems and opportunities for the improvement of the race, as eugenics came to dominate discussions of human progress. This article examines the significance of childhood as a resource for human futures and technologies of ‘eugenics’ insofar as they target children: specifically, the development of intelligence testing, institutions of separation, and involuntary sterilization in the United States and Canada. In these discourses and technologies of eugenics, childhood appears as a reserve of human potential which, appropriately regulated, may be harnessed to ‘build a better future’. The article also considers the perspective of survivors of these practices who experienced their childhood and future possibilities as having been expropriated from them by the state. By considering these governmental and personal registers side by side, the article sheds light on the perceived social utility of childhood, as well as the particular character of loss experienced by those whose childhoods were subject to state intervention.

KEYWORDS:

• Whiteness
• critical childhood studies
• racialization
• eugenics
• survivor memoir
• biopolitics.

Acknowledgments

This paper was written on the lands of Gadigal, Bedegal, and Darug Peoples, and interviews in Canada took place on Cree Nation land. I pay respect to elders who belong to these lands, and the ancestors who sustain them. Thank you to the anonymous reviewers whose incisive advice helped to improve this paper, and to my colleagues in the Gender Studies Reading Group at Macquarie University, who provided feedback on the penultimate version of this article – particularly Nicole Matthews, Kate Manlik, and Susan Barnes. I would also like to thank Judy Lytton, Rob Wilson, and Moyra Lang, for their specific assistance, and the Living Archives on Eugenics in Western Canada team more generally for their work on that project, which supported the development of this paper. This research was funded by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Early Career Researcher funding scheme (project DE120100300). The views expressed herein are those of the author and are not necessarily those of the Australian Government or Australian Research Council.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See the collected interviews with survivors on The Living Archives YouTube page at https://www.youtube.com/@eugenicsarchive (last accessed 10 July 2023).

2. Ethics approval was obtained for these interviews by application to the University of NSW Human Research Ethics Committee (#HC13235). Notably, however, Judy and Leilani were members of the board governing the research project with which I was involved at that time, the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Community-University Research Alliances [CURA]) funded project, Living Archives on Eugenics in Western Canada. Both Leilani and Judy were enthusiastic to publicize their stories, and each had also engaged very publicly in discussions of their traumatic experiences at the hands of the province of Alberta. For a more extensive account of Leilani’s and Judy’s involvement in the Living Archives Project, see Wilson (2018).

3. I place these terms in quotation marks to signal their historical usage, and to acknowledge these terms’ offensiveness.

4. I am indebted to Matt Wray’s book, Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness (Wray 2006) for this insight about the racialization of working-class people through the term ‘white trash’ (‘not quite white’ or not-white-enough).

5. Molly Ladd-Taylor (2017), has, however examined North American eugenic programs from the perspective of government policy concerning children and child-centred policy, after the idea of the ‘economically “worthless” but emotionally “priceless” child’ had gained currency.

6. Sociologist Edward A. Ross first coined the phrase in 1901, and Roosevelt subsequently used it in a speech called On American Motherhood (March 13, 1904). The text of the speech can be found at http://www.nationalcenter.org/TRooseveltMotherhood.html (accessed 28 May 2017). See also Kline (2001, 11). Ross had first used ‘race suicide’ in an address to the American Academy of Political and Social Science (Kuhl 2002, 115, n. 9).

7. Michel Foucault identifies the consolidation of the nation state as coextensive with ‘State racism’ and the emergence of techniques of biopower in the late nineteenth century (Foucault 2003, 81–82).

8. It’s important to note that Indigenous peoples and people of African descent were also targets of medicalized eugenics, as well as more overt practices of annihilation; and that many of the poor, rural ‘morons’ subjected to sterilization descended from ‘miscegenous’ unions.

9. Notably, in Western Canada, many immigrants who could withstand the isolated and prohibitively cold living conditions of the western prairies originated from Eastern Europe, which was already racialized as lesser than their Western European neighbours.

10. I concur with Alexander Weheliye, however, that Agamben’s theorization of this capacity is deceptive: far from transcending race, and other forms of ‘caesura’, the child that is available to eugenic thinking and technologies as ‘bare life’, rather, is an engine of racialization. As Weheliye argues with regard to Agamben’s claim that the figure of ‘the Muselmann’ is deprived a form of life (political differences that characterize human life as it is lived):

Far from exceeding race … the Muselmann represents an intense and excessive instantiation thereof, penetrating every crevice of political racialization; how else to explain the very name Muselmann, a racial slur for Muslims? (Weheliye 2014, Kindle 55/209)

11. An adaptation of the Binet-Simon scale, the Stanford-Binet scale, is still in use today.

12. The moral register of Goddard’s (putatively scientific and objective) discussion of the Kallikaks is striking and brings to the fore the contemporaneous framing of anxieties about social decline in terms of race and class. The book is a moral tale: Kallikak senior’s downfall is due to a moral failing, which is also tethered to his having liaised with a lower-class woman.

13. Goddard did not invent sterilization as a means of dealing with the ‘problem’ of feeblemindedness: Indiana was the first state to legislate sterilization of the ‘unfit’ in 1907.

14. See also Skoreyko’s interview with Norm McLeod (n.d.).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Australian Research Council [grant.DE120100300].