Eugenics and Anti-Black Racism
Eugenics and Anti-Black Racism
Eugenics was a political and social movement that claimed human populations could be improved by controlling reproduction. Although its advocates presented it as an objective science, eugenics relied heavily on existing prejudices involving race, disability, poverty, gender, immigration status, and social class. In the United States, it gave purported scientific legitimacy to white supremacy and helped portray Black people as biologically inferior, socially undesirable, and unfit to reproduce.
Eugenic ideas influenced universities, medical institutions, government agencies, public-health programs, immigration laws, segregation policies, and compulsory sterilization systems. These ideas did not develop separately from American slavery and racial oppression. They adapted older beliefs about Black inferiority to the language of genetics, heredity, intelligence, medicine, and population management.
The history of eugenics also includes resistance. Black physicians, scholars, activists, patients, and community organizations challenged biological racism, exposed discriminatory institutions, promoted public health, and defended reproductive autonomy. Understanding this history is important because racial essentialism, reproductive coercion, medical inequality, and the misuse of genetics have not entirely disappeared.
Scientific Racism and White Supremacy
Scientific racism attempted to classify racial groups according to supposedly inherited differences in intelligence, morality, health, behavior, and social worth. Researchers measured bodies, skulls, brains, ancestry, and other physical characteristics in efforts to construct a biological hierarchy with white Europeans at its summit.
These classifications were not neutral scientific discoveries. They reflected racial assumptions already embedded in societies shaped by colonialism and slavery. Researchers frequently treated social inequalities caused by discrimination, poverty, segregation, and unequal access to education as evidence of inherited racial differences.
Eugenics transformed these assumptions into programs of reproductive control. Its supporters divided people into categories such as “fit” and “unfit” and argued that society should encourage reproduction among favored populations while restricting it among those considered undesirable. African Americans were frequently associated with supposed hereditary criminality, dependency, intellectual deficiency, disease, or sexual immorality.
Influential scientists, physicians, universities, foundations, and professional organizations helped give these ideas institutional authority. Eugenic teachings entered classrooms and medical curricula, while prominent advocates promoted segregation, immigration restriction, anti-miscegenation laws, institutionalization, and compulsory sterilization.
The participation of respected institutions allowed racial pseudoscience to appear credible. Modern scientific and medical organizations have increasingly investigated this history, acknowledged their involvement, apologized for past conduct, and called for more responsible approaches to genetics and racial classification.
Slavery, Segregation, and Racial Classification
American eugenics grew from a longer history of efforts to define Black people as biologically different and inferior. During slavery, physicians and naturalists produced theories that portrayed enslavement as compatible with nature. After emancipation, related arguments were used to defend segregation, disfranchisement, racial violence, and unequal access to public institutions.
Eugenicists were particularly interested in racial ancestry and “race crossing.” Researchers examined mixed-race people in attempts to determine whether Black ancestry could be detected through physical measurements. This work treated racial categories created by law and society as if they were fixed biological divisions.
Universities played an important role in producing and teaching these ideas. Some became centers for eugenic research, racial classification, sterilization advocacy, and the development of policies such as Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act. Medical schools and hospitals also reproduced racial inequalities through segregated facilities, discriminatory treatment, and the exploitation of Black patients.
Collections of human remains provide another example of this history. Scientists acquired, measured, and retained the bodies and brains of Black and Indigenous people, often without meaningful consent. These collections were sometimes used to support theories of white superiority and racial difference.
Eugenics also overlapped with parts of the early conservation movement. Certain conservationists applied ideas about selective breeding, population control, hereditary fitness, and racial hierarchy to human society. Their work demonstrates how white supremacy could operate through scientific, environmental, and reform-oriented institutions.
Forced Sterilization and Reproductive Injustice
Compulsory sterilization was among the most direct applications of American eugenics. More than thirty states adopted sterilization laws, and tens of thousands of people were sterilized under government authority. Officials commonly targeted disabled people, institutionalized patients, poor women, incarcerated people, immigrants, Indigenous people, and African Americans.
North Carolina developed one of the country’s most aggressive sterilization programs. Its Eugenics Board authorized more than 7,600 procedures, frequently relying on assessments shaped by poverty, racism, disability discrimination, and judgments about sexuality or family life. Research indicates that Black residents, particularly Black women and girls, were disproportionately targeted during important periods of the program.
Sterilization could be authorized without genuine informed consent. Some victims were children, while others were threatened with the loss of public assistance or misled about the nature of the medical procedure. Black women were sometimes subjected to unnecessary hysterectomies or sterilizations that became known colloquially as “Mississippi appendectomies.”
These abuses were not simply isolated failures by individual physicians. They reflected broader systems that gave government officials, social workers, judges, and medical professionals authority over the reproduction of marginalized people. Economic arguments were also used to suggest that sterilization would reduce the public cost of supporting poor families.
The legacy of reproductive coercion continued after formal eugenics programs declined. Allegations of forced or inadequately authorized sterilization have affected incarcerated women, immigration detainees, disabled people, and other vulnerable populations. Contemporary reproductive justice therefore addresses both the right to avoid pregnancy and the right to have children and raise them in safe, supportive communities.
Tuskegee, Medical Racism, and Mistrust
The Tuskegee syphilis study is often discussed as a central example of American medical racism. Beginning in 1932, the United States Public Health Service observed Black men with syphilis without obtaining meaningful informed consent and continued the study after penicillin became the accepted treatment.
The experiment was shaped by older racial medical theories. Some physicians believed that diseases developed differently in Black bodies or that Black people possessed particular forms of biological resistance. These assumptions were connected to eugenics, colonial medicine, racial pathology, and the broader belief that racial groups represented fundamentally different biological types.
Tuskegee was not the only source of Black mistrust in medicine. Slavery-era experimentation, segregated hospitals, the exploitation of Henrietta Lacks, compulsory sterilization, discriminatory psychiatric practices, and continuing inequalities in medical treatment contributed to a much larger historical pattern.
Present-day mistrust cannot therefore be reduced to misunderstanding or lack of education. It is partly a rational response to documented institutional abuse and continuing experiences of discrimination. Addressing this mistrust requires accountability, transparency, informed consent, equitable treatment, and meaningful participation by affected communities.
Black Thought, Resistance, and Racial Uplift
Black engagement with eugenics was complex. African American intellectuals, physicians, writers, and reformers worked in a period when the language of heredity and racial improvement was widespread. Some adopted aspects of that language while rejecting white supremacy and using it to demand better health care, education, housing, sanitation, and social conditions.
For some Black reformers, “racial uplift” emphasized community health, opportunity, and resistance to racist claims of degeneration. Their arguments could resemble eugenic language, but their objectives often differed sharply from white eugenic programs based on segregation, coercion, and reproductive exclusion.
Other Black thinkers directly challenged the biological concept of race and emphasized the effects of racism, economic exploitation, inadequate health care, and environmental conditions. Black physicians disputed claims of inherent racial pathology and demonstrated that unequal health outcomes could not be separated from unequal living conditions.
Black women also resisted reproductive surveillance and eugenic fieldwork. Although institutional archives often preserve the perspectives of researchers and government officials, closer examination reveals refusal, negotiation, criticism, and efforts by women to retain control over their bodies and families.
This history cautions against treating Black communities as passive victims. African Americans contested racial science, built independent medical institutions, developed alternative interpretations of heredity and health, and connected reproductive autonomy with larger struggles for civil rights and liberation.
Institutional Responsibility and Continuing Legacies
Eugenics lost public legitimacy after the atrocities of Nazi Germany became widely known, but many of its assumptions and institutions survived. Sterilization laws remained in effect in some jurisdictions, racial categories continued to shape medical research, and biological explanations were repeatedly used to interpret social inequality.
Modern genetic research confirms that commonly recognized racial groups do not represent discrete biological divisions. Human genetic variation does not support a natural hierarchy of races. Nevertheless, race science periodically reappears through claims connecting ancestry, intelligence, criminality, behavior, or social achievement.
Institutions that participated in eugenics have begun reviewing their histories. Universities have reconsidered buildings, awards, and programs named for eugenicists. Scientific organizations have investigated former leaders, issued apologies, changed professional standards, and incorporated the history of scientific racism into education.
Acknowledgment alone is insufficient. Institutional responsibility also requires attention to present-day disparities in research participation, maternal mortality, reproductive care, genetic databases, disability policy, incarceration, and access to health services.
Teaching the history of eugenics can help students recognize how prejudice becomes embedded in scientific institutions. It also demonstrates why evidence, ethics, consent, community participation, and accountability must remain central to medical and genetic research.
Conclusion
Eugenics provided a scientific vocabulary for ideas rooted in slavery, segregation, colonialism, and white supremacy. By portraying social inequality as the result of heredity, it concealed the effects of racism and justified policies intended to regulate Black bodies, families, movement, health, and reproduction.
Its consequences included racial classification, segregated medicine, exploitative research, compulsory sterilization, and the exclusion of marginalized people from full citizenship. These policies were supported not only by openly racist organizations but also by respected scientists, physicians, universities, government agencies, and reform movements.
The history also contains sustained resistance. Black scholars, physicians, patients, women, and activists challenged racial pseudoscience, defended bodily autonomy, promoted community health, and demanded institutional accountability. Their work remains relevant to current debates over genetics, health disparities, reproductive justice, medical ethics, and structural racism.
Confronting the legacy of eugenics requires more than rejecting its most extreme language. It requires examining how biological explanations can obscure unequal social conditions and how scientific authority can reinforce existing systems of power. An ethical approach to genetics and medicine must recognize shared humanity, protect informed consent, confront structural racism, and respect every person’s reproductive freedom and dignity.
Eugenics, Scientific Racism, and White Supremacy
Eugenics Deserves a Place in Our Genetics Curriculum
| Multiple authors | Genetics Education | 2025
Argues that genetics education must address eugenics, racial hierarchy, forced sterilization, and the misuse of heredity to prevent their recurrence.
The Legacy of Eugenics
| Kara Manke | UC Berkeley School of Public Health | June 20, 2024
Explains how eugenics converted racial and economic inequality into claims about heredity while ignoring racism and other social determinants.
Addressing Scientific Racism and Eugenics in the Classroom
| Ashley Hagen | American Society for Microbiology | May 10, 2023
Discusses how educators can confront the role scientists and scientific institutions played in producing and legitimizing racist pseudoscience.
Genetics Society Issues Apology for Ties to Eugenics and Racism
| Sarah Kuta | Smithsonian Magazine | January 30, 2023
Reports on the American Society of Human Genetics’ investigation of its leaders’ connections to eugenics, forced sterilization, and racial discrimination.
Facing Our History—Building an Equitable Future
| American Society of Human Genetics | ASHG | January 24, 2023
Documents geneticists’ historical participation in eugenics and scientific racism and calls for institutional accountability and equitable genetics research.
The Return of Race Science and Why It Matters
| Linda M. Chatters and colleagues | Family Relations | 2022
Reviews the resurgence of genetic racial essentialism, hereditarianism, intelligence claims, and ideas associated with modern eugenics.
Eugenics and Scientific Racism
| National Human Genome Research Institute | Genome.gov | May 18, 2022
Explains how eugenics and scientific racism manufactured biological hierarchies that portrayed white Europeans as superior and justified discrimination against Black people.
U.S. Universities Must Stop Honoring Racist Scientists
| Adam Markham | Union of Concerned Scientists | July 14, 2020
Discusses the institutional commemoration of scientists who promoted white supremacy, racial hierarchy, and eugenic population control.
The Disturbing Resilience of Scientific Racism
| Ramin Skibba | Smithsonian Magazine | May 20, 2019
Examines the persistence of discredited theories connecting race, intelligence, genetics, and behavior despite overwhelming evidence against biological racial hierarchies.
A Brief History of Eugenics in America
| Andrew M. Spiegel | American Journal of Public Health | 2019
Reviews the development of American eugenics, its racial and class prejudices, compulsory sterilization programs, and influence on Nazi racial policy.
The False, Racist Theory of Eugenics Once Ruled Science
| Daniel Okrent | PBS NewsHour | February 16, 2018
Explains how influential Americans used eugenics to give purported scientific legitimacy to racism, segregation, immigration restriction, and forced sterilization.
Racial Eugenics
| Equal Justice Initiative | EJI | October 1, 2013
Describes how American sterilization laws were used as instruments of racial population control against thousands of poor Southern Black women.
U.S. Scientists’ Role in the Eugenics Movement
| Garfield E. Smith and colleagues | CBE—Life Sciences Education | 2009
Examines the participation of American scientists in eugenic research, public advocacy, and compulsory sterilization between 1907 and 1939.
The Origins of Scientific Racism
| John P. Jackson Jr. and Nadine M. Weidman | The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education | 2005
Traces intellectual efforts to portray Black people as biologically inferior and explains how those arguments contributed to later eugenic ideology.
Historical Issues: Grappling with Our Past
| Department of Genetics | University of Wisconsin–Madison | n.d.
Acknowledges how genetics was historically used to rationalize racism, sexism, eugenics, exclusion, and discriminatory public policies.
Eugenics, Slavery, and Segregation
The “Racial Brain” Collector and the Dark History of Eugenics
| Brendan Wolfe | Encyclopedia Virginia | September 5, 2023
Investigates the collection and measurement of human brains in projects intended to substantiate white supremacy and racial hierarchy.
Revealing the Smithsonian’s “Racial Brain Collection”
| Nicole Dungca and Claire Healy | The Washington Post | August 14, 2023
Reveals how Black and Indigenous human remains were collected without meaningful consent by scientists associated with racial anthropology and eugenics.
Charles Matthias Goethe
| National Park Service | NPS | May 8, 2023
Describes a California eugenicist who advocated the reproductive elimination of African Americans and other populations he classified as genetically inferior.
Towards a New Genealogy of Eugenics
| Rana A. Hogarth | Yale School of Medicine | March 27, 2023
Connects eugenic studies of racial mixing to slavery and to enduring efforts to measure Black ancestry through physical examination and biological determinism.
Eugenics at the University of Virginia
| P. Preston Reynolds | Encyclopedia Virginia | 2023
Details the university’s role as a Southern center of eugenic teaching, racial classification, segregation, sterilization, and biologically based racism.
Expertise, Eugenics, and the Legacies of Slavery
| Rana A. Hogarth | Princeton University | December 6, 2022
Examines how eugenicists studied mixed-race people’s bodies to establish supposedly scientific methods for identifying Black ancestry.
Madison Grant
| National Park Service | NPS | April 6, 2022
Profiles a leading eugenicist who promoted Nordic supremacy, condemned racial mixing, supported sterilization, and helped shape racist immigration policy.
Segregation, Marginalization, and Resistance at Harvard
| Harvard University | Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery | 2022
Documents Harvard’s involvement in race science alongside Black scholars who challenged claims of fixed racial difference and Black inferiority.
African American Outdoor Recreation Theme Study
| National Park Service | U.S. Department of the Interior | 2022
Explores connections among conservation, segregation, white supremacy, and eugenics, including comparisons between human population control and wildlife management.
Sierra Club Grapples with Founder John Muir’s Racism
| Alex Fox | Smithsonian Magazine | July 24, 2020
Examines racist ideas within early conservation and the participation of prominent conservationists in organizations promoting eugenics and white supremacy.
UVA, Eugenics, and the Racial Integrity Act
| P. Preston Reynolds | UVA Today | January 9, 2020
Connects university eugenics programs to Virginia’s racial laws, segregated medical care, public-health inequality, and the exploitation of Black patients.
Better Babies Contests and the Eugenics Movement
| Susan Currell | Smithsonian Magazine | January 17, 2019
Shows how popular infant-health competitions normalized ideas about superior hereditary stock, selective reproduction, and the ranking of families.
The “Negro Children” at Tuskegee
| Amy L. Fairchild | Undark | April 4, 2016
Investigates an anthropometric project involving Black children at Tuskegee and the routine institutional practices that made racial eugenic research possible.
Black Thought, Resistance, and Racial Uplift
Race and Refusal in the Eugenic Archive
| Nicole C. Bourbonnais | Mütter Museum | 2025
Recovers Black women’s refusals, criticisms, and negotiations within archival records produced by eugenic fieldworkers studying race and reproduction.
Black Eugenics and the Struggle for Equality
| Ayah Nuriddin | Columbia University | 2023
Discusses the complicated ways Black physicians, scientists, and reformers engaged with eugenics while challenging racism and promoting community welfare.
Electrical Nutrition and Glandular Control
| Daylanne K. English | Twentieth-Century Literature | June 1, 2022
Analyzes eugenics, racial improvement, heredity, and technological modernity in African American intellectual and literary history.
The Black Politics of Eugenics
| Ayah Nuriddin | Nursing Clio | June 1, 2017
Explores how Black intellectuals adopted, revised, resisted, or redirected eugenic language while seeking racial health, equality, and liberation.
African American Doctors, Eugenics, and Public Health
| Ayah Nuriddin | University of Maryland | 2016
Studies how African American physicians employed and contested eugenic concepts within campaigns for public health, racial improvement, and civil rights.
The Cult of Quality: White Eugenics and Black Responses
| Mary Alexandra Ginther | University of Saskatchewan Undergraduate Research Journal | 2015
Compares white eugenic ideology with the varied responses of Black scholars, institutions, and reformers during the early twentieth century.
Liberation Eugenics: African Americans and Black Freedom Struggles
| Ayah Nuriddin | Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine | n.d.
Examines African American efforts to use heredity, public health, reproductive control, and social reform against scientific racism and racial oppression.
Forced Sterilization and Reproductive Control
It Never Stopped: Forced and Coerced Sterilization
| Jessica Coriano and colleagues | Health Equity | 2025
Connects twentieth-century eugenic sterilization to more recent reproductive violations affecting incarcerated, detained, disabled, and racialized populations.
American Eugenics and Forced Sterilization of Women of Color
| KFF | Racial Equity and Health Policy | June 11, 2024
Places forced sterilization within a larger history of white supremacy, reproductive coercion, unequal health care, and racialized public policy.
Racial Disparities in Sterilization at Cesarean Delivery
| Multiple authors | American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology | 2023
Examines racial disparities in permanent contraception performed during cesarean delivery and the structural conditions influencing reproductive choices.
North Carolina Eugenics Program Tried to “Breed Out” Black People
| Hayley Fowler | The News & Observer | July 22, 2020
Discusses research characterizing North Carolina’s disproportionate sterilization of Black residents as a deliberate attempt to prevent future Black births.
New Paper Examines Eugenics’ Effect on North Carolina’s Black Population
| Lucas Hubbard | Duke Today | July 21, 2020
Reports evidence that North Carolina sterilization rates followed the size of counties’ Black populations rather than comparable white populations.
The Forced Sterilization of Black Women as Reproductive Injustice
| Whitney S. Clouse | Ramifications | 2020
Traces the forced sterilization of Black women from slavery and eugenics through later population-control policies and reproductive injustice.
Structural Racism in American Psychiatry: Sterilizations
| Jeffrey Geller | Psychiatric News | 2020
Documents racist eugenics in psychiatric institutions and state hospitals where sterilization was imposed on people labeled mentally or socially unfit.
Forced Sterilization and Eugenics Programs in the United States
| Lisa Ko | PBS Independent Lens | January 29, 2016
Surveys American sterilization programs and their disproportionate effects on poor women, Black women, Indigenous women, immigrants, and disabled people.
Surgical Sterilization, Regret, and Race
| Borrero and colleagues | Obstetrics and Gynecology | 2015
Finds racial differences in sterilization and regret while situating contemporary reproductive decisions within a history of coercion and unequal access.
The North Carolina Forced Sterilization Program and Bioethics
| Leana Scott | Wake Forest University | 2015
Uses survivors’ experiences to examine consent, racial discrimination, disability, poverty, state power, and ethical responsibility in eugenic sterilization.
Eugenics in North Carolina
| Lutz Kaelber | University of Vermont | October 30, 2014
Summarizes North Carolina’s sterilization laws, institutions, demographic patterns, victims, public justifications, and later reparations program.
The Economics of Race and Eugenic Sterilization in North Carolina
| Gregory N. Price and William A. Darity Jr. | Economics and Human Biology | 2010
Demonstrates how economic arguments and racial classifications shaped North Carolina’s state-authorized eugenic sterilization program.
Eugenic Sterilization: Medico-Legal and Sociological Aspects
| Multiple authors | Journal of the National Medical Association | 1974
Responds to the court-ordered sterilization of a Black teenager and analyzes the legal and medical dangers of eugenic sterilization statutes.
The Eugenics Movement in North Carolina
| DigitalNC | North Carolina Digital Heritage Center | n.d.
Provides primary documents showing how officials authorized more than 7,600 sterilizations and classified poor and marginalized residents as undesirable.
Birth Control or Race Control? Sanger and the Negro Project
| Esther Katz | Margaret Sanger Papers Project, New York University | n.d.
Examines the Negro Project, its eugenic context, its reliance on white-controlled institutions, and debates over racism and Black reproductive autonomy.
Tuskegee, Medicine, and Eugenic Racial Theory
Historical Roots of Medical Mistrust
| National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine | National Academies Press | 2025
Places Tuskegee within the longer history of the Middle Passage, slavery, eugenics, segregated medicine, experimentation, and anti-Black institutional abuse.
Black Americans and Mistrust of Health Care
| Pew Research Center | Pew Research Center | June 15, 2024
Connects present-day mistrust to forced sterilization, Tuskegee, Henrietta Lacks, unequal treatment, and continuing experiences of racial discrimination.
The History of Physicians and the American Eugenics Movement
| American Medical Association | AMA Ed Hub | March 19, 2024
Reviews physicians’ participation in eugenics, compulsory sterilization, racial science, and the exchange of ideas between American and Nazi programs.
Historical Primer on Obstetrics and Gynecology Health Inequities
| Adaobi Nnoli and colleagues | Obstetrics and Gynecology | 2023
Traces reproductive inequities from slavery and experimentation through eugenic sterilization and persistent medical stereotypes about Black patients.
Historical Origins of the Tuskegee Experiment
| Jin-Kyung Park | History of Science | 2017
Connects the Tuskegee study to eugenics, racial pathology, colonial public health, and beliefs that syphilis behaved differently in Black bodies.
The Tuskegee Syphilis Study and the Scientific Concept of Racial Nervous Resistance
| Christopher Crenner | Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences | 2012
Examines the racial medical theory that Black people possessed biological resistance to neurological syphilis and shows how it shaped the Tuskegee study.
Eugenics, Medical Education, and the Public Health Service
Shows how Public Health Service officials associated with eugenics helped create the racial assumptions underlying the Tuskegee syphilis study.
