Eugenics and White Supremacy
Eugenics, Scientific Racism, and White Supremacy
Eugenics was a political and scientific movement that sought to control human reproduction according to judgments about which people were supposedly desirable, capable, healthy, or racially superior. Although its supporters presented it as an objective application of genetics and evolutionary theory, eugenics rested on false and discriminatory assumptions about heredity, race, intelligence, disability, poverty, gender, and social worth.
Eugenic ideas supplied scientific legitimacy to existing systems of white supremacy. They were used to defend racial segregation, immigration restriction, prohibitions against interracial marriage, institutionalization, forced sterilization, colonialism, and the exclusion of people classified as biologically unfit. The movement affected racial minorities, Indigenous peoples, immigrants, disabled people, poor communities, prisoners, institutionalized people, and women whose reproductive decisions were controlled by public authorities.
The Rise of Eugenics and Scientific Racism
The modern eugenics movement emerged from nineteenth-century attempts to apply selective breeding principles to human populations. Francis Galton and other early proponents argued that characteristics such as intelligence, criminality, poverty, and morality were inherited. These complex social conditions were reduced to supposedly biological traits that could be measured, ranked, and controlled.
Scientific racism developed alongside eugenics. Researchers divided humanity into racial categories and claimed that inequalities among populations reflected permanent biological differences. These claims ignored the influence of history, discrimination, education, economic conditions, political power, and the environment.
Universities, scientific societies, medical institutions, charitable organizations, and government agencies helped give these theories respectability. Researchers collected family histories, intelligence-test results, medical records, photographs, and physical measurements to identify people they considered defective or inferior. The apparent precision of this research concealed its cultural prejudices, flawed methods, and predetermined conclusions.
Social Darwinism also contributed to eugenic thinking. Distorted interpretations of evolutionary theory portrayed competition among individuals, races, nations, and social classes as a natural struggle in which domination by powerful groups demonstrated biological superiority. Such arguments were used to justify imperialism, economic inequality, racial hierarchy, and government efforts to regulate reproduction.
Eugenics and Racial Government in the United States
The United States became one of the principal centers of eugenic research and public policy. The Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor collected information intended to demonstrate that poverty, disability, criminality, and other socially disfavored conditions were inherited. Its research helped support compulsory sterilization laws, institutional confinement, marriage restrictions, and immigration controls.
More than thirty states adopted sterilization laws during the twentieth century. These programs authorized institutions to prevent people classified as feebleminded, mentally ill, disabled, dependent, criminal, or otherwise unfit from having children. Consent was often absent, coerced, or obtained without a meaningful explanation of the procedure.
Although sterilization laws were frequently written in apparently race-neutral language, their enforcement reflected racial, economic, gender, and disability hierarchies. Black women, Indigenous women, Latinas, immigrants, poor women, prisoners, and institutionalized people were especially vulnerable to reproductive abuse. In the American South, sterilization became a form of racial population control directed disproportionately against poor Black women.
California operated one of the country’s most extensive eugenic sterilization programs. Working-class people, disabled people, immigrants, and young women of Mexican heritage were among those targeted. These abuses formed part of a longer history of medical racism and reproductive injustice that continued after formal eugenics programs declined.
Eugenic reasoning also influenced parts of the American birth-control movement. Access to contraception could advance women’s autonomy, but some advocates promoted birth control using arguments about reducing reproduction among poor, disabled, immigrant, or racially marginalized populations. This history demonstrates the important distinction between voluntary reproductive freedom and reproductive policies imposed by authorities.
Racial Purity, Immigration, and Segregation
Eugenics became closely connected to campaigns for racial purity. Advocates classified affluent white families of northern European ancestry as desirable while portraying racial minorities, eastern and southern European immigrants, poor people, and disabled people as threats to the nation’s biological future.
Immigration restriction was one important expression of this ideology. Eugenicists argued that immigration from supposedly inferior populations would weaken the country genetically. These claims contributed to literacy tests, Asian exclusion, and the national-origins quota system established by the Immigration Act of 1924.
Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924 combined eugenics with white-supremacist law. The act imposed rigid racial classifications and prohibited interracial marriage. Walter Plecker, Virginia’s registrar of vital statistics, used the law to reclassify Indigenous people as Black, erase Indigenous identities from official records, and enforce the state’s racial boundaries.
Antimiscegenation laws were intended to prevent racial mixing and preserve white political and social dominance. Eugenic language gave these restrictions an appearance of scientific necessity. Racial-identity prosecutions, census classifications, marriage records, and the one-drop rule became instruments through which governments monitored and enforced racial hierarchy.
These policies also depended on gender inequality. White women were encouraged to reproduce for the preservation of the dominant population, while women from marginalized communities were described as excessively fertile or unfit for motherhood. Reproductive control therefore operated differently according to race, class, disability, and social status.
Eugenics, Conservation, and Elite Institutions
Eugenics was not confined to laboratories or extremist political organizations. It attracted support from prominent academics, physicians, philanthropists, conservationists, feminists, inventors, and public officials. Elite institutions helped transform discriminatory ideas into accepted scientific knowledge and government policy.
Harvard scholars and other university researchers promoted hereditarian theories, compulsory sterilization, immigration restriction, and racial hierarchy. The University of Virginia became deeply involved in the development of racial-integrity policies. Genetics departments and professional societies supplied expertise that authorities used to classify and control human populations.
Several leading conservationists combined environmental protection with racial exclusion. Madison Grant promoted wildlife conservation while arguing for Nordic racial superiority, immigration restriction, and eugenic control of reproduction. Charles Matthias Goethe supported conservation while championing sterilization and discrimination against people he considered non-Nordic.
Theodore Roosevelt’s ideas about racial hierarchy influenced his views of imperialism, national development, conservation, and land policy. Other public figures, including Nikola Tesla, endorsed compulsory sterilization as a means of preventing people judged undesirable from reproducing.
Some white feminists supported eugenics while seeking greater social authority for women. Their feminism challenged certain restrictions on white women without necessarily rejecting racism, class hierarchy, ableism, or white supremacy. This illustrates how movements for reform can reproduce oppression when their definition of equality excludes marginalized groups.
Scientific, educational, and genealogical organizations have increasingly acknowledged these histories. Institutional apologies recognize that professional authority was used to validate racial exclusion, antisemitism, xenophobia, classism, ableism, and reproductive coercion. Such acknowledgments are an important step, but they must be accompanied by changes in research, education, and institutional practice.
Nazi Racial Hygiene and American Influence
German eugenics developed before Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. During the Weimar period, researchers and public officials promoted racial hygiene as a scientific response to poverty, disability, disease, and national decline. The Nazi government later incorporated these ideas into a totalitarian program of biological and racial control.
Nazi racial hygiene sought to reorganize Germany as a biological state. Physicians, geneticists, psychiatrists, anthropologists, and government officials identified people whose reproduction or existence was considered a threat to the national community. Policies progressed from forced sterilization and marriage restrictions to institutional killing, mass persecution, territorial conquest, and genocide.
Disabled people were among the earliest victims of Nazi medical killing programs. Propaganda portrayed them as hereditary burdens whose lives consumed resources needed by healthy Aryan families. Similar methods of dehumanization were applied to Jewish people, Roma and Sinti people, Black people, and other groups classified as racially or biologically inferior.
American and German eugenics were not identical, but they shared foundational beliefs in hereditary hierarchy and state regulation of reproduction. German racial hygienists studied American sterilization laws, immigration policies, and racial classifications. American segregation and antimiscegenation laws also demonstrated how a modern government could formalize white supremacy through legislation.
The Holocaust revealed the catastrophic consequences of combining scientific authority, racial nationalism, antisemitism, ableism, and unrestricted state power. After World War II, the term eugenics became widely discredited, but many institutions and researchers failed to confront fully their involvement in the movement.
The Continuing Legacy of Eugenics
Eugenics did not disappear when its name became politically unacceptable. Forced and coerced sterilization continued in various settings, while assumptions about race, disability, intelligence, criminality, and reproductive fitness remained embedded in medicine, public policy, education, and popular culture.
Modern white nationalists have attempted to revive biological theories of racial hierarchy. They selectively reinterpret genetics, ancestry research, intelligence studies, and population differences to present white-supremacist beliefs as legitimate science. Scientific uncertainty is often distorted into evidence for conclusions that the research itself does not support.
Human genetic variation does not validate traditional racial hierarchies. Race is a powerful social and political category with real consequences, but racial labels do not divide humanity into discrete biological types ranked by intelligence, morality, or worth. Genetic ancestry is complex, overlapping, and shaped by migration and intermixture throughout human history.
New genetic and reproductive technologies also raise ethical questions about selection, disability, consent, and inequality. Not every use of genetic screening or reproductive technology is eugenic. The central concerns include who makes the decision, whether participation is voluntary, how disability is understood, whether social pressure limits meaningful choice, and whether access is distributed equitably.
Educators and scientific institutions have a responsibility to teach this history. Presenting eugenics merely as an isolated episode of bad science overlooks the roles of racism, professional authority, public policy, economic power, and institutional prestige. It also makes it more difficult to recognize similar reasoning when it reappears in contemporary language.
Confronting Scientific Racism
Confronting scientific racism requires more than rejecting openly racist claims. Researchers must examine how categories are defined, how samples are selected, which social conditions are treated as biological, and how findings may be interpreted or weaponized. Scientific rigor includes attention to history, ethics, inequality, and the limits of available evidence.
Institutions must acknowledge the people harmed by research and public policies conducted under their authority. This includes preserving historical records, supporting affected communities, correcting misleading commemorations, and reconsidering honors given to prominent eugenicists.
Reproductive justice provides an important framework for understanding the legacy of eugenics. It recognizes the right to have children, the right not to have children, and the right to raise children in safe and sustainable communities. This approach rejects both compulsory reproduction and coercive efforts to prevent marginalized people from reproducing.
Disability-rights perspectives are equally essential. Eugenics treated disability as evidence that a person’s life had less value. A rights-based approach instead examines how discrimination, inaccessible institutions, poverty, and lack of support produce exclusion. It affirms that human dignity does not depend on conformity to an idealized standard of health, intelligence, productivity, or independence.
Conclusion
Eugenics transformed racial, economic, gender, and disability prejudices into programs presented as scientific social improvement. Its supporters used the authority of genetics, medicine, universities, and government to justify segregation, immigration restriction, antimiscegenation laws, institutionalization, forced sterilization, and racial persecution.
The history of eugenics also demonstrates that scientific institutions are shaped by the societies in which they operate. Research can challenge injustice, but it can also reinforce existing power when biased assumptions are treated as objective facts. Professional prestige and technical language do not guarantee ethical or reliable conclusions.
Understanding the relationship among eugenics, scientific racism, and white supremacy is therefore essential to evaluating contemporary claims about heredity and human difference. Protecting human rights requires scientific integrity, informed consent, reproductive freedom, disability justice, historical accountability, and an unwavering recognition of the equal dignity of all people.
Eugenics, Scientific Racism, and White Supremacy
Scientific Racism
| Harvard Library | Harvard University | May 27, 2025
Provides research materials documenting how scientific racism was used to rationalize anti-Black racism, colonialism, racial hierarchy, and white supremacy.
The Legacy of Eugenics
| UC Berkeley School of Public Health | University of California, Berkeley | June 20, 2024
Examines how eugenics gave scientific legitimacy to racial, economic, and disability hierarchies while reinforcing the privileges of affluent white populations.
Confronting the Weaponization of Genetics by Racists
| Aaron Panofsky and colleagues | American Journal of Human Genetics | 2024
Considers how racist movements misuse genetics and ancestry research to repackage racial categories and white-supremacist beliefs as legitimate science.
Addressing Scientific Racism and Eugenics in the Classroom
| Amy J. Reese | American Society for Microbiology | May 10, 2023
Argues that educators must confront the influence of scientific racism and eugenics on scientific institutions, research practices, and present-day inequality.
Genetics Society Issues Apology for Ties to Eugenics and Racism
| Teresa Nowakowski | Smithsonian Magazine | January 30, 2023
Discusses an institutional reckoning with genetics research that supplied pseudoscientific support for racism, antisemitism, xenophobia, classism, and ableism.
Human Geneticists Apologize for Past Involvement in Eugenics
| Jocelyn Kaiser | Science | January 24, 2023
Reports on the American Society of Human Genetics’ acknowledgment of its involvement in eugenics and failure to oppose racist abuses of genetics.
Eugenics, Race, and Purity
| Paul A. Lombardo | Race, Racism and the Law | December 10, 2022
Explores the relationship between eugenic ideology, racial purity campaigns, immigration restriction, antimiscegenation laws, and established systems of white supremacy.
Eugenics and Scientific Racism
| National Human Genome Research Institute | Genome.gov | May 18, 2022
Explains how eugenics used scientifically false ideas about heredity and racial improvement to justify racism, segregation, involuntary sterilization, and social exclusion.
The Return of Race Science and Why It Matters for Family Science
| Linda M. Chatters and Robert Joseph Taylor | Journal of Family Theory & Review | 2022
Analyzes the reappearance of biological racial theories and connects modern race science to eugenics, white supremacy, and genetic determinism.
Eugenics: Its Origin and Development
| National Human Genome Research Institute | Genome.gov | November 30, 2021
Traces eugenics from Francis Galton through American sterilization programs, German racial hygiene, Nazi persecution, and contemporary debates about genetics.
UVA and the History of Race
| Anne E. Bromley | UVA Today | January 9, 2020
Examines how University of Virginia professors promoted eugenic racism and helped build laws and institutions designed to preserve white supremacy.
How White Nationalists Mobilize Genetics
| Aaron Panofsky, Kushan Dasgupta, and Nicole Iturriaga | Social Studies of Science | 2020
Examines how white nationalists reinterpret genetic research, ancestry testing, and scientific uncertainty to advance racial nationalism and pseudoscientific hierarchy.
The Disturbing Resilience of Scientific Racism
| Ramin Skibba | Smithsonian Magazine | May 20, 2019
Investigates the survival of scientific racism after World War II and the networks that continued promoting claims about race, intelligence, and genetic superiority.
A Brief History of Eugenics in America
| Allen M. Spiegel | Indian Journal of Psychiatry | 2019
Surveys the American eugenics movement, compulsory sterilization, racial discrimination, and the influence American policies exerted on Nazi Germany.
The False, Racist Theory of Eugenics Once Ruled Science
| Adam Cohen | PBS NewsHour | February 16, 2018
Describes how powerful Americans used eugenics as an allegedly scientific foundation for prejudice against racial minorities, immigrants, poor people, and disabled people.
Harvard’s Eugenics Era
| Adam S. Cohen | Harvard Magazine | February 19, 2016
Documents Harvard scholars’ support for scientific racism, immigration restrictions, compulsory sterilization, and policies intended to suppress supposedly unfit populations.
Historical Issues: Grappling with Our Past
| Department of Genetics | University of Wisconsin–Madison | n.d.
Acknowledges the role of genetics in providing purportedly scientific rationalizations for racism, sexism, ableism, and eugenic social policies.
The 21st-Century Resurgence of Eugenics
| Marius Turda | The British Academy | n.d.
Discusses the reappearance of eugenic ideology, scientific racism, genetic determinism, and language about supposedly inferior populations in contemporary politics.
American Eugenics and Racial Government
How History Has Shaped Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities
| Nambi Ndugga and Samantha Artiga | KFF | June 17, 2024
Places eugenics and forced sterilization within a longer history of policies producing racial inequities in American medicine and public health.
Black Mothers and the Birth Control Movement
| Deirdre Cooper Owens | African American Intellectual History Society | January 26, 2024
Examines how eugenic and racist ideas entered the American birth-control movement and shaped arguments about Black motherhood, poverty, and reproduction.
Historical Primer on Obstetrics and Gynecology Health Inequities
| Amaka Nnoli and colleagues | Obstetrics and Gynecology | 2023
Reviews medical exploitation, racist stereotypes about Black women, the American eugenics movement, and the history of coerced sterilization.
Reproductive Abuse and the Sterilization of Women of Color
| Bayan Alsheikh | History in the Making | 2023
Investigates California’s eugenics program and the sterilization abuses experienced by Latina, Black, Indigenous, immigrant, and low-income women.
Unfit to Breed: America’s Dark Tale of Eugenics
| Rich McManus | NIH Catalyst | 2021
Reviews American eugenics, simplistic hereditarian beliefs, compulsory sterilization, and campaigns targeting people whom authorities classified as biologically unfit.
The Forced Sterilization of Black Women as Reproductive Injustice
| Whitney S. Clouse | Ramifications | 2020
Connects the compulsory sterilization of Black women to slavery, eugenic population control, medical racism, and continuing reproductive injustice.
California Once Targeted Latinas for Forced Sterilization
| Alexandra Minna Stern | Smithsonian Magazine | March 22, 2018
Shows how racial, gender, class, and disability hierarchies shaped California’s sterilization of working-class women and young people of color.
Eugenics: Definition, Movement and Meaning
| History.com Editors | History | November 15, 2017
Summarizes the discredited movement that sought to manipulate human reproduction according to racialized judgments about desirable and undesirable hereditary traits.
Forced Sterilization and Eugenics Programs in the United States
| Lisa Ko | Independent Lens, PBS | January 29, 2016
Surveys state sterilization programs and the coercive reproductive policies imposed on marginalized women, disabled people, prisoners, and institutionalized populations.
America’s Hidden History: The Eugenics Movement
| Jessica Truswell | Nature Education | September 18, 2014
Introduces the organizations, researchers, laws, and institutions that transformed eugenic theories into discriminatory American public policy.
Racial Eugenics
| Equal Justice Initiative | Equal Justice Initiative | January 10, 2013
Explains how sterilization laws functioned as racial population control and disproportionately affected poor Black women, especially in the American South.
Eugenics and Birth Control
| American Experience | PBS | n.d.
Explains how eugenicists classified affluent Nordic white families as fit while depicting racial minorities, immigrants, poor people, and disabled people as unfit.
A Look into the Role of Forced Sterilization in the United States
| Women’s and Gender Center | Amherst College | n.d.
Discusses forced and coerced sterilization as a eugenic practice directed disproportionately against Black women and other marginalized communities.
Racial Purity, Immigration, and Segregation
The Racial Integrity Act of 1924: An Attack on Indigenous Identity
| National Park Service | U.S. National Park Service | February 14, 2025
Explains how Walter Plecker used eugenics and white supremacy to erase Indigenous identities and enforce Virginia’s rigid system of racial classification.
How an Interracial Marriage Sparked a Scandalous Trial
| Shoshi Parks | Smithsonian Magazine | November 20, 2024
Reconstructs a racial-identity prosecution shaped by antimiscegenation law, census classification, eugenic pressure, and the one-drop rule.
The 1924 Law That Slammed the Door on Immigrants
| Jia Lynn Yang | Smithsonian Magazine | May 19, 2020
Describes how eugenics and beliefs about preserving America’s racial composition helped produce the discriminatory Immigration Act of 1924.
Social Darwinism
| History.com Editors | History | April 6, 2018
Explains how distorted applications of evolutionary theory were used to justify imperialism, racism, eugenics, economic inequality, and racial hierarchy.
Literacy Tests and Asian Exclusion Were Hallmarks of the 1917 Immigration Act
| Anna Diamond | Smithsonian Magazine | February 6, 2017
Connects American immigration exclusion to racism and pseudoscientific theories advanced by eugenicists such as Madison Grant.
Gender, Eugenics, and Virginia’s Racial Integrity Acts
| Lisa Lindquist Dorr | Journal of Women’s History | 1999
Analyzes how racial purity, white male supremacy, gender expectations, and fears of racial mixing shaped Virginia’s legal regime.
Miscegenation, Eugenics, and Racism
| Paul A. Lombardo | Florida State University Law Review | 1987
Investigates how eugenic rhetoric influenced Virginia’s racial-integrity legislation and restrictions against interracial marriage.
Eugenics, Conservation, and Elite Institutions
Complicating Conservation
| National Park Service | U.S. National Park Service | July 17, 2024
Examines conservation leaders who protected landscapes while promoting segregation, Asian exclusion, immigration restriction, eugenics, and a white man’s country.
National Genealogical Society Apologizes for Racist and Eugenicist Past
| Christopher Parker | Smithsonian Magazine | June 2, 2023
Reports on an organization’s acknowledgment that genealogy was used to support hereditary hierarchy, racial exclusion, and eugenic ideology.
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and the Place of Science in U.S. History
| National Park Service | U.S. National Park Service | May 9, 2023
Describes the Eugenics Record Office and its racially biased research supporting sterilization, immigration restriction, and claims of white superiority.
Charles Matthias Goethe
| National Park Service | U.S. National Park Service | May 8, 2023
Profiles a California conservationist and eugenics leader who championed sterilization, immigration exclusion, racial purity, and discrimination against non-Nordic people.
Madison Grant
| National Park Service | U.S. National Park Service | April 6, 2022
Profiles the conservationist and eugenicist whose theories of Nordic superiority influenced immigration restriction and government control over reproduction.
How Theodore Roosevelt’s Belief in a Racial Hierarchy Shaped His Policies
| Erin Blakemore | History | August 11, 2020
Explores Roosevelt’s belief in white racial superiority and its relationship to imperialism, conservation, land policy, and emerging eugenic thought.
Nikola Tesla the Eugenicist
| Gilbert King | Smithsonian Magazine | November 16, 2012
Discusses Tesla’s endorsement of compulsory sterilization and his belief that governments should prevent supposedly undesirable people from reproducing.
Eugenic Feminisms in Late-Nineteenth-Century America
| Susan A. Athey | Genders | June 1, 2000
Examines forms of white feminism that sought women’s advancement while retaining eugenic assumptions and authority within white-supremacist racial structures.
Nazi Racial Hygiene and American Influence
Science as Salvation: Weimar Eugenics, 1919–1933
| United States Holocaust Memorial Museum | Holocaust Encyclopedia | March 3, 2023
Explores the growth of German eugenics before Hitler and its absorption into Nazi ideology during the 1920s.
Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race
| United States Holocaust Memorial Museum | Holocaust Encyclopedia | October 27, 2020
Examines how physicians, geneticists, psychiatrists, and anthropologists legitimized and implemented Nazi racial-hygiene policies.
Eugenics
| United States Holocaust Memorial Museum | Holocaust Encyclopedia | October 23, 2020
Explains how eugenics and racial hygiene shaped Nazi sterilization, persecution, medical killing, and policies targeting disabled people and other excluded populations.
The Biological State: Nazi Racial Hygiene, 1933–1939
| United States Holocaust Memorial Museum | Holocaust Encyclopedia | n.d.
Details the Nazi government’s effort to transform Germany into a biological state organized around heredity, racial purity, sterilization, and exclusion.
Nazi Racism: In Depth
| United States Holocaust Memorial Museum | Holocaust Encyclopedia | n.d.
Describes the racial worldview underlying Nazi sterilization, territorial conquest, mass persecution, and murder of groups designated biologically inferior.
Deadly Medicine Exhibition Overview
| United States Holocaust Memorial Museum | USHMM | n.d.
Introduces the Nazi campaign to create an Aryan master race through eugenics, biomedical authority, antisemitism, sterilization, exclusion, and mass murder.
How Eugenics Contributed to Racism in Europe and the United States
| United States Holocaust Memorial Museum | Holocaust Encyclopedia | n.d.
Compares the shared eugenic and Social Darwinist ideas used to support white supremacy and discriminatory racial policies in Europe and America.
Race and Society in Nazi Germany and the Jim Crow South
| United States Holocaust Memorial Museum | USHMM | n.d.
Examines connections among eugenics, Nazi racial ideology, American segregation, institutionalized violence, antisemitism, and Jim Crow white supremacy.
Eugenics Charts from the Kansas Free Fair
| United States Holocaust Memorial Museum | Experiencing History | n.d.
Analyzes popular exhibits that taught Americans to associate ancestry and reproduction with racist, sexist, classist, and ableist judgments of human worth.
What You Inherit
| United States Holocaust Memorial Museum | Experiencing History | n.d.
Examines Nazi propaganda contrasting idealized Aryans with degrading representations of disabled people excluded from the national community.
