PASADENA (USA) â Some members of a liberal (mainly white) church were shocked to discover that a founder, Robert Millikan, was a racist eugenicist. They formed a group to try to make amends (reparations).
Millikan, who headed Caltech, won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1923. About the same time, he helped start the church. After 1928 he joined Pasadenaâs new âHuman Betterment Foundationâ (HBF) and, in 1937, its board.
The main problem isnât that scientists and religious liberals wanted to use science for âhuman betterment.â Itâs that they thought rich, educated white men were better than other humans.
A Century of Racist Eugenics
The HBF intended to study the supposed âdeclining qualityâ of the US population. Their guru was Madison Grant, author of The Passing of the Great Race (1916) and a hereditary member of elite New York society.
In this classic of âscientificâ racism, Grant claimed that the âsuperior Nordic raceâ was in danger. âNordicsâ might soon be outnumbered by immigrants from southern and eastern Europe (especially Jews and Italians) and black southerners migrating to northern cities.
Fast-forward to Charlottesville, NC in 2018, where murderous racists chanted, âJews will not replace us!â Renaud Camusâ Grand Replacement (2012) is a foul reprise of Madison Grant.
Millikan, Paul Popenoe and the HBF promoted the forced sterilization of âinferiorâ women. They helped to get over 35,000 women sterilized involuntarily between 1907 and 1940.  In Germany, thrilled Nazis honored American eugenicists, translated their books, and adopted their model laws.
Eugenics didnât end with World War II. At LA County Hospital, over 200 new mothers, many Spanish-speaking, were sterilized between 1968 and 1974.
Even vaster numbers of Puerto Rican and Native American women were sterilized in the 1960s. Records werenât even kept. Nobody claimed they consented. Sexism and racism, hand in hand.
Eugenics, Immigration Restriction and IQ-ology
The eugenicists had scored an earlier victory for racism: passage of the federal Immigration Act of 1924 with its nationality-based immigration quotas.
Eugenicists echoed the rulersâ fears of radicalized immigrant workers who might have emulated the communist-led revolution in Russia. They said that excluding Asians and southern and eastern Europeans would preserve the ânational characterâ (whiteness) of the US.  Popenoe complained that Mexican immigrants, especially, had large families and got too much charity money.
How is this different from todayâs racist xenophobia? Itâs not.
One more strand linking past and present: Another HBF founder was Lewis Terman, author of the Stanford-Binet IQ test. Robert Yerkesâ large-scale (and bogus) IQ testing of World War I recruits provided data that supposedly supported white-supremacist ideology.  As a VP of the National Research Council, which supported Yerkes, Millikan must have known about this.
By the 1960s, IQ-ology was the main form of scientific racism. Students and professors on many campuses protested Shockley, Jensen, Charles Murray, and Harvardâs Herrnstein and James Q. Wilson. President Nixon cited Herrnstein to justify his vile racist prejudices and policies.
âIntelligenceâ testing has been thoroughly debunked. Yet IQ tests are readily available online. They are widely used in schools. Too many folks still believe that some of us are âsmarterâ than others.
From Reparations to Revolution
What amends can be made by the church? By Caltech and County Hospital? By nearby Occidental College, which in 1929 honored Popenoe?
Offering apologies, revoking honors, and educating ourselves and others about the past â thatâs a start.
But what are we going to do about present-day eugenics?eparations to Communist Revolution
The child sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein intended to âimprove the human raceâ by impregnating women, 20 at a time. But his âtranshumanismâ is just the tip of todayâs eugenic iceberg.
Women are still being forcibly sterilized. First Nations women in Saskatchewan, Canada. Intersex people and women with disabilities in Australia. Latinas and African-American women in California prisons. According to 2006 UN statistics, over a third of the women in India were sterilized â with funding from USAID and the World Bank.
And most pressing: the massive attacks on migrants in the US, Europe and elsewhere amidst howling xenophobia.
As in the past, the roots of these racist outrages are not in racist ideas, despite the academic credentials of those who promote them. Racism is rooted in the need of capitalists to divide the international, multiracial working class in order to maximize their obscene profits.
More important than the past or even the present is the future. The masses are more than intelligent enough to overthrow capitalism and organize society on communist principles. That will uproot racism by destroying its material basis in class society. No more will we be divided into nations and âraces.â
Churches and universities should make what reparations they can. But for the communist future we need, letâs build the International Communist Workersâ Party.
Demonstration at LA County Hospital against forced sterilizations mainly of Mexican immigrant womenâearly 1970âs.
Demonstrators demanded that racist forced sterilizations must end. But they didnât say that racism comes from capitalism or call for its destruction with communist revolution.
Communists participated with others in the campaign to expose racist capitalismâs forced sterilization of mainly Mexican immigrant women. They exposed the lie that the problem in the world is âtoo many people.â They said the problem was too many rich people. If there were no rich, there would be no poor!â
Between 1968 and the early 1970âs, as more immigrants came to LA from Mexico and Central America, the number of non-medical sterilizations increased dramatically at LA County Hospital. This was eugenics in practice. Itâs based on the same racist xenophobic lies the bosses push today: that brown people will âreplaceâ whites. Women were coerced into signing sterilization forms, many without knowing what they were signing. The forms were in English and many couldnât read them. Often they were in heavy labor on pain medication when the form was pushed on them. They later found out they had been sterilized.
Today as the bosses in crisis are pushing racist xenophobia, we should boldly act against these racist capitalist attacks. This time we call for destroying the capitalist system based on racism and genocide. We are mobilizing for communism where all children are welcomed and nurtured by growing communist collectives. The communist masses will abolish racism and sexism, and guarantee the safety and well being of all children and their development as communists.
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