Eugenics is debunked and unsound.
By Dr. Arthur L. Caplan
Drs. William F. and Virginia Connolly Mitty Professor of Bioethics
Grossman School of Medicine
New York University
By Dr. James Tabery
Professor of Philosophy
The University of Utah
“How about allowing people to come through an open border, 13,000 of which were murderers. Many of them murdered far more than one person, and they’re now happily living in the United States. You know, now a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we’ve got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”
“The character of our future civilization will be modified by the ‘blood’ or the natural hereditary qualities which the sexually fertile immigrant brings to our shores. This modification will be manifest to that degree to which the descendants of immigrants constitute our future citizenry. We should therefore make the possession of desirable natural qualities one of the conditions for the admission of sexually fertile immigrants.”
Two quotes, uttered by two men, separated by a century. Yet both aimed their words against immigrants. And both relied on the xenophobic logic and pseudoscientific understandings of heredity that define eugenics.
Eugenics was debunked as both biologically unsound and morally repugnant decades ago, but Donald Trump has repackaged its key lies to appeal to 21st-century American anxieties. In his worldview, there are hereditary haves and have-nots. Biology is used, not to draw attention to what all humans have in common, but instead to manufacture artificial divisions. It is a tool of dehumanization, meant to reinforce the notion that some people are inherently broken, inherently evil, inherently other. It is a weapon of the powerful, employed to convey the idea that there is a natural ordering of humans.
Yet, in spouting their misguided ideology, Trump and many of his MAGA acolytes show that they don’t know anything about American history or biology. If they did, they would know that the divisive rhetoric they shout today is identical to what eugenicists, politicians and the like used to target many of their own ancestors a century ago—people from Germany, Ireland, Poland and Italy, among others. When we do not know, or willfully ignore history, we are doomed to repeat it.
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