C. A. Rector - reorganized argument and notes on David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, “The Eugenic
Atlantic: Race, Disability and the Making of an International Eugenic Science, 1800-1945”
Abstract (paraphrased): Argues that the concepts of disability and race are “mutual projects of human
exclusion, based upon scientific management systems [eugenics]. From the end of the eighteenth
century to the conclusion of World War II, bodies designated as defective became the focal point of
violent European and American efforts to engineer a ‘healthy’ body politic. While fears of racial, sexual
and gender-based ‘contamination’ served as the spokes of this belief system, disability, used as a
synonym for biological (or in-built) inferiority, functioned as the hub that gave the entire edifice its
cross-national utility.”
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The rhetoric/rationale by which non-White (especially Black) people and people with disabilities
became understood to be “less than” were very closely related.
The rhetoric/rationale by which this happened was simply so ubiquitous in Europe and North
America that it makes it difficult for us to see. 844-845
o Sidebar: Through the title, they reference Paul Gilroy’s work, which includes an
argument that one reason that people failed to see the presence of this ideological
infrastructure is that they were (and are) so accustomed to thinking of the modern
nation-state as the best “containers” for culture, so to speak, as though ideas didn’t
move as easily in and out as water through a basket. Part of Gilroy’s argument in The
Black Atlantic is that this way of thinking obscures that identity for Blacks in many places
has been about (trans-Atlantic) “crossings” – not simple assimilation, but a complicated
back-and-forth navigation between the cultural contexts in which they found
themselves and the cultural contexts that were handed down and bound Black
communities together.
In both cases, the rationale was based on a belief that their differences were fundamentally
deficiencies, and that these were biological, i.e., inherited, and visible and observable. (This is in
contrast to earlier/other perspectives of Others being deficient by not having the “right”
religious beliefs, customs, etc.)
o “In general, it would be accurate to argue that an idea of biologically inferior bodies
preceded the belief in a racially degraded body because Enlightenment science gave
credence to the idea that bodies—like the identification of animal and plant species—
could be divided up based on their observed ‘natural’ characteristics.” (847). In other
words, racial differences became deficits by virtue of being comparable with disabled
bodies.
Eugenics as a transnational ideology invented the category of disability, i.e., the ability to group
together people with widely divergent physical and cognitive characteristics under a single
heading of “defect.” 852. This concept provides a simple route to managing many “problems”
under industrial capitalism, and it is possible to “message” it as a humanitarian effort, being for
the public and even the individual good.
o “The trans-Atlantic appeal of eugenics would rest primarily on its ability to offer up the
power of classification to a host of professions and cultural administrators, rather than
hording the technology within a disciplinary or national domain. Such professions
included nearly all of the disciplinary arenas that are today responsible for the
management and oversight of people with disabilities including medicine, therapy,
charity, special education, social work, psychology, psychiatry, institutional
administration and policy.
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The eugenics movement took the form of academic conferences, university degree
programs and departments, and publications in the U.S. and Europe, which essentially
provided the roadmap for the Nazi genocide of “inferior” peoples.”
o Supporting industrial capitalism was typically an interest of the nation-state. Nationstates wanted people working outside the home, while caring for disabled family
members may have reduced that pool of people (beyond that required for the raising of
children.) Therefore institutionalization was an interest of the nation-state. 854
o A lack of familiarity bred contempt: “As familiarity [of communities and families in
accommodating disability] lessened and eugenics rhetoric further debased its clientele,
Eugenic Atlantic attitudes toward disability grew increasingly less tolerant of human
differences.” 856
o Institutionalization provided a ready-made research population. “Beneath the guise of a
liberal sentiment (care for those who could not care for themselves), eugenics took
shape as an educational rescue mission for children who were seen as exhibiting signs
that would make then unworthy of education (from atrophied muscles to cross-eyes to
reading delays). Yet, once institutional administrators, trainers and, later,
psychiatrists/psychologists recognised the institution as an ideal laboratory with a
ready-made research population, institutions for the feebleminded sought to retain
their charges.” 855
o “If disability robbed one of a viable life, reasoned Nazi eugenicists, then destruction was
for their own benefit and that of the nation, through the alleviation of ‘suffering’ and a
lessening of institutionalisation as an economic burden.” 857
Conclusion: They argue that disability is the “master trope” of human disqualification.
o “The culmination of the era of the Eugenic Atlantic in the systematic extermination of
disabled and racialised peoples allows for a juxtaposition of the intertwined fate of two
populations that share an identification as ‘subhuman’.” 859
o “Skin pigmentation, religious practices, cultural separatism and refusals to assimilate
came to be viewed by the dominant culture as signs of deterministic incapacity and
therefore provided a basis for exclusion.” 859
o “Rather than sustain race and disability as separate phenomenon within the eugenics
profile drawn here, we want to argue for the identification of a convergence that
condemns stigmatised groupings to a shared deterministic fate. The fact that the
systematic killing of Jews, Romanies and gay peoples in the Holocaust was devised in the
gas chambers of the psychiatric killing hospitals provides an instructive parable for
future research.” 860-61
“As one surveys eugenics literature of the period, it becomes evident that approaches to
disabled people that were initially unspeakable—permanent institutionalisation, marriage
laws, immigration laws, sterilisation laws and, eventually, even extermination—gradually
creep into the discourse as a whispered plausibility… Once the unspeakable is spoken, to
resignify African American novelist Toni Morrison’s phrase, the road is already paved for that
very impossibility to become reality.”
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Discussion Questions
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Snyder and Mitchell argue that historians have not adequately addressed the issue of
eugenics as one of the “foremost ideological movements of the European and North
American fin-de-siecle” because of a “persistent ambivalence in Europe and North
America about the value of disabled lives.” 845 What do you think about their functional
assertion that historians can’t see eugenic thinking very well because they’re still caught
up in it?
o In their view, historians have tended to differentiate the “euthanasia” or murder
of people whose disabilities could have been “remediated” – i.e., Snyder and
Mitchell are saying that other historians tend to differentiate people who could
be “normalized” from those who could not, i.e., that these other historians
themselves are participating in a worldview that places a greater value on people
with disabilities who can be “normalized” than those who cannot. 846-847
o Existing historical scholarship tends to dismiss eugenics as a “quack science,”
which lets us avoid having to deal with its lingering repercussions. What are the
consequences of this?
Snyder and Mitchell note that cognitive disabilities (“idiocy” or “feeblemindedness,” in
the parlance of the times) were positioned at “the farthest degree of subnormality.”
How does that intersect with contemporary culture? What value do we place on
intelligence as a component of human value? 846
See the last point in the outline. Do you see parallels in today’s political discourse?
What do you think about that?
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