(upbeat music)
- Look at that.
My little finger, it's all black and blue.
You did that, Tom.
I know you didn't mean to,
but that's what I get for
marrying a brute of a man,
a great big, hulking,
brute of a man.
- Oh Daisy.
I hate that word.
Hulking.
Even in kidding.
- Hulking.
- Please, let's not start one of those.
- Nick, have you read that book,
"The Rise of the Colored
Empires" by Goddard?
- Why, no.
- Well, it's a fine book,
everyone ought to read it.
See, the point is, that
if we don't watch out,
the white race will be utterly submerged.
No, that's so.
It's up to us who are the
dominant race to watch out,
or these other races will
have control of things.
- We've got to beat them down.
- Now Daisy, it has all
been scientifically proved.
You see, we're Nordics.
You are, and I am, and--
(butler mumbles to Tom)
Thank you.
Will you excuse me?
Anyway, we're responsible
for all the things
that've gone to make
civilization: art, science,
and all that.
- Human society needs to avail itself
of every possible means
for its own advancement.
Quite naturally, this means
it falls into two classes,
one, those pertaining to
improving the condition
of individuals already born,
and two, those concerning
the improvement of the innate
qualities of future generations.
The latter means is the concern
of the signs of eugenics.
And eugenics, in turn,
works quite naturally
along two channels.
One, concerning the increased
fecundity and fortunate
matings of the better classes,
and two, concerning the cutting off
of the supply of defectives.
Eugenics is, at best,
a long term investment,
and will appeal only to
far-sighted patriots.
Like all other investments,
the earlier and the greater
the primary investment in
accordance with the familiar
principle of geometric progression,
the vastly greater the end result.
This particular investigation
aims to fit into
the general scheme of social betterment
by attempting to point
out practicable means
for accomplishing the
cutting off of the supply
of innate social misfits.
It does purports to be one
of the several agencies
of social advancement.
It is the duty of human society to grasp
every possible means for
its own amelioration.
And if it finds, in the segregation,
a sterilization of defectives,
a means for improving
the inequalities of future generations,
without inflicting the
present moral deeper wound,
it is the duty of society,
even at great cost and effort,
to bestir itself applying to the remedy.
(rhythmic music)
This investigation once from for the past
only inspiration employs this.
Only again, naturally,
we contend that we'll
break it, all of this.
- I am the interpreter of your questions.
I am the interpreter of your questions.
the queer shape-shifter.
We hope you have come back to us
a little bit unraveled and unresolved.
Where do you fit inside the
geography of the sacrificed?
Do you come open, or do you come trapped
by your own inhibitions and fears,
of the perfect body,
the perfect erotic, the divine?
Have you been selected
for genetic deselection?
Have you been used as an
argument for abortion?
Have you been asked not
to breathe?
Have you been called
sick, queer, crazy?
Have you been called
feeble-minded, insane, deviant, a disease?
Have you been called, needing
a cure, genetically inferior?
Have you been called less than human,
a punishment, an impurity, a sin?
Have you been called less than whole,
undesirable, unseen?
Like acrobats, the disabled are
forced to swallow our fears,
to metabolize our discomfort,
to bring it back to us in
some palatable shape or form.
To bring the ugliness
past our shameful eyes.
To chew it, swallow it,
to make themselves whole.
Despite our passive
cruelty, the disabled artist
whose political voice and sonorous cries,
from joints and and blood,
from guts and bones,
to distaste our notions
of the perfect beauty,
the perfect body, the perfect erotic.
To make themselves visible.
To make themselves resilient,
to make themselves erotic, and sexy,
and seen, and whole, again.
- I am haunted.
I am haunted by an image.
I'm running.
I'm running.
I'm running.
Since age five, I return to the scene,
yearly at first, but lately too often.
Am I running away?
If so, what from?
This, a caricature,
justifying the reading
objecting from the American body of
such a misshapen chimera?
Down with monopolies.
But, it was the Chinese who excluded.
This is an image I've scrutinized,
I've researched, I've persevered,
Am I this ugliness.
No, it is not this image.
Could it be this, what scares me?
This so-called mongoloid idiot?
Claimed by racial scientists to be
a spontaneous example of degeneration
from superior to inferior germ plasm?
This is an image I've scrutinized,
I've researched, I've perseverated,
am I this ugliness?
No, this the not the image.
I'm running.
I'm running.
I'm running.
Since age five, I return to the scene.
The school bell just rings.
It's kindergarten.
It's park forest.
That parcel from prairie land
that becomes corn fields,
sprouting arrowheads, that
becomes a post-Korean War suburb,
that became the place where hick families,
of Joe Marzano and Leslie Gapinsky left
Rust-Belt cities for and became whitened.
I wonder where they are now.
I am five.
I barely speak a word of English, that is.
The bell rings.
The sidewalk stretches ahead.
The boys run out, all those hours
of sitting, of behaving.
I am running too.
I kick Michael.
The boy with the large head.
The gawky walk,
the boy who thought he
was just like one of us.
I kick him in the butt.
I feel elated.
I'm running, I get, at last,
approval from the other boys.
Had I witness this before, I now wonder?
This feeling I recall, this did.
I was exhilarated.
How could I do this?
But, it was like a reflex.
Other boys' approval must've
meant so much, I rationalize.
Now, a lifetime later,
I'm constantly returning
to the scene of my crime.
I'm running away.
I'm running after.
Right foot ready to kick him.
The ugly boy, so that I,
the not big-headed, the not inclined,
the not idiot other, to feel a
fleeting moment of belonging.
At this moment, I knew
I had become American.
And I've been haunted ever since.
- I hope that everybody
here has gotten the chance
to see the exhibit, to go by the exhibit.
I knew eugenics is a very visual ideology,
and the exhibit is not only visual,
it's tactile, it's three dimensional.
The two images that I
am bringing you today
are not as stark as
what you're going to see
at the exhibit or as haunting
as what you're gonna see
in the windows of this building.
They're dry, they're bureaucratic,
but, you know, it's the graphitised
systems that dehumanize.
The criminal justice
system, the healthcare net,
the welfare net,
the immigration regulations
that we live with,
these are the systems that
have ensnared the vast
majority of people who've fallen prey
to eugenics enterprises in this country.
First, thank you,
we have Harry Laughlin's
1920 testimony in front of the committee
immigration and naturalization,
who was holding hearings
on the biological aspects of immigration.
Eugenicists had a multi-pronged agenda.
Bar entry to the foreign unfit,
sterilize the domestic
unfit, be vigilant against
interracial sex, et cetera, et cetera.
They targeted the racial lines,
they pathologized the poor,
they defamed the disabled,
eugenics was octopus-like
in its strategy and in its ideology.
So, it had one tentacle
stretching out to nationalism,
another to blatant racism
and white supremacy,
another to liberalism, to anti-Semitism,
to nationalism, certainly
homophobia, fascism,
it bolstered and was
conscripted by all these
movements and all these ideologies.
And, its role was to give them dimension.
To give them substance.
To rationalize them with data.
And nobody was better at this
than Harry Laughlin.
Director of the Eugenics Record Office,
founder of the Pioneer Fund,
which continues to fund
eugenics research and policy to this day,
drafter of the Model Sterilization Law,
which ultimately became
the basis of the Nazi's
Hereditary Health Law, and
in 1920, the designated
eugenics expert for the U.S, congress.
He covers quite a bit in this testimony.
I'm just gonna give you a couple excerpts.
"The character of our
future civilization will be
"modified by the blood or
the hereditary qualities,
"which the sexually fertile
immigrant brings to our shores.
"Racial purity cannot be
maintained because throughout
"history, women of lower
races are not adverse to
"intercourse with men of higher.
"Morons can slip through
the immigration sieve
"as it exists today."
He went on to say Jews and
Italians are over-represented
in U.S. asylums, Mexicans in
schools for the delinquents,
all due to biology.
And he comes equipped with
charts and statistics lists of
breakdowns of expenditures.
But, by the time he testified
in front of Congress,
there had already been
decades and decades
and decades and decades
where multiple categories of exclusion
had been enshrined in law.
1875, the Page Law,
Chinese women excluded.
1882, Chinese Exclusion Act,
that's pretty self-explanatory.
And the prohibition on the
landing of idiots and lunatics.
1881, persons suffering from loathsome
or contagious diseases.
The first two decades of the 20th Century,
individuals with epilepsy,
professional beggars,
anarchists, paupers, people
from Japan, excluded.
1912, the first IQ test
given in this country,
right here in New York
to people riding steerage
to Ellis Island.
And what do they find, 80%
of Jews, Hungarians, Poles,
Russians, and Italians:
feeble-minded defectives.
1917, South Asians, excluded.
Also, anyone who has
committed moral turpitude,
a lasting term that can still get you
thrown out of the country.
And the process of
de-naturalization and deportation of
union leaders, leftists, and anyone else
considered subversives
becomes much easier.
Now, after this hearing,
Laughlin went on to hold
regular sessions with one
of the committee members,
Representative Albert Johnson.
He was also a member of the
American Eugenics Society.
And he co-sponsored the
1924 National Origins Act,
which effectively bars
the door to any non-Nordic
still standing after all
these other enactments.
And was framed with the
help of Madison Grant,
author of "The Passing of the Great Race",
one of the most notorious eugenics texts
in U.S. history.
I'm going to fast-forward
a little bit here to 1952,
the McCarran-Walter Act
Co-sponsored by Francis Walter,
board member on Laughlin's Pioneer Fund,
involved with the Draper Project,
dedicated to proving
the eugenic inadequacy
of African Americans and chair of
the House of Un-American
Activities Committee.
The McCarran-Walter Act
did a lot of things,
among other things, it
bars anyone afflicted
with psychopathic
personality or mental defect.
And, just to remove any
ambiguity, this includes gays.
The 1965 Immigration Act
explicitly names homosexuals
as inadmissible sexual deviants.
This stands until 1990,
making the US the last
industrialized nation that
has a total ban on gay members.
So now, all this coincides with very long,
ongoing quest to assert
biological, psychological,
and genetic differences between
queer and straight people.
Over 100 years of, and counting,
of theories on the cause
of homosexuality and gender deviance.
From that perennial favorite,
sin, to anatomical flaws,
to psychiatric disorders
to hormonal imbalances
to diet, race, climate, country of origin,
moral deficiency, hereditary,
moral deficiency, acquired,
prenatal stress, perinatal
stress, absent father,
overbearing mother, car crashes,
masculinization of genitals
of future lesbians in utero,
temporal lobe pathology,
genes, germs, hypothalamuses.
All of these had their
corresponding interventions,
violent, even cataclysmic
punishments and public policies
and treatment protocols, including:
castration, testicular transplant,
electric shock therapy,
lobotomy, aversion therapy,
chemical castration,
olfactory interventions, clitoridectomy,
restorative therapies,
and especially vulnerable
to all of these have
been the incarcerated,
the institutionalized, and
those not yet of legal age,
so that by the time we get to the 1980s,
by the time we get to AIDS,
the scientifically incontestable,
biological difference
between LGBTQ people and the
threat posed by immigrants
had been taken as axiomatic
for almost a century.
AIDS, some even said, served evolution,
in that it was decimating the
unhealthy and the immoral.
And not just homosexuals.
Haitians, and heroin users,
and African American women
with HIV who were cast,
not as people in need
of care and treatment,
but as predatory carriers,
infecting their sexual partners,
and as risk factors for their babies.
In 1987, with homosexuality
still grounds for inadmissibility,
the United States decrees
people living with HIV
can no longer immigrate
to the United States,
if they're here already,
they can't adjust their
immigration status,
and they cannot travel or even
transit through the country,
except with very, very, in very,
very limited circumstances.
If permission is given, for
example, for a traveler,
to enter for a limited time,
their passport was indelibly
stamped the with number
corresponding to the clause
that enumerated the HIV mark.
You can see that right here.
That 202 right there.
On a much, smaller scale,
the ban had lethal consequences,
as the 1924 law, which sealed the fate
of so many refugees during World War II.
For 23 years, the HIV ban
left people stuck in countries
where stigma or persecution
or unavailability to
treatment was lethal or,
just as fatally,
if they were here, it
left people vulnerable
to detention, deportation,
unable to access housing
or healthcare or a decent
job, and people died.
The HIV Entry Ban was supremely aligned
with just about every
eugenics and foreign policy
in this country.
After all, eugenics posits
the most vulnerable,
the most violated, the most
imperiled, as the greatest,
most menacing, most sinister threats.
This drive to exclude, to
punish, to contain outsiders
is grafted onto our immigration policy,
and not only our immigration policy.
It is consistent with the
rhetoric of immigrants
polluting the nation with
alien ideas of sexuality,
of criminality, of
illness, non-Christianness,
it is congruent with the
construction of racial
and sexual outsiders as vectors of actual
and metaphorical disease.
Infectors and infected
of the national body.
These artifacts represent
two fatal eugenics policies.
Two fatal interventions among
many that we could call out
here tonight, and people will.
And between them lies almost a century of
eugenics-based exclusion, racial hysteria,
and homosexual panic.
Benedict Anderson wrote that,
"Nationalism thinks in
historical destinies
"and racism dreams eternal contamination."
That is a tag line for
U.S. immigration policy
if there ever was one.
(dramatic music)
- I'd like to know just
what sterilization is.
- So would I.
Just how do they do it?
- Well, I'll tell you.
- Sterilization must be abolished
from the statutes of this country.
(dramatic music)
- I'm sorry, Doctor.
Three generations of unfit are enough.
Petition not allowed.
- She's not like the rest of the family,
she's a good girl, Judge!
- [Judge] I'm sorry young man.
- Oh now wait, please.
Please listen to me.
Don't you understand what you're doing?
Look at me.
Can't you see that I'm well and strong?
And I'll be a good mother too, Judge!
Honest I will!
- Who gave them the
authority to tell me that
I can't bring life into the world?
Only God has that right!
Oh Doctor Brooks, are they going
to make me go through with this?
Can't you get them to wait until tomorrow?
You're the only one who could help me now!
Please do, you've just got to!
(dramatic music)
- That film was made some years after
Carrie Buck had brought
a case that reached
the Supreme Court of the United States.
In many ways, that case
was about quantification.
Francis Galton, who was of
course the father of the word,
and of the movement, of
what we know as eugenics,
was obsessed with quantification.
He and his protege, Karl Pearson,
practically invented the
field of biostatistics,
developing technologies
and analytical methods
which we still use today.
There's nothing inherently
wrong with quantification,
applying statistical tools
to describe populations
in the analyzed group
traits has the danger
of leading us to believe
that the numbers we use
are a reality unto themselves
and that the categories
that we place people
within and the taxonomies
that we use to group
them dismiss the humanity
of the people whom we are
attempting to describe
and reduce them to nothing
less than a number,
and nothing more than the number.
You have heard about
the kinds of assessments
that were done at Ellis
Island, using early IQ tests,
there was a mention of the
kinds of tests that were done
on the troops, the
recruits in World War I,
massive tabulations of
defects in enlisted men
that Charles Davenport did.
And the assessments done
by Yerkes and others,
leading them to determine
that something like a third
of all the men inducted
into the army prior to
World War I were somehow
defective and feeble-minded.
We know that various
states enacted statutes
that attempted to quantify
the quantum of blood
from various races, where
you separate people based
on that kind of calculation.
And to write miscegenation
and anti-miscegenation laws
that said you could not
marry someone if they were
1/8 or one 1/16 or 1/4 of the blood
of another race.
Or in some cases, only one drop.
We've also seen some
photographs in this exhibit
of the use of anthropometry,
and interestingly I read
an article only last week
in Fortune magazine showing
someone believed if you
measured the heads of all
the people on Wall Street,
you'd find out who the best negotiator,
based on theories of anthropometry,
which some of us had attributed
to a previous century.
Well, I'm going to talk
about sterilization,
as the movie has suggested.
But in the case that was real
case and not a fictional one,
and that was the case of Buck v. Bell.
It was heard by the United
States Supreme Court in 1927.
That case upheld the
constitutionality of the law that
was written in 1924 in Virginia.
It took a couple years
to go through the courts,
reached the court of Washington in 1927.
And it prescribed for
sterilization of people
in state institutions who
were, according to the language
of law, socially inadequate.
That included criminals or,
in Harry Laughlin's words,
anyone who was socially inadequate,
orphans, ne'er do wells,
paupers, criminals, and the like.
Carrie Buck was the
plaintiff in that lawsuit,
and this is a picture of
her from December of 1982.
At the time that I met
her, I didn't realize
that she was almost late for the world.
She died about three weeks
after this picture was taken.
She was very aware at
the time that she died
of the place she had taken in history.
It was a very embarrassing
position for her to be in,
after all, she was the
person that the United States
Supreme Court used to uphold the law,
which would have sterilized
people in institutions
who had been found to be
like she had been found,
feeble-minded or morally-delinquent.
So, she was still quite
embarrassed about that,
even in the last weeks of her life.
For about 15 years after her death,
I looked for other images of Carrie
that would show the
person that she was not,
almost near death, here,
she was almost 80 when
this picture was taken,
but closer to the time that her
trial was famous in America.
Closer to the time that
the Supreme Court actually
made a decision about eugenics.
In 1996 I found this picture
in a university archive,
actually up in Albany.
It shows Carrie at
the Virginia Colony for the
Epileptic and the Feeble-Minded,
a place that she had been sent
when she was about 17 years old.
South, in the central
part of Virginia near
the town of Amherst and near Lynchburg.
She was at the colony
because she had been declared
to be feeble-minded.
She was sitting, in this picture,
next to her mother, Emma.
And the picture was actually
taken the day before the trial
that would eventually end
up in the Supreme Court.
This was in November of 1924.
At the trial, she was
called feeble-minded because
she had been given a test
when she came to the colony,
and she had performed poorly.
It was a test very similar
to the one that was given
to soldiers who were getting
tested before World War I,
it was also similar to
the one, 10 years earlier,
that'd been given to people
landing at Ellis Island.
It was still a very rough instrument.
Carrie's mother, Emma, is
shown here on her right,
slightly less literate than Carrie,
she hadn't gone to school quite as much.
She also had been given
the test, and she tested,
according to the records, poorly.
And so both Carrie and
her mother were given
the label of feeble-minded,
suggesting that they had
a mental defect, but also suggesting,
and the trial actually explicitly stating,
that this was mark of
moral defect as well.
The feeble-minded, according
to Charles Davenport,
who was the administrator
of the Eugenics Record
Office in Cold Spring Harbor.
The feeble-minded, according to the book
that he published in 1916, were people
who were also feebly-inhibited.
And in his book he tied
together the lack of cognition
that he found in people
called feeble-minded
and said they also had no self-control,
particularly in the area of sexuality.
These were people who stole because
they couldn't stop themselves,
who were sexually active
because they had no inhibitions,
and you could match these
two characteristics, feeble-mindedness
and feeble-inhibitions.
And so Carrie Buck and
her mother were called
feeble-minded after the tests, but also,
described as feebly-inhibited
and moral degenerates
who were unable to
control their sexuality.
Emma Buck was accused
of being a street walker, a prostitute.
And Carrie was taken to the colony there
in Amherst, Virginia, specifically
because she had a baby,
but she was not married.
So her feeble-mindedness
and feeble-inhibitions,
according to the court, came together.
She was someone unable
to make moral judgements,
someone unable to control herself.
Now, the strategy in that case was to tie
the problem family, two members
shown here of the Bucks,
to a long history of problem families.
The Jukes and the Kallikaks,
the books that were studied
by people visiting Cold
Spring Harbor as students.
And by generations of
people going to colleges
and high schools in America,
problem families that
generated social costs.
Problem families who were
mostly feeble-minded,
had too many children,
often ended up on welfare
or in prisons, or
asylums, or institutions,
paid for by the state.
And all these people, of
course, were also given tests.
And all these people were
called feeble-minded.
But when the case came to trial,
they had experts to
testify to these points.
Arthur Estabrook was a field
worker in Cold Spring Harbor.
He traveled to Virginia
to testify in the case.
He picked up the record
that had been generated
by his colleague, Harry Laughlin,
who sent his comments in
a deposition, in writing,
and who had repeated the
comments of the doctor,
who had committed Carrie Buck, and said,
"These people are part
of the core white trash
"in the south."
Another category, another
grouping, another taxonomy.
He was asked, Estabrook
as the expert was asked,
"Did you give Carrie Buck and mental tests
"to determine her mental capacity?"
Well he hadn't, he'd been in a hurry,
he'd relied on his own judgment,
he kind of eyeballed the situation.
He looked at the records.
He stumbled a little bit when he testified
but then he said, "I gave her a sufficient
"examination so that I
consider her feeble-minded."
He brought out his book an
displayed it to the court,
proving that he was, after all, an expert.
"What about Carrie Buck's child?"
He said, "Were you able
to make any judgment
"about her child?"
Well this is the child.
The woman holding her was
Carrie Buck's foster mother,
Ms Dobbs, and the baby there is Vivian,
Carries baby, who was
born only three months
before she was committed to
the Virginia Colony for the
Epileptic and the Feeble-Minded.
And Ms Dobbs is being asked to, I think,
re-demonstrate the test that
was being given to the baby.
She's holding a coin, she's
moving it back and forth.
As you can see, the
baby probably is looking
at the photographer rather than the coin.
"Did you see Carrie Buck's child,"
Mr. Estabrook was asked at the trial.
"Were you able to form any
judgment about that child?"
There had already been
testimony that there
was something peculiar about the child,
something not quite normal,
that's what the Red Cross nurse had said.
And Estabrook followed up and said,
"Well I gave the child
the regular mental test
"for a child of the age of six months,
"and I decided she was below average."
Based on that testimony,
the court concluded that
the sterilization law
was appropriately applied to Carrie Buck
as the representative of the Buck family.
Now, the case went on
to the Supreme Court.
This was a case, as the
lawyers had argued, just like
the Jukes, just like the Kallikaks.
And when the case arrived
at the Supreme Court,
Justice Oliver Wendell
Holmes was given the task
of writing an opinion.
And he agreed completely
with the conclusion
of the lower court.
He agreed completely with the taxonomies
the people had testified to.
The feeble-minded.
In his age, the words were
a little bit different.
And he used that language, he said,
"We have seen more than
once that the public welfare
"may call upon the best
citizens for their lives."
People going off to war.
"It would be strange if
you could not call upon
"those who already sapped
the strength of the state
"for these lesser sacrifices,
"often not felt to be
searched by those concerned,
"in order to prevent ours being
swamped with incompetence.
"It is better for all the
world, instead of waiting
"to execute degenerate
offspring for crime,
"or to let them starve
"for their imbecility,
society can prevent those
"who are manifestly unfit
from continuing their kind."
The principle evoking science here
that sustains compulsory vaccination,
is broad enough to cover
cutting the fallopian tubes.
The Buck family, forming in
the records, made the case.
Three generations of imbeciles are enough.
So, here are the three Bucks.
Based on the tests, such as they were,
in the categories of
feeble-minded and poor white trash
attributed to them, Holmes' proclamation,
"Three generations of
imbeciles are enough."
Was the last legal word.
Now, this case was a fraud.
There is plenty of evidence to prove that.
And the case, of course, is in some ways,
a lesson of how a bad law
will get you bad results.
It doesn't say anything about disability,
in the sense that Carrie Buck
and her mother really weren't
disabled in the sense that
we might use that word today,
and young Vivian ended
up on the honor roll.
So the labels that were applied
to them were inaccurate,
which says nothing about whether
or not they should've been
applied to anyone else.
Certainly they should not have.
We see a kind of sorting,
a kind of categorization,
and kind of taxonomy,
continuing to go on after the Buck family,
after Carrie Buck and her
sister were sterilized.
Some 65,000 Americans were
sterilized up until the 1980s.
And it's only in the last
month that the first state,
North Carolina, made some reparations
to some of those people
who had been sterilized.
But, we hear, the same
week that we hear of the
North Carolina sterilizations
and the reparations
will be paid, that the
state of California has
sterilized another 100
plus women in prisons,
showing us that our memories
that we get from history,
often don't last very long.
Eugenics continues in different guises.
- I entered this conversation
through a personal story
as well as a political one.
I, myself, was 23-yeas-old
when I was sterilized.
Needless to say, it angered me.
Because I had a doctor at George
Washington Hospital Center
saying that he made the
decision whether or not
I would have any more kids.
So, I entered this whole
conversation on eugenics
both as a living witness to
it, but also as an activist
in the African American community,
wanting to know about the
resistance of my foremothers.
Obviously if it happened to me,
who else had this happened to?
And so, I've been studying
eugenics for a long, long time,
reading the books that I
can access on the subject,
but one of the things that
I've realized more recently,
is that we understate
the impact of eugenics
when we make it only womb-centric.
When we only make it about biology,
because the eugenicist
were deeply concerned
about a number of social
engineering issues.
And one of those issues, of course,
was land use and housing policies.
And so we need to bring
into conversations,
things beyond just
focusing on reproduction
and looking at how the whole
philosophy of eugenics,
the ideology of eugenics
is still happening
to manipulate and control
entire communities.
And so my presentation
is on gentrification
as a population control issue.
Which is a, kind of,
sideways look at eugenics,
but one that has real
relevance for how we are
exercising control
over, not only the land,
but who is seen as entitled to the land?
Who is entitled as we
call in our movement,
a right to the city.
And so, this is really important for me,
because this stands
clearly at the intersection
of class, race, and gender.
Far more so than most people
who are dealing with
gentrification tend to understand.
But obviously, we can't even
talk about population control
in this setting, in this
society, without addressing
the myth of overpopulation.
Because, quite often, the major media
and the loud proponents,
try to say that the
world is so deeply
overpopulated that it would be
irresponsible not to limit the fertility
of certain populations,
which is kind of ironic
because they don't necessarily
talk about limiting the
consumption of other populations.
You'd think that if
you're really concerned,
or concerned about the environment,
you would go after the
military-industrial complex
that is destroying it, rather
than assuming that a woman,
in Sub-Saharan Africa, who
barely has access to electricity,
is the cause of climate change.
What's also ironic about this
particular historical moment
is that, those of us who
consider ourselves progressives,
or on the left, or I'm
obviously a feminist
of the women's movement.
We're behind in calling
attention to population control
through strategies of gentrification,
or the prison-industrial
complex and others like that.
What's really sad and tragic
is that, in many ways,
our opponents who are opposed
to abortion and birth control
and family planning, and, you know,
LGBT rights and everything
else, environmental control,
all of our opponents, they're
the ones that are seizing
the momentum to talk about
opposing population control,
and so we find ourselves
offering critique of our allies
for neglecting the issue,
and offering a critique of our opponents,
for taking it up for the wrong reason.
'Cause they're talking
about racial suicide
of the white race, and that's
why they're opposed to,
to the population control.
But the same eugenicists
of a generation ago
are now saying
that they're the ones
fighting against eugenics.
So, that's a whole 'nother conversation.
What did they say in the letter,
how cynical you become, you can't keep up.
(audience laughs)
So, reproductive
strategies are, of course,
are the way to control,
the kind of communities,
but they're not the only way.
And we started out with a
slide that I missed, probably,
where it was talking about
ethnic cleansing in Harlem.
Yeah.
We watched New York get deeply gentrified,
we've watched the evisceration
of entire communities in New York,
it's sold to us as a way to
increase the tax base of New York,
make it a more livable city.
It started with those zero-tolerance
broken window policies,
of the police state where
massive incarceration
of people of color, of low-income people.
And I should add, I only
want to talk about New York
because I'm from the
city of Atlanta, which,
ironically is ruled by
an entirely all-black
city council and mayor.
And they passed ordinances in the 1990s,
we had the Olympics come through Atlanta,
and they passed a peculiar ordinance
against what they call urban camping.
It was okay to sleep outside as long as
you sleep outside the city limits,
because that's rural camping!
But if you slept outside
within the city limits,
it was against the law.
They created this whole
ordinance around urban camping.
Now, who do you think sleeps outside,
within the city?
In other words, it's literally
illegal to be homeless
within the city of Atlanta.
And this was passed by an
all-black city council.
So, you get really confused
over the racial dynamics,
which are trumped by the class dynamics,
which are forced by the business dynamics,
I mean it's just amazing!
And to watch homeless people get arrested
at the center for nonviolence,
Dr. Martin Luther King Center, is tragic,
and it happens over and over again.
I think he's spinning in
his crypt as it happens.
So, let's talk about
gentrification because
I'm probably running out of time.
I am a professional
talker! (audience laughs)
One of the current policies
that we're looking at
that borrows on eugenics
ideology was just affirmed
by the US Supreme Court.
Which, in 2014, let
stand a Nebraska city ban
on renting residential housing
to undocumented immigrants.
Claiming that the ordinance
does not discriminate,
specifically against Latinos,
the city of Fremont, Nebraska
requires potential
renters to prove that they
are in the country legally.
So, you have to be documented
to rent property now in Nebraska.
And the Supreme Court upheld that!
So, you are using land-use
policies and city ordinances
as a way to control the movement
and behaviors of entire populations.
You're denying them the right
to the city, in other words,
if they don't have a place to live.
We also need to look at other,
I don't have time to talk
about all of the different ways
that I think we need to intersect eugenics
with other social justice issues,
but I do want to talk
about racial profiling,
police brutality, because that's very much
in the news today, the
reports of Ferguson,
and what's going on.
The prison-industrial complex,
immigration restrictions,
sexist and racist (mumbles)
which go on and on, resource allocation.
Who determines how public
education is funded
and who benefits from that
and who loses in that?
Welfare or healthcare
systems, food insecurity,
lack of educational
opportunities, zoning regulations,
internal displacement from
natural disasters like Katrina.
These are all issues of
eugenics and population control,
if we widen our lens beyond the womb.
And that's what I'm calling on those of us
who are fighting eugenics to do.
So, let me start closing by talking about
a particular policy that I
have tracked since the 1960s.
And it's called spatial deconcentration.
After the 1968 riot,
a commission was put together,
called the Kerner Commission,
some of you may remember that.
That talked about ways to
prevent the riots, future riots.
And one of the recommendations, of course,
was that they would start
funding family planning.
Because unchecked fertility, they saw,
as a cause of the riots.
But, some of the other,
lesser-known recommendations
that were implemented from
the Kerner Commission report,
first of all, called for
an increased policing
of the rest of communities,
leading to, of course,
the creation of the COINTELPRO programs
and things like that.
But, more specifically, through
spatial deconcentration,
they created a program that was designed
to depopulate large concentrations
of inner-city blacks and brown people.
And so they did this
through urban renewal,
of course we have the Bob
Moses picture up there.
I'm not doing a good
job of telling you when
to advance the slide, so,
just pretend that I said
advance. (audience laughs)
Because I'm not doing a good job.
But, it started, of course,
with the urban renewal
and Robert Moses doing
what he did to distort
the city of New York,
destroy neighborhoods,
building all these freeways
and stuff like that;
created all this public debt, that stuff.
And I want to talk about
spatial deconcentration
coming out of the the 1960s and
being implemented in the 1970s.
And one of the clearest
and most obvious legacies
of spatial deconcentration
was the creation
of a Section 8 voucher program,
the housing subsidy program.
Because, in order to depopulate a city,
you have to create push factors,
pushing people out of the city.
So, what we saw in the 1970s and the 1980s
was the closing down of public
services like hospitals,
and fire departments, and
schools, and just, you know,
the inner cities became deserts!
Literal deserts with low amenity.
So those were the push factors,
but you you also had to
pull people out of the city.
And that was what Section 8 was for.
To give them housing
subsidy so that they could
be dispersed to these suburbs.
So like in Washington D.C.,
Chocolate City became,
you know, mocha? (audience laughs)
At best, I mean a city that
was 80% African American
is now, like, 48% African American.
While Prince George's County
that, at the beginning
of spatial deconcentration was
98% white is now 99% black.
And so, when we talk about eugenics,
I want us to not be so womb-centric
and understand that all of these policies
are interlocked and intersecting around
manipulating populations,
advantaging white populations,
and white upper-class populations at that,
while disadvantaging everybody else.
And if we don't talk about
the legacy of eugenics
in that way, through the
lens of white supremacy,
we really missed the boat.
Thank y'all.
(speaking in foreign language)
- It's interesting that
I get to go off right now
as Obama is about to make an announcement,
actually he already started,
and we're dealing in a very
critical time in regards
to immigration, talking
about administrative relief,
an executive order that is
happening, or will happen,
for a small sector of
undocumented communities.
As a migrant myself, being
undocumented for 20 years,
this idea of who gets to belong
and who gets to, you know,
have some time of humanity in this country
is something that really touches home
and definitely with me.
So I wanted to take you
through a different journey.
My pieces are just a well-rounded idea
of how complicated it is to be a migrant,
how complicated it is to
try to live and survive
in this country, when everything,
when research and data is attacking you.
So, I'm gonna start off with
"Chronicles of Losing Your Name"
There's this thing that happens to you
when you attend school in America.
You are told to grip your
pencil in a strange form,
so erotic, still painful.
The lead penetrates you
instead of the paper.
It feels different from the way
your parents taught you how to hold it.
I forgot your small hands
can't be holding up suns this early.
Your dad taught you to write
your name in a certain way.
A public display of how
wrong your parents were.
And so you begin to erase the swirl
your mom eloquently taught
you when writing the S.
But mommy forgot to tell you these
Ss never make it into history books.
Never told you this between prayers
So now your name is left fighting
off your number two pencil
Yelling, "Don't erase me!"
Don't erase me.
But you do.
Teachers now begin the next lesson
because she can't understand you
and between pauses she teaches you
how to say your name.
You can hear the anger in her voice
as she takes attendance.
She wants to skip over your name,
it doesn't sit well in her lips.
You hear her struggling,
and other kids hear it too.
They start giggling and you
want to giggle along because,
because how else do you
deal at a certain age
the act of being othered?
It helps that your mom
ironed your uniform because
because now you're scared.
It becomes your armor.
Your small brown hands
grip the edges of the skirt
as each letter escapes
It feels dirty, but that's your new name.
It fits better on scanned drug tests.
Makes people feel comfortable,
makes them think they know you.
Your tongue no longer
moves in the same way.
Now you hide away
any traces of your mother and father.
But you don't swallow home
is in back of your throat
and at the beginning,
at the beginning you try to correct them
Sonia Guinansaca.
They laugh at you for thinking
you knew how to say your own name.
How silly of you.
And then they will proceed to ask
where the name originates from.
Maybe you will answer,
but most times you will close your mouth
holding back, not allowing anyone else
to take anything else from you.
Same reasons, you hated
parent-teachers night.
You don't want your parents
to become unwanted objects
teachers keep locked in their desks.
You don't want your
parents to be thrown in
next to a yo-yo or Yu-Gi-Oh,
cards or Bubblicious gums,
objects prohibitive to our school days,
objects to be questioned,
objects mispronounced.
But your parents do come
As three of you sit in
front of the teacher,
you translating, the teacher speaking,
they exchange the tongue.
It's learning to move again.
And you leave with your mom and dad.
The teacher never gets to keep them.
And you begin to taste home.
And maybe years after that,
maybe when you are 24
and you will have the courage
to share your real name.
No, when you are 24,
you will allow people a glimpse into
that divine part of you,
because it is sacred to know your name.
It is sacred for your name
to be to dance on lips
And as worse than shout you will say
my name does not allow me to trust anyone
that cannot pronounce it right.
Guinansaca.
Notice, this difference in my name.
And I think that I wanted
to name this session
of my performance "Disrupting Research"
because I think that for
a majority of the time,
and either way, right?
Anti-immigration, or
pro-migration, there's always
this dichotomy of how
undocumented migrant community
should be talked about.
As good-fitting, or bad
immigrant, or good immigrant.
And I wanted to disrupt that
because it doesn't
allow room for humanity.
It doesn't allow room for the grey area.
Right?
And so, my next poem is
called "Calling Cards".
Because it's not easy.
Migration, all of these things.
It is not easy to swallow.
"Calling Cards".
One, I've crossed oceans and land,
working to connect one
phone line with another.
Like the umbilical cord of a child,
these $5, $10, $20 square
cards are more than plastic.
These calling cards have heart beats.
Two, we, we survive through phone lines.
The cycle of dialing numbers
On the other line waited abuela
On the other line waited birthday wishes
That you should have given us in person,
while you ate cake with us.
While we were here,
and you were there.
On the other line we
waited for your voice.
That is all we had.
Our dad waited for you, he still does.
Three, how do you dial a loved one,
when your fingers have worn out
from weaving too many memories
when your voice has changed
since the last time
you saw them in person.
Your bones have broken from their absence.
Your face is the only clue left
of what they might look like now.
Perhaps, it's best not
to look in the mirror.
Perhaps you are too ashamed
of looking for lost memories.
Four, I can still hear
Abuelita Olivia's voice
(speaking in foreign language)
Yes, Abuelita, I promise to return.
And then a long pause.
You hear her shuffling the phone,
Trying to remember
which side to talk from.
She's not familiar with this technology.
I call it old school.
Some call it poverty.
Abuelita's gentle voice rocks me back
to memories of when she
carried me as a baby
My face lays flat on her back
She hangs up and I lean
quickly onto her words.
Trying to let go, never enough minutes.
Five, calling cards don't
have heartbeats any more.
They just hang in the store, teasing you.
My dad stopped at the
bodega for other reasons,
his mouth curls up at
the end of the bottle,
Lucking for one more conversation.
I think believes that with every beer,
he gets closer to heaven, closer to her.
And secretly, I wish that was true.
The phone goes unused like
the passport in my wallet
No more dialing.
In his palms rest spaces
where my grandma is buried,
and even then, borders created
by the lines in his head
restrict him from being too close.
Dad wants to hold my hand.
But mostly, we look at each other,
hoping to find comfort, he
says I look like Abuela.
There's so many things that
are happening right now
in the United States,
nationally, globally,
and I think that sometimes
we compartmentalize issues
when they're so interconnected,
when they're moving.
And so, this next poem is called "Targets"
and is a reflection of what
is happening at the border
with unaccompanied minors,
but also just in general.
The lives of black and brown youth,
and thinking of Ferguson.
I think about the challenge
of being a child in 2014
I think about the challenge of
being a black or brown child,
Never children, just targets.
Little ones and older babies,
You should be carrying
book bags to school,
not through deserts.
Your bodies should only
be found in playgrounds,
not outlined on the
streets next to bullets.
I need composing by the border,
not looking from inside prisons.
Did you know that you are loved?
As a little one, I often wondered
if my parents ever loved me.
Why did they leave me?
Why can't I imagine anymore?
Why does this country hate me?
But black and brown children,
your imagination is sacred,
your presence is needed,
you're worthy of life.
As each of you become targets,
let you remember that your birth
signaled the beginning of sunrises,
and I will carry the sun for you.
You are kings and queens.
You are children.
So little ones, go on and play.
Cover the streets with the broken crayons.
Go on and build sand castles.
Build homes that we can all sleep in.
Imagine new beginnings.
And let your smile guide us to a world
where we all get to live.
Where we all get to outline flowers
and hopscotch on pavements,
and never outline each other's bodies.
Where we all get to live,
to never be targets, just children.
At least one generation
can enjoy their youth.
And for conclusion,
I know everything is,
like very heavy shit,
(laughing)
but that's the reality, right?
I think that when you're
other in this country,
and just you're constantly under attack,
everything is heavy so, personally myself,
I just acquired my green
card in the past month,
so that has fucked me up!
In my mind.
(laughing)
I'm like, "Here, no, take it back!"
(laughing)
I think that in the process of
being other in this country,
you try to just touch upon
the least of humanity that you have,
and sometimes you just
have to reflect back
on your family and your roots,
and that's where you find your comfort.
So, under this
announcement, it's going on,
and it's very haunting,
that clock right there.
And the live Tweets that
are coming in my phone too.
So, I keep thinking about my parents.
As we think of how all these policies,
all these reforms are being
constructed, and, like,
segueing them out.
And who's left behind, right?
Bursting the photographs
after trying to squeeze
all of the memories
They don't tell you this when you migrate.
Old Polaroids are never enough.
So you are left tracing
silhouettes of your grandparents.
Of whatever's left of them.
How many years has it been?
Five, 10, 20?
It's been 20.
In those 20 years,
you have been asked to hide your accent,
been asked to straighten up,
sit up straight.
Find some way to purify yourself.
Dig out the roots from your home
underneath your nails.
Cut your hair.
Pledge allegiance to the flag.
And if you can't?
Each thread will cut through
every inch of your body.
Teaching you that your
kind is not welcome,
is not meant for this nation.
That told you this, that
actually told you once
that they would measure
your success by how much,
or how smart you can be
And you tried to be smart, didn't you?
Books after books, you changed vocabulary
that can give you value.
You changed legislations
that could give you meaning.
Yes Sir, I am skilled worker.
Yes Sir, I can contribute.
No Sir, I haven't committed any crimes.
Then, against one another, you remember
that your mother almost didn't
make it through the border.
And this time around, this time around
she won't make it into legislation.
She won't make it into
healthcare packages.
She won't be remembered
during press conferences.
She will be dissected.
And research after research,
and research about how
much she doesn't belong
will be published.
They don't tell you this when you migrate.
- Hello everyone, good evening.
- [Audience Member] Good evening.
- My name is Dean Saranillio.
I teach in the Department of
Social and Cultural Analysis.
And, my research is on Hawaii,
I am also part of a movement
that aims to de-occupy Hawaii
from the United States,
and so, just light topics, right?
I have a lot to say here
and I know we only have
a certain amount of time to do so.
Maybe the best way to
kind of start things off
is to share a few jokes that
are pretty common in Hawaii.
And, these jokes were
created by a comedian
named Frank De Lima.
And Frank De Lima who himself
traveled throughout different
public schools, telling these jokes.
And so, one of the jokes
he used to tell is,
why are there so many Filipino failures?
Why are there so many Filipino janitors?
And the inverse,
why are there so many
Japanese success stories?
Why are there so many Japanese astronauts?
So this bizarre kind of
comedy and these kinds
of common sense logics
that themselves always
circulated throughout Hawaii.
And myself, being both
Filipino and Japanese,
and hearing these kinds of
jokes at such a young age,
it lead me, of course,
to want to dis-identify
with being Filipino and to
rather really try to highlight
being Japanese because I viewed that
as an avenue for success.
And I think this is very
specific to the kinds
of racial dynamics that exist in Hawaii.
And, in doing a certain
amount of research,
I think, one of the origins,
especially in regards to
the kinds of racial ideas
that emerged from the university,
is to think about the
work of Stanley Porteus.
And so, Stanley Porteus
maybe this is actually
more of an actually funny joke.
Is that, Stanley Porteus believed
that Filipinos, and
other primitive people,
including Kanaka Maoli, Native Hawaiians,
did not deserve to be educated
because they lacked the
capacity to be educated.
And the reason for this
is because he argued
that they suffered from what
he called ethnic retardation.
And ethnic retardation is ridiculous.
This retardation, he argues, is the result
of living along the equator.
And because of the earth's rotation,
it creates human heads
that are oblong-shaped,
(laughing)
and for these reasons,
Filipinos or Kanaka Maoli,
should not be educated, right?
And so, he himself began in Australia.
And he does a of work in rural schools.
And he works with grade school children
and with Aboriginal communities.
And it's here that he
begins to kind of develop
this idea around ethnic retardation.
In 1922, he was at New Jersey and he was
at the environmental training school.
And as a result of the
numerous labor protests,
that existed in Hawaii and
the militant labor movement,
this Hawaii sugar planters
brought Stanley Porteus
to Hawaii to teach in the
department of psychology
and they asked him to produce a book
that would help them to manage
these unruly labor militants.
And so he writes the book
called, "Temperament and Race".
And "Temperament and Race"
primarily gets its material
through conversations
with plantations owners,
plantation managers.
And their casual observations
about racism gets taken
as itself to be academic knowledge, right?
And so, a part of what he starts to argue
are along those lines of, kind of,
emphasizing a certain kind of
discourse around primitivism.
But, he's also utilizing
a discourse of Orientalism
that makes the argument,
and we've heard a lot of
those arguments tonight,
which is that the white race,
the more closer to majority they get,
the more effective they become.
The more feminine they become.
And for these reasons,
they have to be on guard
against the Japanese, because
the Japanese themselves,
their racial temperament,
is that they want to be,
what he called, more in the sun.
They are themselves jealous of the amount
of white privilege that
exists in the islands, right?
And so he's really kind of
creating these different
kinds of dynamics in Hawaii.
And so this,
these slides paint Hawaii as a
kind of multi-cultural utopia.
This kind of place with
racial harmony, right?
And he does similar kinds
of tests that he had done
in Australia, except this time in Hawaii,
in the public school system.
And he primarily measures
the children's head sizes
in order to make the arguments
around racial difference,
the kinds of arguments that
I've just kind of gone over.
So, these are just some of
the other kinds of citations
that he does, Emil Villager
from 1912, he's again,
using Australian Aboriginals
equivalent Negros, Malays,
Hawaiians, Chinese, Caucasians.
But I think here is really
important to understand
that there are these
kind of different kinds
of distinctions that he was primed to make
and argue between primitive
races and oriental races.
And so, in 1972 Stanley
Porteus passes away.
In 1974, two years later,
the University of Hawaii
Board of Regents of course,
names the social science
building after Stanley Porteus.
Strange.
And so, students and staff
and faculty immediately,
four months later, begin
organizing and they start
a movement to rename Porteus Hall.
And beginning in the 1970s,
they refused to call Porteus,
Porteus Hall, and instead
refer to it as Racism Hall.
And when I become a student
at the University of Hawaii
in 1997, I remember their
referring to this hall,
not as Porteus, but as Racism Hall.
And in 1997, it was my first
year as a college student.
I grew up on the island of
Maui, so I moved to Oahu,
and I attend college and I
remember catching the shuttle
to Student Services and
I have to walk past here.
And the first day of
school, this is what I see.
So above all nations, end racism
at the University of Hawaii now.
And it's a little bit difficult to see,
but there are effigies of
Japanese women, Filipino women,
native Hawaiian women, all
populations that Stanley Porteus
recommended be sterilized, right?
And I remember seeing this
and smiling to myself,
and thinking, I'm gonna love college!
(audience laughs)
And so in 1997,
the Associated Students at
the University of Hawaii,
the ASUH, they vote to support
the renaming of Porteus Hall,
and they are successful.
And so, Porteus Hall is
no longer referred to
as Porteus Hall, it's now Saunders Hall.
But, I think along the
lines of what everyone
has been saying tonight,
obviously it doesn't end here.
Specifically, I think
there are these certain
types of connection in the
ways in which Kanaka Maoli,
Native Hawaiians, are
themselves a population that
are legally cast as wards
of the state, right?
Which means that they lack
the capacity to make decisions
on their behalf for the 1.8
million acres of land that
is held, in trust, on their
behalf, by the state of Hawaii.
So, in this way I think
there are definite ways
in which it doesn't just,
Porteus' work, wasn't just
about pocketing control in terms of labor,
but it was also about
generating a discourse
that justified for everyone
why native Hawaiians
cannot be self-determining.
Why a Hawaiian nation could not exist,
and why the United States and
their occupation of Hawaii
was itself deemed necessary.
- Genetics: what can it mean?
The ability to perfect
the physical and mental
characteristics of every unborn child.
- Severed--
- Of genetic ingenuity--
- To choose the gene--
- In a sense...
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] In the
not too distant future,
our DNA will determine
everything about us.
A minute drop of blood,
saliva, or a single hair,
determines where you can work,
who you should marry,
what you're capable of achieving,
In a society where success
is determined by science,
divided by the standards of perfection,
one man's only chance,
- How do you expect to pull this off?
- I don't know, exactly.
- [Narrator] is to hide his own identity,
- This is the last day
that you're gonna be you
and I'm gonna be me.
- [Narrator] by borrowing someone else's.
- Congratulations.
- What about the interview?
- That was it.
- Do you think that you'd
be doing what you're doing
if it wasn't for who
you are, what you are?
- I'm feeling he might be
there under false pretenses,
playing somebody else's hand.
- They've got my picture
plastered up all over the
place, they'll recognize me.
- [Man] They won't recognize you.
- They'll recognize me!
- I don't recognize you!
They won't believe that
one of their elite could've
suckered them all this time.
- They are going to find me.
- [Narrator] But in a place
where any cell from any part
of your body can betray you,
how do you hide?
(grunting)
When we all shed 500 million cells a day?
(dramatic music)
Ethan Hawke,
Uma Thurman,
Welcome to Gattaca.
- Since humanity's expulsion from Eden,
we've had utopia on our mind.
Traditional utopia relies upon stability,
social stratification, the
abolition of private property,
and just as importantly, eugenics.
We see this in Plato's "Republic",
H.G. Wells' "A Modern Utopia",
and certainly eugenics
founder, Francis Galton's
little-known utopian
novel, "Kantsayanywhere".
All one word, beginning with a K.
In Galton's novel, a
professor much like the author
must prove himself fit
at a eugenics college
in order to marry his love.
Unfit individuals are segregated,
surveilled, and criminalized.
"Kantsayanywhere" is the
updated eugenic utopia
and a fantasy model for the
movement that would soon
rise up around the world,
promising a better, fitter future.
Pop cultural utopias
continue to grow in variety
throughout the 20th century.
Prior to World War II, many
science fiction novels,
such as Robert Heinlein's
"Beyond This Horizon"
accepted eugenic ideas as the
basis for utopian society.
In the Golden Age of Science Fiction,
the form's classic writers,
such as Isaac Asimov
and Arthur C. Clarke
posited futures filled with
rational male actors,
rationally rationalizing the way
to an ever more rational future.
The latter half of the
20th century is littered
with the dystopian fallout.
The forum most of us are familiar with
in our pop-cultural lives.
The state controls
necessary to manage a utopia
have become sinister and
works like "Blade Runner",
"Ender's Game", "The
Giver", and "Gattaca".
These worlds often feature
a radical individual
who wakes society up and
frees us from the bonds
of state, bureaucratic,
or corporate control.
The eutopic, dystopic
binary owes deal to our
fascination and repulsion with eugenics.
The utopia offered to
us in the eugenic model
is one premise on abjection,
seeking to transcend
the limits of humanity
by removing part of it.
On the other side, the
dystopian reaction features
the libertarian ideal of
the individualist hero.
Either way, the diverse
reality of our humanity
is a liability.
What's frustrating about
this cliched binary
is how it keeps us from
utilizing eutopic framings
to create real world change.
While the right offers
pastoral and suburban fantasies
of earlier eras to underpin
its policies and motivate
its voters, the left is often
pigeon-holed as academic
and lacking vision.
A eutopic exercise that
accepted the mixed nature of our
realities and our beings
and framed a more just
and equitable future
could provide a visionary
model for radical policies.
(slow music)
- [Narrator] Professor Capron is
a recognized expert in bioethics.
He believes designer children
born of IVF could suffer
possible psychological damage.
- We now have doctors doing
things which are not aimed
at avoiding suffering for
the child, they're aimed at
turning the child into this
object for the parents' desire.
Now, that's not a formula for
a child having a flourishing
life, for having a life in which
they're secure if the sense
is that parents only want you if you meet
the parents' expectations
in very particular ways.
- [Narrator] As yet, there
is no study on the future
psychological development
of children born of
non-medical in vitro fertilization.
This is particularly worrying
since a doctor recently
decided to go even further by proposing,
in addition to the baby's
gender, hair color,
eyes, and skin could
be chosen in a service
that will cost $18,000.
The practitioner is non
other than Dr. Steinberg.
- Physical characteristics
are genetically determined.
Clearly our hair color is
genetically determined,
our eye color is genetically
determined, our complexion
is genetically determined.
If it's genetically
determined, we should be able
to observe those genetic
traits in every embryo.
- [Narrator] The announcement
sparked unprecedented
controversy, some have
accused Dr. Steinberg
of creating a new form of discrimination.
Others of the best case scenarios.
Dr. Steinberg decided
to withdraw his offer,
for now at least.
- We had many patients, and
we continue to this day,
even though we published that
we're not going to offer it,
they still continue to call,
seeking to choose eye color.
- [Narrator] In recent
decades, the revolution
in prenatal diagnosis has allowed parents
to increasingly program
their unborn children.
And most countries practice
large-scale screening,
not in terms of the color of the eyes,
but of the sex of the baby.
In California, it should
be recalled Dr. Jain offers
in vitro fertilization to
allow couples to choose the
sex of their baby and discard embryos with
easy-to-diagnose genetic
diseases, such as Down syndrome.
In the coming months, the
doctor will offer customers
a much more elaborate analysis of the DNA
that will detect diseases
that can, in fact, be cured.
- One of the best described
mutations is called
the BRCA gene, B-R-C-A gene.
We also call it the breast cancer gene.
If a woman is a carrier
of that gene, she has,
approximately, 80% life time
chance of having Breast Cancer.
So, if we could detect
that gene in an embryo
or perhaps an egg, we can
then eliminate that genetic
predisposition for the
rest of her family members,
or offspring and future generations.
- So my very brief remarks
this evening are framed
by two questions.
Now, the first is really a
question we've been reckoning
with all evening.
How do you rank a race?
Is it through skull
measurements, facial angles,
or brain size?
Or maybe shades of yellow and
brown in skin, hair, and eyes?
Or are standardized average
statistics: IQ scores,
family incomes, SATs and
high school drop out rates
more suited to our modern moment?
Today we often see race ranking
through the lens of culture.
Immatures, discourse for
so-called urban youth.
The coded language of law
and order, crime and poverty,
guided by the same logic
with visceral difference
in disgust, encoded in
old-school dichotomies.
The Chinese exclusion
era's first race question.
Eugenics language for fit versus unfit.
American eugenics offers a critical bridge
between historical methods
of scientific racism,
and today's policy-driven biases.
It's a uniquely modern
moment in the history
of what we might call race ranking.
When popular common
sense racial hierarchies
were refined and redeployed
by racists and xenophobes.
Flanked by both popular biases
and supposedly pure science.
Emerged anecdotal and the statistical
adding to an established obsession
with physical measurement,
the culture of testing.
Testing intelligence, capacity, pathology.
Of course, these matrices
of misinformation all came
together in the infamous vaults
of the Eugenics Record Office.
Clearly the 20th century's
first step towards big data.
Crucially, the research
was neatly packaged
when presented to the public
in now-familiar arguments about
taxation, welfare, incarceration rates.
My second question, which, perhaps,
is something that has sort
of been something that you've
been thinking about as the
APA Institute has brought
forth this project on eugenics:
What does eugenics history have
to do with Asian Americans?
So, here's my take on it.
Many talk about the
model minority myth as if
it's a post-World War II invention,
a useful device of rhetoric,
devised for a particular
modern political context.
This is true, in part.
But, western white society
has been regurgitating
very similar racial
hierarchies for centuries.
And Asians, east Asians in particular,
have always occupied an ambiguous place.
Clearly non-white but clearly non-black.
Simultaneously feared and commended.
Law-abiding, disciplined, hard-working.
But also dirty, unwholesome aliens.
In 1873, founder of
eugenics, Francis Galton,
wrote a disturbing
posable in which he argued
that the Chinese should
settle and repopulate Africa.
Because the African
climate was too tropical
for European settlement, Galton argued,
hardened Chinese would
be the next best thing.
He wrote, "My proposal is
to make the encouragement
"of the Chinese settlements at one or more
"suitable places on the
east coast of Africa,
"a part of our national
policy, in the belief that
"the Chinese immigrants will
not only maintain the position,
"but that they would multiply
and their descendants supplant
"the inferior African race.
"I should expect that a
large part of the African
"seaboard, now sparsely
occupied by lazy savages,
"might in a few years be
tenanted by industrious,
"order-loving Chinese."
It's a shocking sentiment,
but in some senses,
sadly familiar in its racial position.
Today, when Bill O'Reilly
uses Asian American success
to deny the existence of white privilege,
or when white lawyers
use Asian faces to fuel
affirmative action lawsuits,
they're unwittingly
drawing on a centuries-old tradition of
race-ranking which has
consistently contained East Asians
in an ambiguous middle.
A middle that simultaneously
upholds whiteness
while it degrades blackness.
How do you break down the
system so deeply entrenched?
To do so takes subverting
the very understandings and
articulations of difference.
From skull sizes to SAT scores,
that continue to rank and divide us all.
- Thanks for having me,
thanks for being here.
So as I went through the exhibit,
over the past few weeks
I've been working on this
"Normal" poem.
Because as I was going through the exhibit
and as I was taking a look at the windows,
one of the things I found
most interesting was the
elastic terminology and
how assaulted and depressed
I felt as a legacy of
eugenics, the word normal is.
So when I looked up the
etymology of it, normal,
before the late 1800s
was, as I understand it,
a mathematical term.
And it wasn't until the
late 1800s that it started
to be applied to human beings.
And I started to think
about my life and, just,
being from an Indian
reservation and being gay,
and now living in the
biggest city America, like,
how abnormal I feel, but then it's like,
well, what is the normal
that I'm talking about?
And what's normal for me?
So, that's the spirit
with which I made this.
It has become so much
longer than I anticipated,
so I'm just going to read,
like, 10 minutes of it.
"Normal Poem"
Feeble, defective,
inferior, imbecility,
pure, deviant,
American, mixed,
natural, standard,
data, crazy,
facts, moron,
intelligent,
classic, good,
unfit, fit,
sane, mask,
open, chill,
smooth, foreign,
educated, artsy,
well-traveled, laid-back,
cool, quirky,
quality, toned,
agenda-free, gifted,
nice, professional,
athletic, secure,
facts, down-to-earth,
mild-to-wild, that spark,
the X factor, my truth,
flesh-toned, support our troops,
she's crazy, that's amazing,
normal, you know what I mean?
Normal is defined, not by what it is,
but what surrounds it.
Meaning it could literally be anything.
It is nothing.
Let's say I wanna get a nose piercing.
Let's say I'm 30-years-old.
Let's say nothing big and bull-like,
nothing too attractive,
nothing chandliering from septum to lobe,
just a simple little stud.
Is it normal to get a nose ring at 30?
No, it's not.
Am I just afraid of death?
Yes, probably.
(laughing)
Is there nothing more
normal than fearing death?
It is very normal to fear death.
Should I get a nose ring?
It would look very cute on you.
(laughing)
I have the feeling to be very pure.
I have inherited a lot of bad ideas.
Language reflects the
relationship between speakers
in groups, like new restaurants
in a changing neighborhood.
A straight guy saying, "Size queen."
A white gay saying, "Go off!"
Kelly Clarkson singing
with En Vogue on stage,
that part in "Free Your Mind"
"Oh Lord, forgive me for
having straight hair."
♪ It doesn't mean there's
another blood in my heirs ♪
Don't get me wrong,
a couple of my friends are
straight guys, I think.
I've dated the white gays,
and I literally love Kelly Clarkson.
Things reflect their intersections.
James, the guy I'm seeing,
looks at me like I'm not speaking English.
"I believe in facts," he says.
He says, "You talk like
you're always being
"interrupted by yourself."
He says, "You take big
breaths before you speak,
"like an excited child."
(inhales) What is a fact, even?
James rolls his eyes.
"What do you mean, what does it mean?
"A fact is a fact, facts are real.
"Proven, objective."
I say, "Facts are created and curated
"by authority figures with agendas."
I say, "Facts are used
to subjugate, intimidate,
"enslave, and kill entire races of people,
"reproductive rights, et cetera."
I say, "So yeah, I have a complicated
"relationship with facts,
and pretty much everything.
"The only thing I think
is objective about facts,
"is your blind allegiance to them, James."
Or, I say nothing, because
I'm trying to get lucky,
but I'll save it for a poem.
(audience laughs)
"The Normal Poem" is a container for words
like, whilst and tamp and tincture.
It rhymes every couple of lines.
It conducts something of
permanent in universal interest.
"The Normal Poem" takes
something like an apple,
and turns it into the skin,
and the seeds, and the core,
it talks about gravity, it
talks about Adam and Snow White,
and the stem of knowledge.
In my poem, Apple is an Indian drag queen
who dresses like a milkmaid and sings
"Half-Breed" by Cher.
(laughing)
"What's your nationality?"
This guy shouts at me
during drag queen karaoke
at this gay bar two stops down the line.
In order to talk about a hurricane,
you first have to talk about the
pre-existing disturbance over the ocean.
So you have to talk about
mean ocean temperatures.
So you have to talk about human industry
and the Sun's rays.
So you have to talk about helium.
So did you know helium is named
for the Sun god, Helios?
And was defined by a gap
in the solar spectrum
so literally not itself,
but what surrounded it?
So of course we have to
talk about the Solar System,
and the Milky Way, the
networks of the universe,
and the Big Bang,
How far back do you have to go
to answer a question about race?
"Um, American," I say.
Or, "Um, Kumeyaay, I'm
from the Kumeyaay Nation."
Which are both technically true,
but when he says nationality
what he's saying is,
you look vaguely not
like a total white boy.
And, I'm trying to get lucky,
so I put on my not-bored face,
"I'm from an Indian
reservation, near San Diego."
I burst back over the drag queens
who are singing the Michael
Buble version of "Feeling Good".
(laughing)
Before something like deviance
can be legislated against,
something like normal has
to be more closely defined.
The data has gate-keepers.
But I understand it,
like a soar of sky after hiking for hours.
Like the high ceiling in the main lobby
of the Natural History Museum.
Like the scored edges of a cloud.
The panic of something
deafeningly unknowable.
The institution is very normal.
The audience is very normal.
The fear is very normal.
I'm a weirdo faggot,
I'm incapable of making anything
worthy of this audience.
In the room, the people come and go.
In the room I realize I never left.
I see my shoulders in the drawers,
my face in the folders,
my body pinned and writhing on the board.
I tell James, "I feel
depressed by normal."
He says, "The oppression
of normal is equal
"to the power you give it."
And I say, "The oppression of normal is
"so much more than the power I give it.
"Because it's also the power that other
"people give it, especially if they
"have power over my body."
Dear New York,
The only thing viral about
Ebola is the Internet.
(laughing)
Indian people are mean as shit.
This one boy, I get to say it.
(laughing)
This one boy is from Cocopah
Tries to kick my ass at the Barona Pow Wow
because he thinks I'm
just some rando white fag.
He stubs his cigarette out on my sternum,
he says, "And next time,
it's your face, bitch."
But my cousins run up quick, tell him to,
"Back the fuck off!"
They tell him my dad is Sheridan Pico
and make him say sorry.
Oh Tommy, you shoulda seen your face
when you thought you were
gonna get your ass beat!
I always wonder how my
re-telling will go over
with my cousins.
But, in this small narrative, for example,
three of the five present
in the events are dead.
This isn't a coincidence.
At some point, at many points in his life,
the boy from Cocopah,
nobody intervened on his behalf
when fear and anger and
abuse poured into him
and lit a match,
waits for him after school,
in the delivery room,
and grows him into the person
America cultured him to be.
What do they call me?
My name is Saffronia.
Normal is oppressive occupier god
that washed up on my shoreline,
grew roots, and now has
an impressive network
straight through the
mantle of fire, marble.
Normal is a mixed metaphor.
It's not a secret that normal
isn't really good at networking.
Normal has very expensive socks.
Normal is passing for human.
Normal is very perceptive.
Normal is very conceptual.
Because I have a hunch that
the closer a line come
to approaching normal,
the less it occupies the mind
and maybe the same goes for approaching
the opposite of normal.
Normal is only the idea of normal.
But human beings, what we are,
creators, the seat of ideas
that get passed down like genes,
it's no secret.
Normal becomes a force that pushes back.
Normal is a house on a hill.
You imagine a family inside.
A father asking how your day went.
He stays.
He returns your calls.
He remembers your birthday.
You didn't come home from college one year
to find your stuff in moldy,
rat-infested boxes in a rusty storage unit
under the tree you fell
from in fourth grade,
where he didn't find you a day,
Not because he was looking,
but because he went out to get more beer.
The father doesn't look at you
with your suitcase and say,
"Oh, I turned your room into a
healing and meditation room."
And you ask, "Why?"
And he says, "I didn't think
you were living here any more."
And you shout, "I am in college!"
And he says, "Well,
congratu-fucking-lations!"
He says, "Bootcamp was my college!"
He says, "I learned how to
jump out of airplanes, faggot."
He says, "I was the last thing
"my best friend saw before he died."
He said, "I wasn't even
old enough to drink yet."
He said, "You were named after him."
No, the father in the house on the hill,
teaches you how to shave,
and tie ties, and play poker.
He teaches you about
cigars and pocket squares
and how to build a fire.
The mom doesn't scream at you
and kick holes in the door,
and then lay in bed for days
with her eyes fixed on
crannies in the ceiling.
She scratches your head.
And teaches you how to make chicken.
And flirt with people.
She teaches you how to
look people in the eye.
And use words like
assiduous, and stentorian,
and how to drink wine
with those huge, delicate
swan glasses you're too afraid to touch
in the crown molding restaurants
that you don't belong in.
It's hard to unhook
the heavy marble normal
from the chain around your neck.
It can't be helped when
history is stolen like water.
In the opening poem of her
book, "Of Gods and Strangers",
Tina Chang writes, "As the trees split,
"a religion crashed to a moan.
"People were shocked to learn
"the sky was not a chariot of water."
My invaders learned it
scarcely rains in San Diego.
Within just 20 years from 1850 to 1870,
The indigenous population fell by 60%.
I'm missing many cousins.
Have you seen them?
Anthropologists write,
"Population decline"
with the gentle implication
of a drying fog.
The recourse suggests resources.
And people say, "Get over!"
I read a lot.
I've been singing lately.
Seeing art.
It's hard but I'm starting
to see the chariot of water.
Thanks.
(slow, tense music)
(clapping)
