Taking Race Into Account: The Specter of Eugenics

The recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions regarding affirmative action represent another chapter in an unfolding American narrative about the appropriate role of race in public policy. In Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, for example, the court found that affirmative action policies unfairly advantaged African-American applicants while disadvantaging Asian-Americans, consistently rating African-Americans’ non-academic “personal qualities” higher than any other group while rating Asian-Americans’ the lowest.

At the turn of the 20^th century, the heyday of eugenics, the American psychology of race looked quite different.

The eugenicists promoted the idea that institutions of higher education can and should discriminate between people based on race. They based such recommendations, which they extended to other spheres, such as immigration and employment, on the idea that characteristics such as intelligence are heritable. They argued for public policies that encouraged reproduction among the highly intelligent while discouraging it among those of lower intellectual ability. Such policies were embraced by the Nazis, who sought to eliminate the disabled and minority groups of “inferior stock.”

David Starr Jordan in 1921

E. Spencer Mackey, The Days of a Man, 1921

Consider David Starr Jordan, one of the world’s foremost ichthyologists and the founding president of Stanford University. During his more than 20 years in that office, Jordan published such treatises as “The Blood of the Nation: A Study of the Decay of Races through the Survival of the Unfit,” and “The Human Harvest.” In addition, he served as one of the trustees of the Human Betterment Foundation, which advocated compulsory sterilization of the unfit, and chaired the Committee on Eugenics of the American Breeder’s Association, which promoted both sterilization and deportation.

Simply put, Jordan was a racist. He maintained that the “highest range of possibilities” has been achieved by the “blond races” of Europe, while decrying “Mexico’s teeming millions, ignorant and…lacking most of our Anglo-Saxon virtues,” the “unutterable bad” of the “uneducated Chinese of the lowest type,” and the choice of “negro suffrage,” which he regarded as “the least of the evils, no doubt, but an evil nevertheless,” like all evils destined to become a “festering sore in the body politic.” He found among such groups “pedigrees of the dissolute, the feeble-minded, the idle, the defective.”

Based on his eugenicist psychology, which took for granted that some races are less fit than others, Jordan argued for strict limits on the immigration of the unfit. “The dangers of foreign immigration lie in the overflow to our shores of hereditary unfitness. The causes that lead to degeneration have long been at work among the poor of Europe,” he wrote. Likewise, he warned against what he called “indiscriminate charity,” which has been a “fruitful cause of the survival of the unfit,” declaring that “to kill the strong and feed the weak is to provide for a progeny of weakness.”

To say that Jordan’s views influenced admissions at Stanford would be misleading. Up until the early 1950s, virtually any male who applied was accepted. But as the university moved to more selective admissions practices, and while strenuously denying that it asked about applicants’ religion or race or employed any form of a quota system, it began limiting the number of Jewish applicants it accepted. Only last year, the university’s president apologized to the Jewish community for the university’s policy during those years “to suppress the admission of Jewish students.”

Eugenicists such as Jordan thought they were doing their universities, their nation, and humankind a service by assigning human beings to different categories and then determining which categories were inherently superior or inferior. They thought that you could look at a photograph or a checked box on a demographic survey and determine who should be admitted and encouraged or excluded and suppressed. They exalted the importance of fixed biological traits and believed that those with inferior endowments should be weeded out.

If we adopt a psychology like Jordan's and begin sorting and selecting people based on demographic categories, we open the door to all manner of mischief. We begin supposing that we can judge a person’s worthiness or unworthiness at a glance. In fact, however, human potential is not just skin deep. To really know what someone is capable of, we need to know not how they can be classified but who they are as a person. We need to read their essay, learn what others who know them well say about them, watch them in action, or best of all, engage them in conversation.

Perhaps this is why Martin Luther King, Jr. described racial segregation in his 1963 "Letter from Birmingham Jail" as an “existential expression of man’s tragic separation, an expression of his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness.” Just four months later, standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, he spoke of a dream that one day his “four little children will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” What really matters is not race or biological pedigree but who people are, what they are capable of, and the difference they aspire to make.

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People view the recent Supreme Court decisions from very different points of view. Yet having revisited how Jordan and many of his fellow eugenicists used race as a cudgel against minority groups, the possibility emerges that shifting higher education's focus away from race may help to prevent future intolerance and oppression. To dwell on such fixed characteristics is to open the door to a fearsome psychological menace that can obscure and distort our view of our fellow human beings, who deserve to be known and judged as individuals and not as members of any demographic category.