American Eugenics

Few Americans are aware of one of the most notorious Landmark Supreme Court cases in history, Buck V. Bell. Carrie Buck was a young woman that was mandated to be forcibly sterilized by the state - a practice known as negative eugenics that would enjoy popularity with Nazi Germany in years to come. The Supreme Court held that it was constitutional to genetically modify this woman because she was deemed "feeble minded." Or, as Oliver Wendell Holmes put it succinctly "Three generations of imbeciles are enough."

Composite class portraits were natural heirs to the nineteenth-century social-anthropological/ethnographic photographic discourses that effectively defined “the other,” functioned differently. Only, rather than visually defining “marginality,” composite class portraits idealized a semi-aristocratic group of white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant stock as the ideal models for an American, New England-focused, Positive Eugenics agenda that was indoctrinated at institutions including Harvard University. The photographs – which made using founding father of Eugenics Francis Galton’s composite techniques – discursively conveyed specific gender-role and hetero-normative norms for the consumption of college and university students. While men were expected to become captains of their industries, upper-class New England women were taught that they should lead a “proper” social life, which involved marrying within their caste, supporting their husbands, and maintaining the family’s social profile. As upper-class society saw itself as threatened by waves of immigrants, the women of colleges such as Smith College, for instance, therefore were reminded of their critical roles as mothers whose shared destiny included raising “well-bred” offspring to preserve their own elevated social caste in faithful adherence to the mission of the Positive Eugenics movement.
This book takes a closer look at composite portraiture and other related photographic practices that documented an idealized “reality” of the New England social-caste experience. Despite these images’ didactic and rhetorical functions as a reminder of “class” unity and duty, when the portraits are positioned in relation to the individual stories and portraits of members of the class, they reveal points of non-conformity and rebellion with their own rhetoric.

‘Tiger Mom’ spurns out another bestseller – a bit racist but true?

NEW HAVEN – Social media is currently hyping a soon-to-be published book by America’s notorious ‘Tiger Mom’, Amy Chua, author of The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, and her husband Jed Rubenfeld. Both are Yale law professors.

The new book The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America, ready for global distribution in February this year by Penguin, is preceded by a massive PR-campaign aimed at plucking some of America's most sensitive nerves: eugenics, racism, cultural superiority, and sheer nonsense.