About This Unit

This unit treats race not as a discovered biological fact but as a category produced through twentieth-century institutions — laboratories, courts, clinics, immigration offices, hospitals — that classified bodies in the name of "fitness," "heredity," and "national stock." The American Eugenics Movement, which gathered scientific authority, philanthropic funding, and statutory power between the 1880s and the 1940s, supplies the historical material through which Module 1's constructionist argument moves from the abstract category of race into the operations of state and science that put bodies into racial relation. The unit traces how compulsory sterilization, restrictive immigration law, marriage prohibition, intelligence testing, and public-health surveillance worked together to make some bodies legible as citizens and others as threats to a racially imagined national future.

The central analytical concept of the unit is biopolitics — the regulation of life, reproduction, and population health as a form of political power — and the readings ask learners to follow biopolitical logic from the eugenic movement's interwar peak through its formal repudiation after the Holocaust and into the present. Eugenics did not end in 1945. Its statutes remained on the books in many states into the 1970s; its sterilization practices recurred in Indian Health Service clinics, in California prisons, in ICE detention facilities; its vocabulary survives in contemporary debates about genetic ancestry, embryo selection, and the "weaponized" race science of online subcultures. The unit's argument is not that the past explains the present but that the institutional and discursive infrastructures built by eugenicists were never fully dismantled, and that learners need this history to read contemporary debates about reproduction, citizenship, and genetic science clearly.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this unit, learners will be able to:

• Trace the institutional history of the American Eugenics Movement from its late-nineteenth-century origins through its mid-twentieth-century discrediting and its post-1945 afterlives.
• Distinguish biopolitics as an analytical framework for the political regulation of life and reproduction from eugenics as a specific historical movement, and apply both to a U.S. case.
• Analyze how reproductive politics — sterilization law, contraceptive programming, immigration restriction, and family policing — function as sites where racial categories are institutionally produced and reproduced.
• Identify continuities between historical eugenic practices and contemporary debates over genetics, reproductive justice, and citizenship, drawing on both archival and present-day sources.

Keywords

• American Eugenics Movement
• Biopolitics
• Reproductive politics
• Citizenship formation
• Scientific racism
• Public health

Open Educational Resources

• Precision Healthcare: Genomics-Informed Nursing. "Eugenics and Scientific Racism." 2025. Access the book chapter.

Textbook chapter · CC BY-NC 4.0.

This chapter from an open-licensed nursing textbook introduces the history of eugenics and scientific racism for healthcare professionals in training. It traces the emergence of eugenic frameworks in late-nineteenth-century biology, their institutionalization in twentieth-century American medicine and public-health policy, and their legacy in contemporary health inequities and genetic-counseling practice. The chapter addresses the role of nurses, physicians, and public-health officials in carrying out sterilization programs, the racial logics that shaped which populations were targeted, and the ways scientific racism continues to shape diagnostic categories, risk assessment, and the clinical encounter. Written for nursing students, the chapter situates eugenics as a professional and clinical inheritance rather than as a discrete historical episode, and provides learners outside the health professions with a clear introduction to the medical and biopolitical dimensions of the unit's central themes.

• Panofsky, Aaron, Kushan Dasgupta, Nicole Iturriaga, and Bernard Koch. "Confronting the 'Weaponization' of Genetics by Racists Online and Elsewhere." In "Envisioning a More Just Genomics," edited by Josephine Johnston, Deanne Dunbar Dolan, Danielle M. Pacia, Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, and Mildred K. Cho. Special report, Hastings Center Report 54, no. S2 (2024): S14–S21. Access the article.

Journal article · Open access.

Panofsky, Dasgupta, Iturriaga, and Koch examine how genetic science is being appropriated and reframed by white supremacist online communities to support claims about innate racial difference and hierarchy. Drawing on a multi-year study of online forums and the genetics-adjacent content circulated on them, the authors document how concepts from population genetics, ancestry testing, and polygenic-score research are extracted from their scientific contexts and recast as evidence for race essentialism. The essay distinguishes overt racist deployments of genetics from more diffuse appropriations that draw on legitimate published research, and it considers what responsibilities scientists and journals bear when their findings circulate in racist contexts. Part of the Hastings Center's "Envisioning a More Just Genomics" special report, the piece extends the unit's argument that eugenic logic did not end in 1945 but persists in the institutional and discursive infrastructures that contemporary debates about race and biology still navigate.

• PBS American Experience. The Eugenics Crusade: What's Wrong with Perfect? Directed by Michelle Ferrari. Boston: WGBH, 2018. Watch the documentary.

Documentary (video).

A two-hour American Experience documentary tracing the rise and fall of the American Eugenics Movement from its late-nineteenth-century origins through its mid-twentieth-century discrediting. The film draws on archival film, photographs, and the papers of the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor to reconstruct how a coalition of biologists, philanthropists, public-health officials, and lawmakers built a movement that produced compulsory sterilization laws in thirty-two states, the 1924 Immigration Act, and the intellectual climate for Buck v. Bell. Interviews with historians situate the movement in its scientific moment and trace its connections to Nazi racial science. Learners will encounter the institutional and personal scale of the movement — the laboratories, family-study fieldworkers, state hospitals, and exhibitions at world's fairs — alongside the testimony of sterilization survivors whose accounts were central to the movement's eventual legal repudiation.

• Van Camp, Nathan. "The Biopolitical Turn." Chap. 1 in Redesigning Life: Eugenics, Biopolitics, and the Challenge of the Techno-Human Condition. Brussels: Peter Lang, 2015. Read the chapter (PDF).

Book chapter (PDF) · CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

The opening chapter of Van Camp's open-access book surveys the analytical concept of biopolitics from its development in Foucault's lectures through its elaboration by Agamben, Hardt and Negri, Esposito, and others. Van Camp argues that the "biopolitical turn" in late-twentieth-century theory provides resources for analyzing not only twentieth-century eugenics but also contemporary genetic-enhancement, embryo-selection, and human-augmentation technologies as continuous expressions of political power over life. The chapter introduces key distinctions — between sovereign power and biopower, between making live and letting die, between population and the individual body — that anchor the unit's analytical vocabulary. Readers unfamiliar with continental political theory will encounter clear summaries of the relevant arguments; readers with prior exposure will find a synthesis that prepares them for the unit's American historical material. The chapter operates as the theoretical companion to the unit's case-based readings.

• National Human Genome Research Institute. "Eugenics and Scientific Racism." Bethesda, MD: National Institutes of Health. Read the fact sheet.

Fact sheet · Open access.

A National Human Genome Research Institute fact sheet introducing the history of eugenics and its entanglement with the scientific authority of genetics. Maintained by NHGRI as part of its public-education materials, the fact sheet traces how the eugenics movement deployed early genetic concepts to justify sterilization, immigration restriction, and racial classification, and how those deployments shaped both popular understandings of heredity and the development of genetics as a scientific discipline. The document also addresses the ongoing responsibility of the genomics community to acknowledge and counter the misuses of genetic science in contemporary contexts, including the misappropriation of ancestry and genomic data by racist movements. Written for a general public audience, the fact sheet provides learners with an institutional perspective on eugenics from the federal agency that now leads U.S. genomics research, situating present-day genomic medicine in continuing dialogue with its own disciplinary history.

Key Scholarship

• Nelson, William Max. Enlightenment Biopolitics: A History of Race, Eugenics, and the Making of Citizens. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024. Access the publisher page.

Book.

Nelson's Enlightenment Biopolitics relocates the origins of modern eugenic thought from the late nineteenth century — where most American histories begin — to the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment, arguing that the philosophical and political projects that produced modern conceptions of the citizen also produced the conceptual apparatus through which populations could be sorted, ranked, and improved. Drawing on French, British, and German sources, Nelson examines how Enlightenment naturalists, philosophers, and political theorists treated race, heredity, and citizenship as joint problems of governance, and traces how the resulting frameworks were inherited by nineteenth- and twentieth-century eugenicists. The book situates the American Eugenics Movement within a longer transatlantic genealogy and argues that the constructionist critique of race must engage not only with the scientific racism of the eugenic era but with the philosophical foundations on which it built. Provides learners with a deeper historical baseline for the unit's analytical vocabulary.

• Lombardo, Paul A. Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell. Updated ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022. Access the publisher page.

Book.

Lombardo's Three Generations, No Imbeciles reconstructs the 1927 Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell, in which the Court upheld Virginia's compulsory sterilization statute. Drawing on archival research and trial records, Lombardo argues that the case was engineered by eugenicists — that the petitioner, Carrie Buck, was not the "feebleminded" daughter of a "feebleminded" mother the record represented her to be, that her lawyer cooperated with the state to produce a test case, and that the medical evidence on which Justice Holmes built his notorious opinion was fabricated. The updated 2022 edition includes new material on the case's continuing legal afterlife, including the Supreme Court's failure to overturn Buck v. Bell in subsequent reproductive-rights decisions. Learners will encounter law not as a neutral arbiter of biopolitical disputes but as a site that eugenicists actively shaped, and will gain a detailed account of one of the most consequential moments in American eugenic history.

• Roberts, Dorothy. Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty. 2nd ed. New York: Vintage Books, 2017. Access the publisher page.

Book.

Roberts's Killing the Black Body argues that American reproductive politics — from chattel slavery through Sanger's Negro Project, from forced sterilization in southern states through Norplant policies and welfare-conditioned contraception in the late twentieth century — has operated as a continuous racial project that has conscripted Black women's bodies in service of changing demographic anxieties about the racial composition of the nation. Roberts traces how the languages of population control, reproductive responsibility, and family planning have repeatedly been deployed in ways that target Black women, and she develops a framework for understanding reproductive justice that goes beyond the abortion-rights paradigm of mainstream feminism. The 2017 edition adds a new introduction addressing the post-1997 trajectory: the rise of long-acting reversible contraceptives, the continued use of sterilization in carceral settings, and the entanglement of reproductive politics with the family-policing system. Provides the unit's most sustained treatment of how eugenic logic has reshaped itself through successive generations.

• Stern, Alexandra Minna. Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016. Access the publisher page.

Book.

Stern's Eugenic Nation presents the most comprehensive recent history of the American Eugenics Movement, with particular attention to California — the state responsible for approximately one-third of all forced sterilizations in U.S. history. Drawing on archival research at state hospitals, eugenic organizations, and public-health agencies, Stern traces how eugenic frameworks shaped not only sterilization law but immigration restriction at the U.S.–Mexico border, intelligence testing in schools, public-health surveillance in cities, and even conservation policy and population biology. The book argues that the breadth of eugenic application across institutional domains — and the post-1945 redeployment of eugenic ideas under new vocabularies — makes the movement central rather than peripheral to twentieth-century American state-building. The second edition adds material on contemporary genomics and on the survivors' movement that produced California's 2003 apology for its sterilization program. Anchors the unit's claim that eugenics is a structural rather than an episodic feature of American history.

• Molina, Natalia. Fit to Be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879–1939. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Access the publisher page.

Book.

Molina's Fit to Be Citizens? examines how public-health discourse in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Los Angeles racialized Mexican, Chinese, and Japanese residents by treating them as carriers of disease and threats to the health of the national body. Drawing on records from city and county health departments, immigration files, and public-health journals, Molina shows how quarantines, vaccination campaigns, housing inspections, and the regulation of food and laundry establishments produced racial classifications that materially shaped who could become a citizen and on what terms. The book argues that public health was a major site at which biopolitical categories were assembled in the United States — not at the margins of the eugenic movement but at its operational center — and that understanding the racialization of Mexican Americans, in particular, requires attention to medical and sanitary discourses alongside more familiar legal and labor histories. Connects the unit's biopolitical frame to a concrete municipal case.

Case Studies

• The Contested Legacy of Margaret Sanger

Multi-source case study · Primary and secondary sources.

A multi-source examination of Margaret Sanger's contested legacy as both a birth-control pioneer and a figure entangled with the American Eugenics Movement. The case study draws on the Margaret Sanger Papers Project's archival study "Birth Control or Race Control? Sanger and the Negro Project" (NYU, 2001), Planned Parenthood's 2022 "History of Planned Parenthood" statement reassessing Sanger's legacy and the organization's relationship to its founder, and the use of "Opposition Claims About Margaret Sanger" in Supreme Court briefing (2018). The case study juxtaposes archival scholarship, institutional self-narration, and contemporary political and legal citations to ask learners how primary and secondary sources can be read against each other when a historical figure's legacy is actively contested in the present.

• Immigration Detention and Coerced Sterilization: History Tragically Repeats Itself

American Civil Liberties Union, 2020 · Investigative commentary.

The ACLU's account of the 2020 whistleblower complaint by nurse Dawn Wooten, which alleged that detained migrant women at the Irwin County Detention Center in Georgia had been subjected to coerced and medically unnecessary hysterectomies. The case study uses the ACLU's framing — that the incident represents a recurrence of historical patterns — to test the unit's argument that eugenic infrastructures, vocabularies, and institutional practices persist in the contemporary United States.

Questions for Reflection

1. On Roberts and the Sanger case study: Roberts argues in Killing the Black Body that twentieth-century reproductive politics in the United States — from Sanger's Negro Project through Norplant and welfare-conditioned contraception — operated as a continuous racial project that conscripted Black women's bodies in service of changing demographic anxieties. Reading the Margaret Sanger Papers Project's "Birth Control or Race Control?" alongside Planned Parenthood's 2022 historical reckoning, identify one specific decision, partnership, or rhetorical move by Sanger or her successors that you would characterize as a racial project in Roberts's sense. What does the disagreement among the sources about how to interpret that decision reveal about how the legacy of eugenics is contested in the present?
2. On Lombardo: Lombardo's Three Generations, No Imbeciles reconstructs Buck v. Bell (1927) as a case engineered by eugenicists rather than a neutral juridical encounter — the parties, the lawyers, the medical testimony, and the briefs were coordinated to produce a Supreme Court endorsement of compulsory sterilization. Drawing on Lombardo's account, articulate one way that the construction of the case complicates the role of the Court as an arbiter of citizenship and bodily integrity. What does this case suggest about how law operates as a site where biopolitical categories are made?
3. On Stern: Stern's Eugenic Nation traces how eugenic frameworks shaped not only sterilization law but immigration restriction, intelligence testing, public-health programs, and even conservation policy in twentieth-century America, with California as the institutional center. Identify one domain Stern examines and explain how eugenic logic operated within it. What does the breadth of eugenic application across domains tell us about the relationship between scientific authority and state power in the early twentieth century?
4. On Molina and the ICE sterilization case study: Molina argues in Fit to Be Citizens? that public-health discourse in early-twentieth-century Los Angeles racialized Mexican, Chinese, and Japanese residents and shaped their eligibility for citizenship by treating them as health threats to the "fit" national body. Reading Molina alongside the ACLU's account of coerced sterilization in ICE detention, articulate the continuity (or the rupture) between the two cases. Does the ICE case represent a recurrence of historical biopolitical logic, a transformation of it, or both?
5. On Panofsky et al. and the PBS documentary: Panofsky, Dasgupta, Iturriaga, and Koch argue in their 2024 Hastings Center essay that contemporary genetic science is being "weaponized" by online racist subcultures that treat ancestry data, polygenic scores, and population genetics as evidence for hierarchical racial claims. After viewing the PBS Eugenics Crusade documentary and reading Panofsky et al., identify one continuity between the early-twentieth-century eugenicists' rhetorical strategies and contemporary online race science. What in the contemporary situation is genuinely new, and what is a recurrence of older patterns?
6. Synthesis across the unit: Roberts, Stern, Molina, Lombardo, and Nelson all argue, from different angles and across different historical periods, that race has been made through the regulation of bodies — through reproductive politics, sterilization, public health, citizenship law, and Enlightenment philosophy. Drawing on two of these works together with one of the unit's case studies, articulate the relationship between biopolitics and racial formation as you now understand it. Where does biopolitics most clearly do work that the framework of racial formation alone cannot, and where might racial formation extend or complicate the biopolitical frame?

Further Readings and Resources

• Rattansi, Ali. "The Demise of Scientific Racism." In Racism: A Very Short Introduction, 2nd ed. Very Short Introductions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Access the chapter.

Book chapter (Very Short Introductions series).

A chapter from Rattansi's Racism: A Very Short Introduction (2nd ed.) that traces the post–World War II scientific repudiation of biological race — the UNESCO statements, the work of Ashley Montagu, and the consensus position of population genetics — while also examining the persistence of race as a folk biological concept after its scientific demise. Rattansi argues that scientific racism did not so much disappear as transform, moving from biological essentialism toward cultural and psychological claims. Provides a compact account of the formal closing of the eugenic era.

• Ikemoto, Lisa C. "The Social Transmission of Racism." Tulsa Law Review 51, no. 2 (2016): 531–540. Access the article.

Law review article · Open access.

Ikemoto, a law professor, examines how racial inequalities are reproduced not only through overt discrimination but through ordinary social, institutional, and legal practices that transmit racial categories across generations. The article draws on critical race theory and on legal scholarship treating race as a "social fact" to develop a framework for understanding how racism survives its formal repudiation. Complements the unit's eugenic-history readings by addressing how the categories produced by historical biopolitical regimes continue to operate after their explicit ideological scaffolding has been disavowed.

• Paul, Sharad. "The Myth of Race." TED Talk, 2016. Watch the talk.

TED talk (video).

A short TED talk by physician and skin-cancer researcher Sharad Paul that surveys the scientific evidence against race as a biological category — drawing on human evolutionary history, dermatology, and population genetics — and considers the medical and ethical implications of treating race as a social rather than biological variable. Provides an accessible public-facing complement to the unit's scholarly readings and a useful starting point for learners new to the scientific case against biological race.

• Van Camp, Nathan. Redesigning Life: Eugenics, Biopolitics, and the Challenge of the Techno-Human Condition. Brussels: Peter Lang, 2015. Read the book (PDF).

Book (PDF) · CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

The full open-access book from which the unit's OER chapter on "The Biopolitical Turn" is drawn. Van Camp examines the analytical resources of biopolitical theory for understanding contemporary technologies of human enhancement, embryo selection, and genetic engineering, and argues that eugenic logic has not vanished but migrated into private medical decision-making, reproductive-technology markets, and bioethical frameworks. Provides learners with the broader theoretical context for the OER chapter and an extended treatment of the unit's biopolitical themes.

• National Human Genome Research Institute. "Eugenics: Its Origin and Development (1883–Present)." Educational timeline. View the timeline.

Interactive timeline.

An interactive timeline maintained by the National Human Genome Research Institute that traces the development of eugenic ideas, organizations, statutes, and practices from the coining of the term "eugenics" by Francis Galton in 1883 through the present. The timeline pairs key events — sterilization laws, immigration acts, court decisions, scientific publications — with brief contextual entries. Useful as a reference work for locating specific events the unit's readings touch on and as a starting point for further inquiry.

• National Human Genome Research Institute. "Teaching and Learning About the Holocaust, Eugenics, and Public Health Through Primary Sources." Educational video. Watch the video.

Educational video.

A video discussion produced by the National Human Genome Research Institute on teaching the connections among the American Eugenics Movement, the Holocaust, and the history of public health, drawing on primary sources from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and other archival collections. Aimed at educators but accessible to general audiences, the video models how historical primary sources can be used to teach the ethical responsibilities of contemporary genetic science.

• Eugenics Archives. Digital archive. eugenicsarchive.ca.

Digital archive.

An open-access digital archive of materials documenting the eugenics movement in Canada and internationally, maintained by a consortium of Canadian universities. The archive includes primary documents, oral histories, photographs, biographies, and topical essays addressing sterilization, immigration restriction, mental-health institutions, and Indigenous experiences with eugenic policy. Provides a comparative resource for learners interested in how eugenic logic operated outside the United States while maintaining many of the same institutional forms.