stereotype & society

Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut's passing is a great loss for the human community. Thankfully he left giant footprints behind, and his rare voice will remain among us and and in the lives of our children's children.

We loved reading his books when we first discovered them in the 1960s and continued to admire his mind, his uncommon commitment to human justice and his belief in the importance of speaking out, saying "NO!" even in the face of a culture of fear that has gripped our society for far too long. In his work and his words, his ongoing message was "Enough, already!" This is the mark of something rare in our world: integrity.

It was one of the great pleasures and honors of our lives to know that some of Kurt Vonnegut's departing written words were dedicated to telling people that it was important to read our book, Typecasting. For both of us reading these words was a transcendent moment, a treasure.

We, like the millions of others who felt he was a kindred spirit, a voice for so many, will miss his incisive vision and his wry smile.

Elizabeth Ewen and Stuart Ewen

Strange Bedfellows: Margaret Sanger and Eugenics

Margaret Sanger is widely heralded as the founder of the modern birth control movement, a major figure in the rise of women's liberation. While this is true, Sanger's contribution was not simply a blow for women's freedom. In some of its inconvenient details it was more ambiguous than that.   

Hoping to broaden her base during the 1920s, Sanger linked the mission of contraception to that of eugenics.  While she "believed that some of the eugenics movement's ideas were stodgily Victorian or "inspired by class…and sex bias," the bedrock language of eugenical thinking began to permeate her vocabulary. 

Her 1922 book, Pivot of Civilization, contained an "Introduction" by H. G. Wells, science fiction writer and well-known eugenicist.  In the book Sanger declared "the lack of balance between the birth-rate of the 'unfit' and the 'fit,' [to be] admittedly the greatest present menace to the civilization…"

She opened her fourth chapter, entitled "The Fertility of the Feeble-Minded," with the following words:"There is but one practical and feasible program in handling the great problem of the feeble-minded.  That is, as the best authorities are agreed, to prevent the birth of those who would transmit imbecility to their descendants. Feeble-mindedness as investigations and statistics from every country indicate, is invariably associated with an abnormally high rate of fertility. Modern conditions of civilization, as we are continually being reminded, furnish the most favorable breeding-ground for the mental defective, the moron, the imbecile."

Writing a guest editorial for Collier's magazine in 1925, Sanger described the imperative need for action.  "We are spending billions, literally billions," she wrote, "keeping alive thousands who never in all human compassion, should have been brought into this world.  We are spending more in maintaining morons than de-veloping the inherent talents of gifted children. We are coddling the incurably defective, and neglecting potential geniuses."  To dramatize her point, she quoted the distinguished California botanist, Luther Burbank, who had been, along with Henry Osborne [president of the American Museum of Natural History], a founder of the Eugenics Committee of the American Breeders Association in 1906:

"America…is like a garden in which the gardener pays no attention to the weeds.  Our criminals are our weeds, and weeds breed fast and are intensely hearty.  They must be eliminated.  Stop permitting criminals and weaklings to reproduce. All over the country to-day we have enormous insane asylums and similar institutions where we nourish the unfit and criminal instead of exterminating them.  Nature eliminates the weeds, but we turn them into parasites and allow them to reproduce."

Constructing Ideal Types

In 1878 Sir Francis Galton, Charles Darwin's cousin and the father of Eugenics, introduced a new technique he called "Composite Portraiture." It can be an amusing creative trick to play with (as seen in Archie Bishop's 2002 composite of six Hunter College Students, below) but its history became inextricably intertwined with ideas of innate human inequality and with calculated strategies for identifying and then eliminating "undesirable" groups of people from the human gene pool.

Employing a system of multiple exposure, he merged photographic portraits of individuals into generic faces.  While Galton's invention was first promoted as a novel artistic device, he soon maintained that his composite photography was a "scientific tool" that could hide the particular characteristics of individuals and reveal the hereditary attributes or deficiencies of the TYPE they belonged to.

Galton maintained that the photographic portraits of ideal types (Jews, criminals, members of the Royal Guard, tubercular women, etc.) could be used to identify those portions of humanity which should be selected for surgical sterilization, in order to extinguish the bloodlines of degeneration, criminality, feeble-mindedness and evil from among the human race.

In the United States, as the Second International Congress on Eugenics was held at the American Museum of Natural History in 1921, composite portraits were among the various exhibits designed to illustrate the characteristics of those peoples whose genetic make-up threatened to pollute America's "original Nordic stock" through interbreeding. The Johnson-Reed Act (1924) that closed off immigration, and the Buck v. Bell Case that led the Supreme Court to uphold forced sterilization as the law of the land, were two sequelae that emanated from the 1921 Congress.

Preview: 'Inherit the Wind' Meets 'Dr. Strangelove'

On March 19th, a new theatrical production of the classic "Inherit the Wind" will open at the Lyceum Theatre in New York City. Starring Christopher Plummer as Henry Drummond (based on Clarence Darrow) and Brian Dennehy as Matthew Brady (based on William Jennings Bryan), the play was inspired by the famous 1925 "Monkey Trial" where a high school teacher, John T. Scopes, was prosecuted for teaching evolution to his classes in Dayton, Tennessee. Written in 1955, at the height of McCarthyism, the play offered a cautionary metaphor against the dangers of small-mindedness. No doubt, the new production is motivated in part, by present day assaults on the teaching of evolution by "creationists" and advocates of "intelligent design."   

Though it is a fictional drama, "Inherit the Wind" is a powerful play and has, over the years, become the main source of many people's understanding of the Scopes Trial and the issues that surrounded it.  The trial is usually seen as a simple battle between the enlightenment of evolutionary theory vs. antediluvian creationism—the interpretation brought to the stage in Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s 1955 play, and further popularized by Stanley Kramer’s star-studded film of 1960—but the science and politics of the mid-1920s made the issues of the trial considerably more complex than this.

In teaching evolution, Scopes also taught eugenics, a thought-system linking Darwin’s theory to notions of innate racial and ethnic inequality, and that proposed the need to protect the "Nordic" American gene pool against an onslaught of feeble-mindedness, found among immigrants, blacks and the poor. This should not be surprising. Evolutionary theory in the twenties was widely employed as a scientific justification for closing off immigration, legalizing forced sterilization, and upholding laws against miscegenation (race mixing). Evolution was used as a justification for the need to encourage breeding among  Anglo-Americans and limit sexual reproduction among those deemed by eugenics movement leaders as "unfit.

Because of this, the theory of evolution disturbed William Jennings Bryan, “The Great Commoner” who had been the Democratic candidate for President in 1896.  In "Inherit the Wind" the Bryan character is depicted as a know-nothing, Bible thumping windbag, but an examination of evidence from the time shows that his opposition to evolution was, in large part, propelled by its link to an active and powerful eugenics movement in the United States. 

Due to Scopes' last minute plea of guilty, which was designed to bring the case to appeals court, Bryan was never able to deliver his planned summation. Newspapers and magazines published it, however, and it was widely read at the time.  It also appeared in pamphlet form.   

To bolster his case against the teaching of evolution, Bryan's summation quoted at length from Darwin’s Descent of Man to demonstrate the extent to which evolutionary theory gave support to the idea of eliminating “the weak” from the human stock.  He included the following passage from Darwin:

"With savages the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of everyone to the last moment.  There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox.  Thus the weak members of civilized society propagate their kind.  No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man… We must, therefore, bear the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving…"

Current uses of evolution, Bryan argued, went “against the public welfare,” and were callously applied as an argument against the progressive principle of social improvement. He wasn't wrong about this. The hereditary determinism of the 1920s routinely argued that the human lot was predestined, impervious to programs for social change.  Given this context, Bryan responded that evolution could only obliterate people’s sense of possibility and hope.

"Evolution is deadening to spiritual life of a multitude of students… [T]he evolutionary hypothesis is that, by paralyzing the hope of reform, it discourages those who waiver for the improvement of man’s condition. Every upward looking man or woman seeks to lift the level upon which mankind stands, and they trust that they will see beneficent changes during the brief span of their own lives. Evolution chills their enthusiasm by substituting aeons for years."

In his indictment of evolution, the specter of eugenics and of the amoral nature of science was an underlying theme. As he wrote in the planned summation, “science is a magnificent force, but it is not a teacher of morals. It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine.”  Evolutionary theory’s “only program for man is scientific breeding,” he added, “a system under which a few supposedly superior intellects, self-appointed, would direct the mating and the movements of the mass of mankind…”

Bryan’s Christianity—while scriptural—was also infused with a staunch belief in social justice, in the democratic principle of the common good.  He was also an anti-imperialist in an age of American empire. His recurrent invocation of Christ provided—for Bryan—a compassionate moral compass, that was and often continues to be, absent in the cold calculations of science and power.

None of this is to question the monumental importance of Darwin's discoveries, or to defend the small-mindedness that presently seeks to marginalize them in the teaching of science. It is only to remind us that history, when presented as an easily consumed morality tale, can rob us of deeper understanding of issues. It is also a reminder of the intrinsic dangers of scientific research when its application is not guided by an overarching concern for the greater good of society. We ignore this at our own peril.

Carrie Mae Weems

Last week I found out CUNY students can go to MoMA any day of the week for free. I went there two days ago and saw this work from 1995 by the artist Carrie Mae Weems - I remember seeing before, somewhere, but i don't know when, was back in 95, maybe more controversial than other things happening.

I thought it would be useful on Stereotype & Society

I thought the audio commentary from the artist was a useful way of experiencing (looking) at the work.  It is part of the main collection. See:

http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?object_id=45579

Comments appreciated.

Sean Tarjoto

A Tomb for the Unknown

On Friday, the 9th of August, 2002, in a solemn ceremony held upon a hilltop looking out on the green farmlands of Hankey, South Africa, Saartjie Baartman was laid to rest. A small crowd, about fifty mourners, watched respectfully as her coffin was lowered slowly into the ground.  Her return to the earth, near the place that she was born, put a close to a drama that had begun some 192 years before.

Saartjie’s cruel odyssey commenced in 1810 at the Cape of Good Hope.  The twenty-one year old daughter of a Khoi-San shepherd, she had been brought there two years earlier, to work as a servant for a family of Dutch farmers who gave her the name Saartjie Baartman.  With no written records of her birth, her original Khoi-San name is unknown. 

Saartjie’s ill-fated fortune changed when an English doctor, Alexander Dunlop, arrived at the farm.  Dunlop, who served as a ship’s surgeon, “supplemented his income by exporting museum specimens from South Africa.” Cutting a deal with the farmers, Peter and Hendrick Cezar, Dunlop acquired a partial interest in the ownership of Saartjie. He then arranged for her to be brought to England, to be exhibited in Piccadilly as a living “curiosity” who occupied a strange borderland between human and animal.  Saartjie’s participation in this scheme was exacted with the promise that she would eventually return home a rich woman.

In Piccadilly, the dehumanization of Saartjie Baartman moved forward.  Promoted by her handlers as “The Hottentot Venus,” her fame grew as hordes of Londoners flocked to gape at this supposedly hideous remnant.  For Europeans, the use of the name Venus was a venal attempt at humor.  The goddess was widely cited as the Greek apotheosis of female beauty. Joachim Winckelmann had described her as “a rose which, after a lovely dawn, unfolds its leaves to the rising sun.” Conversely, Saartjie was exhibited for her allegedly degenerate deformity. She was presented to crowds as “the epitome of all that the civilized Englishman, happily, was not.”

When she died in Paris several years later, her body was carved up by the famed anatomist, Baron Cuvier. Her genetalia and brain were put on display in the Museum Nationale d'Histoire Naturelle.  These body parts, along with a cast of her body that was made before she was was cut up, remained on display (later at the Musee de l'Homme) into the 1970s.

Such humiliating displays of human specimens hardly ended with Saartjie. She was part of a parade of people brought to Europe and the United States well into the 20th Century, exhibited as "missing links" or "wild men," people who occupied a vague border between humans and lesser life forms. Shows like these reinforced ideas of European superiority, and were used to justify conquest, enslavement and extermination.

World's Fairs were a common site for spectacles of human inequality, but Natural History museums appended the countenance of "science" to these Outlandish Western entertainments. 

In 1906 the American Museum of Natural History, in cahoots with the New York Zoological Society placed the survivor of a Belgian massacre of a Congolese village in the Monkey House of the Bronx Zoo. The man, Ota Benga, was released following protests by African-American ministers, but the zoo's director and the mayor of New York continued to insist that the exhibit had been an enterprise of significant educational value.

Within a decade, Ota Benga committed suicide.