The Other Problematic Outbreak: As the coronavirus spreads across the globe, so too does racism by Yasmeen Serhan & Timothy McLaughlin

Eugenics is a cold, calculated way of thinking about human life, reducing human beings to nothing but parts of the whole, either dragging down their race or pulling it up. Yet somehow it seemed to make sense at the time, with a logical appeal that stretched across the political spectrum. We associate it today with the fascists who perpetrated the Holocaust, but before World War II, many on the left saw it as socially progressive. Galton himself was certainly not considered a crank. He was a fellow of the Royal Society, and an anthropometric laboratory he set up in 1884 to catalogue people’s measurements enjoyed support from the British Medical Association. Eugenics belonged firmly to establishment science, and among intellectuals, it wasn’t just mainstream, it was almost fashionable. (Saini 44-45)

In India, too, European notions of racial superiority were easily absorbed by some, partly because they mirrored the country’s existing caste system—itself a kind of racial hierarchy—but also because Germany’s Aryan myth placed the noble race as once living in their region. The ideological quest for the true “Aryans” remains alive in India, and Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf is a bestseller in Indian bookshops. Each nation used the idea of race in its own ways, marrying it with science if it could be of use. Eugenics, then, became just another tool in what were longstanding power dynamics. (Saini 48)

“The lived experiences of those who are scorned, feared, driven away, and unfairly labeled as ‘infected’ may show us how the climate of fear we have created could in fact cause far more serious damage to society than the epidemic itself.” (qtd. it Serhan & McLaughlin 4)

The Topic:
The “science” of eugenics was dedicated to human improvement and superiority by breeding out limitations and inferiority. It assumed that racial intermixing would retard the progress of society, because the genes of “lower peoples” posed a threat to those who were above them. One could protect and cultivate civilization by removing those who were unwanted.

The Question:
Keeping in mind the words of the sociology lecturer, Minnie Li, which are quoted above, write an argumentative essay that analyzes both given quotations from Scientific Priestcraft, and two others from the same text, to show how the science of eugenics relied on absurd and contradictory formulations to label and stigmatize those who were seen as racially and intellectually inferior.

The Other Problematic Outbreak: As the coronavirus spreads across t...