Regina Lowe, Samuel Loyack, Madison Holt, Lindsay Simpson
Following the abolishment of slavery in the 19th century, issues of race had accelerated in the United States, particularly in North Carolina. During this period, scientific racism stemming from European colonial ideology, began guiding a novel and violent form of reproductive procedure known as eugenic sterilization that would later become a tool of the state to undermine the civil rights movement (Reilly, 2015). This era of eugenics in North Carolina would begin with the official legal enactment of eugenic sterilization in 1933 and efforts from this program would persist until the 1970s (Kaelber, 2009). The law would ultimately oversee the authorization and completion of the reproductive sterilization of thousands of women, disproportionately consisting of lower class and minority women. In this blog post, we examine the institutionalization of eugenics in North Carolina, explore science as a technology of colonialism and postcolonialism, and analyze how colonial science serves as the roots to eugenic sterilization.
Science as a Technology of Colonialism
The use of scientific racism has undermined the notion of Revolution and Black power (Charles, 2020). In the United States, settler colonialism, slavery, and the race concept combine. Through a separation of the body from the self, Black bodies have been regulated and supervised in the colonial project. Settler colonialism is a process of engagement and negotiations, and this separation has allowed the Black body to be constantly transformed (Wolfe, 2001). Black bodies represent “states of transition on the colonial landscape” (King, 2019). Within the colonial landscape, Black bodies may be turned into labor or other manifestations of colonial power. The eugenics project seen in North Carolina sits in this seam of race and sexuality where individuals’ bodies are manipulated in order to progress the goals of the state.
The race concept in the United States has been promoted in a variety of ways with Anthropology having a contributing role. Founding concepts to race in anthropology surround essentialism and biological determinism. Essentialism corresponds with the idea that race was considered a manifestation of natural categories (Caspari, 2003). This kind of thinking has roots in European enlightenment: the natural world can be defined into distinct classes.
From these distinct classes, decisions and assumptions about their behavior and capabilities form biological deterministic outcomes (Caspari, 2003). The colonial state and its postcolonial partners use these examples to develop an idea of social darwinism. This idea rationalizes that hereditary differences, such as race, contribute to the evolutionary path of humans (Bashford, et al., 2010). Through this ideology, beliefs of racial superiority are reinforced and colonial practices are justified using a racial basis for domination. Race has functioned as a cornerstone of the coloniality of power and the use of racial difference as a function of power continued into the postcolonial landscape, as this perspective of racial superiority in combination with the scientific study of inheritance and genetics ultimately developed the rationale, support, and practice of eugenics.
Eugenics in North Carolina
Map of the number of forced sterilizations occurring at the peak of the Eugenics program in North Carolina by visualized by county. Appears in a brochure printed by the N.C. Justice for Sterilization Victims Foundation (“JS Brochure”).
North Carolina has a deep history with the use of eugenics, starting in 1933. One North Carolina county, Mecklenburg County, sterilized three times the amount of people than any other county. The North Carolina Eugenics Board, founded in 1933, was located in Mecklenburg county (Rose, 2011). The Eugenics Board sterilized nearly 7,600 people over its four decades of operation. The overwhelming majority of these people were Black women (Fowler, 2020). The identities and actual number of forced sterilization victims will never truly be known, as the N.C. Eugenics Board closed their records to the public. The Eugenics Board was quietly disbanded in 1974, following the legalization of abortion in the United States.
By the 1960s, 60% of sterilized North Carolina residents were African American, while they only made up a quarter of the North Carolina population. 25% of the sterilized African Americans were deemed mentally ill (Sinderbrand, 2005).
Duke Professor William A. Darity Jr. co-authored a report correlating the number of unemployed Black individuals with 10 recorded years of forced sterilizations all over the state of North Carolina. Darity Jr. stated that the Eugenics program was designed to “breed out” the Black residents. The paper suggests that “for Blacks, eugenic sterilizations were authorized and administered with the aim of reducing their numbers in the future population — genocide by any other name.”
Darity Jr. also noted the United Nation’s definition of genocide, which is defined as “imposing measures to prevent births within a (national, ethnically, racial or religious) group.” “North Carolina’s disproportionate use of eugenic sterilization on its Black citizens was an act of genocide,” explains Darity Jr (Hubbard, 2020).
- About 70 percent of those seeking sterilization were African American, in contrast to 38 percent of the overall caseload and about 30 percent of North Carolina’s population.
- Women seeking sterilization through the eugenic sterilization program were, on average, twenty-seven years old and had had four children at the time of the petition. Black women tended to have more children in a shorter time span (4.4 children compared to 3.4 children for white women) and sought sterilization at a younger age (at the age of 26.5 compared to 28 for white women).
- 43% of African American petitioners but only 28% of white petitioners had had five or more children at the time of their petition. Black women not only had greater difficulty gaining access to elective sterilizations but they also found it more difficult to obtain reliable contraceptive advice, leaving them with more children at a younger age and the eugenic sterilization program as their only alternative.
Subaltern View- Elaine Riddick
Elaine Riddick is a survivor of North Carolina’s Eugenics Board forced sterilizations and outspoken advocate for women’s rights. At 13 years old, Riddick was kidnapped, sexually assaulted, and consequently impregnated by a neighbor (“Who We Are”). Prior to giving birth, a social worker visited her home and discovered the pregnancy, at once coercing her illiterate grandmother, whom she was living with at the time, to sign a document giving the state permission to sterilize Riddick with threats of sending her to an orphanage if she did not comply (“Who We Are”). Although in reality a rape victim, the Eugenics Board of North Carolina deemed Riddick too “feebleminded” and “promiscuous” to bear the responsibility of ever having children, and in 1968, at fourteen years old, she was sterilized immediately after giving birth to her son, Tony (“Who We Are”). After giving birth, she reluctantly left her son in the care of her grandmother and went to live in New York with an aunt (Iraq, 2012). There, she met and married a man at 18, but was abused by him and later divorced him once he found out she was forcibly sterilized (Iraq, 2012).
Today, Elaine Riddick is happily remarried and living in Atlanta, still fighting for women’s rights to life, freedom, and happiness (Iraq, 2012). While 10 million dollars have been awarded to victims of state-mandated forced sterilizations, as Riddick puts it, “Fifty thousand dollars isn’t nearly enough to bury my pain…It’s shut-up-and-go-away money.” (Iraq, 2012). This is a reasonable accusation given that the state is not only excluding victims of private practice forced sterilizations from financial compensation, it is also barely putting forth any effort to educate the public on the history of the North Carolina Eugenics Board or adequately funding any programs that support minorities subject to racial discrimination and/or ableism. Riddick, on the other hand, has taken it upon herself to champion women’s rights by founding the Rebecca Project for Justice, a “transformational organization that advocates protecting life, dignity and freedom for people in Africa and the United States” and one that stands on the belief that “vulnerable women, girls and their families possess the right to live free of environmental, medical, physical and sexual violence.” (“Who We Are”). Elaine Riddick has also studied psychology at New York City Tech and was the Victims Coordinator for Attorney Wilie Gary’s class action lawsuit against Depo Provera, a form of birth control that has caused serious health complications and even death in women (“Who We Are”).
Overall, by pursuing a life in Atlanta with her second husband and pursuing an education to fight against the wrongdoings of the state of North Carolina, Riddick has demonstrated that humans have and will exhibit agency under colonialist regimes.
Bibliography
Bashford, Alison, and Philippa Levine, editors. The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics. Oxford University Press, 2010, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195373141.001.0001.
Caspari, Rachel. “From Types to Populations: A Century of Race, Physical Anthropology, and the American Anthropological Association.” American Anthropologist, vol. 105, no. 1, Mar. 2003, pp. 65–76, https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.2003.105.1.65.
Charles, Jean Max. “The Slave Revolt That Changed the World and the Conspiracy Against It: The Haitian Revolution and the Birth of Scientific Racism.” Journal of Black Studies, vol. 51, no. 4, May 2020, pp. 275–94, https://doi.org/10.1177/0021934720905128.
“JS Brochure.” Welcome to the Office of Justice for Sterilization Victims | NC DOA. https://ncadmin.nc.gov/about-doa/special-programs/welcome-office-justice-sterilization-victims. Accessed 1 Mar. 2023.
Iraq, David Zucchino. “Sterilized by North Carolina, She Felt Raped Once More.” Los Angeles Times, January 25, 2012. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2012-jan-25-la-na-forced-sterilization-20120126-story.html.
Kaelber, Lutz. “Eugenics: Compulsory Sterilization in 50 American States.” The University of Vermont. The University of Vermont, March 24, 2009. https://www.uvm.edu/~lkaelber/eugenics/NC/NCold.html.
King, Tiffany Lethabo. “At the Pores of the Plantation.” In The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies, 111–141. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
McMillan, Andy. “Photos: Survivors of North Carolina’s Eugenics Program.” Mother Jones, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/05/north-carolina-sterilization-eugenics-photos/. Accessed 1 Mar. 2023.
Fowler, H. NC Eugenics Program Tried to ‘Breed out’ Black People: Report | Raleigh News & Observer. https://www.newsobserver.com/news/state/north-carolina/article244411987.html. Accessed 1 Mar. 2023.
Hubbard, L. New Paper Examines Disproportionate Effect of Eugenics on North Carolina’s Black Population. https://phys.org/news/2020-07-paper-disproportionate-effect-eugenics-north.html. Accessed 1 Mar. 2023.
Reilly, Philip R. “Eugenics and Involuntary Sterilization: 1907–2015.” Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics, vol. 16, no. 1, Aug. 2015, pp. 351–68, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-genom-090314-024930.
Rose, Julie. “A Brutal Chapter In North Carolina’s Eugenics Past.” NPR, 28 Dec. 2011. NPR, https://www.npr.org/2011/12/28/144375339/a-brutal-chapter-in-north-carolinas-eugenics-past.
Sinderbrand, Rebecca. “A SHAMEFUL LITTLE SECRET.” Newsweek, 27 Mar. 2005, https://www.newsweek.com/shameful-little-secret-114565.
“Who We Are” Rebecca Project for Justice. https://rebeccaprojectjustice.org/who-we-are/. Accessed 1 Mar. 2023.
Wolfe, Patrick. “Land, Labor, and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race.” The American Historical Review, vol. 106, no. 3, 2001, pp. 866–905, https://doi.org/10.2307/2692330. JSTOR.