26-03-2025
Eugenics ideas and a Natal Conference don't belong at the University of Texas
Years ago, I took a class at the University of Texas called anthropological genetics. Deborah Bolnick, an anthropologist and geneticist, taught us how humans have constructed and deconstructed our various groups. We learned that the racial categories of the United States Census have shifted several times. We learned that humans have more genetic diversity within a defined racial group than between them.
And very critically, we learned about eugenics, the notion that certain 'kinds' of people are better suited to reproduce. We learned how this was a guiding doctrine of Nazi science and the Jim Crow South, and was intertwined with similar dictums such as pronatalism — the idea that the 'right kind' of people should reproduce as much as possible. (You know which kind.)
The class gathered three times a week in a sunny room in Painter Hall, a 15-minute walk from the AT&T Hotel & Conference Center — another university-owned venue where later this week a conference on natalism and eugenics will be held. But bafflingly, this week's Natal Conference seeks not to decry eugenics, but to celebrate it.
At first glance this may not seem so bad. Survival of the fittest, after all? But the key question to ask here is this: Who gets to decide who the fittest are? And on which criteria? Are people of a certain race inherently better? Which combinations of nucleotides mark the best people?
Consider the speaking lineup for this conference. Instead of demographers — scientists who study populations and how they change — the lineup features far-right gadflies and prominent proponents of eugenicist ideas and practices, all with a stated aim to 'improve' future generations, not by investing in communities and the health and well-being of populations, but by developing policies of genetic selection that elevate and encourage the reproduction of white, abled people only.
But gadflies, by definition, exist to annoy. Arguing with them yields limited returns. And much to my dismay, UT has welcomed this event to our campus. While I urge university leadership in the strongest possible terms to disavow this embarrassing spectacle and protect our community from people who tweet cheerfully about the "butt rape" of Indigenous Americans, I doubt they will respond.
What we can do is this: Learn how horrific this movement is.
Read about the nonconsensual sterilization of prisoners in California, which wasn't stopped until 2013.
Read about the history of 'Mississippi Appendectomies,' the nonconsensual hysterectomies performed on Black women in teaching hospitals across the South.
Learn about Carrie Buck, the young woman who became pregnant by rape and was sterilized by a pro-eugenics physician who treated his patients as if they were cats who needed spaying.
Discuss these examples and their lessons with your friends and family. Do what you can with the emotional energy you have to counter this very ugly movement. Horrible things take root in ignorance.
While eugenics has never gone away, those who support it are more comfortable and publicly accepted than they have been in decades. It is especially concerning that they find comfort on the campus of our state's most celebrated public university, which has said it cannot discriminate against the viewpoints of anyone wishing to use the AT&T Conference Center.
The tacit approval of a race science conference at UT-Austin, alongside the large-scale defunding and muzzling of American science by a far-right regime, marks a very dark chapter of our history. It should worry all of us, not just academics, how quickly we've moved away from science, progress and the embrace of diversity.
We won't win every battle in this war. But no one can force us to forget our richly and beautifully diverse backgrounds as Americans, and our values as human beings. Consider this quote from the late Stephen Jay Gould, a paleontologist and one of the most celebrated and widely-read scholars in modern history:
'I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.'
Claire Zagorski is a graduate research assistant and PhD student in translational science at the University of Texas.
This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Natal Conference and eugenics don't belong at UT Austin | Opinion
