“Eugenics is not a closed book of past history. It casts a long shadow over both science and society in the Western world and, in fact, also globally.”
The May 17, 2021 National Review magazine contained this observation:
“In the New York Times, Planned Parenthood president Alexis McGill Johnson formally criticized the institution’s infamous founder, Margaret Sanger, for her association with white-supremacist groups and the eugenics movement. After about a century, and the last year of racial tension, the abortion provider is finally ready to admit what many of us have been saying for quite some time: Sanger was a leader in the U.S. eugenics and population-control movements, motivated especially by her animus toward the poor, the “unfit,” and the “feeble-minded.” Sanger’s repulsive sentiments should shine a harsh light on the present-day business model of her organization. Nearly 80 percent of its clinics are located within walking distance of neighborhoods occupied predominantly by black and Hispanic residents. While constituting only 13 percent of the female population, black women represent more than one-third of all abortions in the U.S. each year, and they are five times more likely than white women to obtain an abortion. In recent years in New York City, more black babies were aborted than were born alive. Some day, let’s hope, Planned Parenthood will be apologizing for more than just Sanger.”
Pushed by mental health practitioners, the eugenics idea of racial inferiority became ingrained in the U.S. and led to Sanger’s “cure” for racial inferiority — sterilization. Sanger planned to “exterminate the Negro population” by inducing several black ministers with “engaging personalities,” to preach that sterilization was a solution to poverty. She stated that reaching Blacks “through a religious appeal,” would be the “most successful educational approach.”
[Elasah Drogin, Margaret Sanger: Father of Modern Society, 1986]
The American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) recent apology (January 18, 2021) for its support of structural racism understates psychiatry’s racial human rights abuses and its long history of instigating racism by providing “rationales” that justified and perpetuated it.
Over the last 50 years, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) has exposed that sordid history and intensified its efforts by forming the Task Force Against Psychiatric Racism and Modern Day Eugenics.
It is noteworthy that in the late 1700s, psychiatry’s own “Father of American Psychiatry,” Dr. Benjamin Rush, a slave owner, created a medical justification for racism by claiming Blacks suffered from a disease called “negritude,” supposedly a form of leprosy, and recommended their segregation to prevent them from “infecting” others. A logo with the image of Benjamin Rush is still used for APA ceremonial purposes and internal documents. The APA still gives a Benjamin Rush Award.
Psychiatrists in the American mental health movement later latched onto and promoted the false science of eugenics [from the Greek word eugenes, well-born, from eu- well + -genes born], which claims some humans are inferior to others and should not have children.
African Americans are disproportionately diagnosed with mental illness and disproportionately committed to psychiatric facilities. They are more likely to be labeled with conduct disorder and psychotic disorders, especially schizophrenia, and overly prescribed antipsychotic drugs. Black men are more likely to be prescribed excessive doses of these psychiatric drugs. Black children are overly labeled with ADHD.
The APA’s incomplete apology may be viewed as political pandering and an attempt to whitewash history to pave the way for the psychiatric-pharmaceutical industry to expand – very profitably – into the African American community.
