Profs & Pints Charlottesville: Eugenics and Virginia

Profs and Pints Charlottesville presents: “Eugenics and Virginia,” on the Commonwealth’s role in efforts to improve humans and its lessons for genetic engineering today, with Glenn Davis Stone, biotechnology and eugenics scholar and senior research professor of anthropology and environmental studies at Washington and Lee University.

[All tickets must be purchased online with sales tax and processing fees added. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/charlottesville-eugenics .]

With the White House blaming crime on bad genes and biologists contemplating human gene editing, there’s no question that eugenics is back. It remains haunted, however, by a dark and troubled history, much of it centered in Charlottesville.

Come to the Graduate by Hilton Charlottesville to learn about the largely forgotten—or deliberately misremembered—history of the eugenics movement, as well as the prominent role that Virginia played in it.

Glenn Davis Stone, an expert on the intersection of politics and technology, will start by discussing how eugenics emerged in the late 1800s among British elites looking down on the working class.

In the United States the eugenics movement was championed by University of Virginia scientists who, while considered progressive in their day, had ideas shaped by the legacy of slavery and an obsession with racial purity and superiority. In 1924 such thinking led to Virginia laws enforcing racial purity and allowing compulsory sterilization of the “mental defectives."

That law led to a landmark battle over the fate of Carrie Buck, a Charlottesville teenager who, having become pregnant as a result of being raped, was committed to an asylum, sterilized, and denied custody of her baby based partly on accusations of moral degeneracy. Her case, Buck v. Bell, was the subject of a deeply corrupt trial. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld her forced sterilization in what is widely regarded as one of its worst decisions.

The Court’s ruling had far-reaching consequences, opening the door to thousands of forced sterilizations of the poor and helped inspire Hitler's sterilization law. It was cited by Nazi doctors at Nuremberg.

By midcentury, visions of improving the human gene pool were giving way to ambitions to improve genes themselves through genetic engineering. Yet the principal application of genetic engineering has been the creation of agricultural crops resistant to toxic herbicides.

Today, proponents of CRISPR gene editing insist that this powerful new technology will be used for good. Their assurances echo justifications heard throughout the history of eugenics, obscuring larger questions about the vested interests of those controlling technologies. The case of Carrie Buck and her daughter, finally reunited in Charlottesville's Oakwood Cemetery, has much to teach us about those larger questions. (Advance tickets: $13.50. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Doors open for talk attendees at 4:30 pm and the talk starts at 6 pm.)

Image: A 1924 photo of Carrie Buck and her mother at the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded (photo by A.H. Estabrook / Wikimedia Commons).