The History We Don’t Teach. The Rights We Are Still Losing.

Lakshmi*, a high-school senior in California, writes about her experiences learning—or not learning—about eugenics in California in her Advanced Placement U.S. History course.

Lakshmi Nakka is a high-school senior in California.

When  I first learned that California once sterilized people deemed “unfit to reproduce” I was shocked - not because it happened, but because no one ever taught me it did. In classrooms where we debate consent, reproductive rights and the future of transgender care, we rarely talk about the past: how the institutions of science, government, and medicine once colluded to take away the most basic right of all: the right to have a family. 

I first learned about Eugenics in my Advanced Placement U.S. History (APUSH) class this past school year, where the term was presented as an unimportant vocabulary word. As an incoming senior high-school student based in California, I was surprised at the fact that our class, which delved deeply into reproductive rights and healthcare, just glazed over the term. All we got was a minute-long acknowledgement that the practice was racist & harmful, never stopping to learn exactly why or how. Why not, I wondered? 

Okay, it might be that the topic itself is not relevant to APUSH, right? No. The Eugenics movement spanned across decades of American history, shaping state and federal policies - some of which still exist today. It dominated science, as leading scientists and physicians rushed to become the first to make breakthroughs in Eugenics. It even took over pop-culture, with movies, books, and artworks being created to sell Eugenics to the public.  A trip to the movies in 1917 would mean watching a propaganda film, The Black Stork (also known as Are You Fit To Marry?)  which was created solely to sell Eugenics to the general public.

Even at the breakfast table, Eugenics was part of the conversation: Kellogg’s cereal was poured into bowls, along with his legacy as a eugenicist. John Harvey Kellogg worked closely with leading figures of the Eugenics movement, like Charles Davenport, aiding in organizing events such as the Race Betterment Conference in 1915. Skipping over it would leave students with an incomplete understanding, if any understanding at all. I wondered, then, whether it was the violence. The movement itself is hard to read and learn about, as every social “underclass” was targeted, women forcibly sterilized, and innocent people criminalized. It’s hard to learn about and hard to grapple with – but so is so much of the history we traditionally study: slavery, the Trail of Tears, Jim Crow laws, to name a few. 

Ignoring this history in an attempt to disown it, to pretend like it doesn’t continue to affect our lives  today through reproductive rights battles, genetic sciences and prison system reforms (among others) is leaving us underprepared to solve these problems. We can be equipped with the knowledge needed to spur change, but this starts in the classroom. In history classes, APUSH or not, anti-eugenics needs to be a forefront and not a footnote. Explaining the movement in depth, teaching students about its origins, it’s widespread and devastating impact, exposing them to the truth instead of letting them believe it was insignificant and inconsequential. Teachers owe it to themselves and their students to represent this history accurately. But today, there’s many of us who’ve already taken all our high school history classes, and don’t have a teacher to walk us through it. If you’re reading this thinking back to ancient high school days (however far away they might be), there are still ways to learn eugenics and make anti-eugenic thinking & practices a part of your life. It can start here, reading through the Anti-Eugenics Collective at Yale, or elsewhere: articles, books, papers. The point is to start somewhere, to take the difficult step of learning about Eugenics so you can aptly confront the horrific legacy it has left behind. 

Though it’s uncomfortable to realize that such a movement took place, and continues to manifest itself in different ways through society, our ignorance makes its impacts worse.

We owe it to those who were silenced to speak about it and we owe it to those living with its aftermath to listen.