Anti-Eugenic Communities & Organizations
Local organizations in Connecticut and the Northeast have been mobilizing for decades to fight against rhetoric centered around biological difference and hierarchical thinking. A number of organizations and communities furthering work in fields such as reproductive, migrant, and disability justice are grappling with how to combat logics and policies with eugenic origins.
The legacies of eugenics remain alive in a multitude of spaces, whether that be laboratories, courtrooms, healthcare facilities, or classrooms. There certainly is not a shortage of ways to seek justice, whether that be through legal advocacy, public education, or curricular change. Advocacy within these relevant communities works to reimagine concepts of human worth and push for more inclusive ideas of family formation and bodily autonomy.
1- Our Takeaway on Contemporary Organizing and Anti-Eugenics
2- New Haven and Connecticut Organizations
Unidad Latina en Acción
Sex Workers and Allies Network
Stop Solitary CT
3- Highlighting Other States’ Efforts
Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights (& Project South)
California Eugenic Legacies Group
4- National Organizations
SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective
Facing History
The Anti-Eugenics Project
On this page
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The following sections tackle how contemporary organizing addresses persisting eugenic logics about human categories and taxonomies, racial and economic hierarchies, carceral approaches, and family formation and reproduction.
Our Takeaway on Contemporary Organizing and Present Anti-Eugenic Efforts
Not all of these these communities and efforts proclaim to be anti-eugenic in mission.
Why do we consider them inherently anti-eugenic?
New Haven and Connecticut Organizations
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Unidad Latina en Acción
IMMIGRATION, ECONOMIC JUSTICE
Unidad Latina en Acción is a grassroots organization dedicated to defending the rights of immigrants and workers in Connecticut since 2002.
By organizing collectively to build political power, they actively challenge the structures and legacies of racial hierarchy that were carefully propagated by eugenicists. Campaigns, such as winning wages and damages for victims of wage theft, sexual harassment, and workplace injuries, or suing ICE for civil rights violations, disrupt and resist the eugenic ideologies that suggest some races, ethnicities, or families are more or less deserving of dignity and justice than others.
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Sex Workers and Allies Network
DECRIMINALIZATION, ABOLITION
Sex Workers & Allies Network is a harm reduction organization based in New Haven, Connecticut. SWAN stands for decriminalization of sex work, abolition of the unjust criminal system, and dignity for all.
In fighting for abolition of prisons, jails, and similar structures, SWAN challenges how eugenicists upheld the carceral system by institutionalizing people they deemed “unfit.” SWAN also advocates for decriminalizing sex work which pushes back on how eugenicists vilified people’s sexuality, including that of Mexican American women in California institutions. Natalie Lira’s 2021 book titled Laboratory of Deficiency details how eugenicists criminalized people’s “deviant sexuality.”
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Stop Solitary Connecticut
TAGS, KEYWORDS
The Stop Solitary CT campaign, a program within Christ New Testament Church, aims to end the use of solitary confinement in jails, detention centers and prisons across Connecticut, replacing it with humane, safe, and effective alternatives.
Eugenicists were committed to removing and isolating those deemed unfit, and to an overall carceral approach. Stop Solitary CT has built a coalition of people, current and formerly incarcerated people, and others opposed to state sanctioned use of solitary confinement. Their most recent legislative victory, the PROTECT ACT, monitors not only the use of solitary confinement but also conditions of confinement, and in doing so, contributes to their project of dismantling systems of oppression and racial injustice.
Other States’ Efforts
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Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights
IMMIGRANT RIGHTS
The Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights is a non-profit, community-based organization that educates, organizes, and empowers Latino immigrants.
Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights & Project South actively worked to seek legal redress for women forcibly sterilized in an ICE detention center in 2020.
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California Eugenic Legacies Project
ANTI-EUGENICS, REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE
The California Eugenic Legacies Project is an effort involving Miroslava Chavez-Garcia, Alexandra Minna Stern, and Wendy Kline, among others.
This group actively acknowledges the explicit eugenic acts of the state with regards to forced sterilizations (largely at hospitals, state homes, and prisons) while creating space for discussion of how eugenics logics are perpetuated today.
On National Efforts to Politically Organize
The constant work of communities and individuals coming together to redefine conceptions of justice and human value is vital to anti-eugenics. At the national level, it is recognized that the whole country is implicated, and one city, state, or institution is a site among many.
Just as eugenicists entered their ‘science’ into the public discourse, anti-eugenics must actively engage with how eugenics logics are engrained at a variety of levels: in institutional processes, knowledge production, and so on. In this way, eugenics is rendered visible in everyday life and can be recognized as relevant.
National Organizations
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SisterSong
REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE
The SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective’s mission is to strengthen and amplify the collective voices of Indigenous women and women of color to achieve reproductive justice by eradicating reproductive oppression and securing human rights.
SisterSong defines Reproductive Justice as the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.
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Facing History
PUBLIC HISTORY
Facing History & Ourselves uses lessons of history to challenge teachers and their students to stand up to bigotry and hate.
Facing History & Ourselves engages young people with challenging content through a process that builds the knowledge, skills, and dispositions of deep civic learning.
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The Anti-Eugenics Project
ANTI-EUGENICS
The Anti-Eugenics Project is an interdisciplinary effort working to understand and bring awareness to the continuing legacy of eugenics, which applied supremacist principles to a wide range of hard and social sciences and public policies.
The Anti-Eugenics Project seeks to excavate the lasting effects of eugenics and in doing so, begin to dismantle the politics of exclusion – the founding eugenicist ideology that some humans are “fit” and and others are “unfit” – that continue to plague our society in the forms of racism, misogyny, ableism, homophobia, xenophobia and other forms of social tyranny.