Archive | September, 2017

I support the NFL players who kneel for the anthem

26 Sep

25reidSub-master768

Read this essay by Eric Reid in the New York Times.

The links between eugenics and rescinding DACA

7 Sep

This week Trump and Sessions announced that they will end DACA, a program under which certain young immigrants who came to the US as minors and who went to school in the US, can study and work.

The announcement that DACA is rescinded is extremely worrying news for 800,000 people who benefit from DACA plus their families, their friends, their colleagues, and many other people. If we were to lose those 800,000 people, it would be a human tragedy and a great loss for the country.

It should come as no surprise that Trump is doing this, because it fits with his racist ideas and policies.

You may not realize though (and I didn’t realize until recently) that the United States has a long history of using immigration policies to try to keep the country white. So what Trump is doing is not new. And whereas nowadays, California seems to be one of the states that are treating their immigrants better than other states, California was once a hotbed of racist genetics. For example, David Starr Jordan, who was the first president of Stanford University, worked to keep people of color out of the country. Wikipedia writes:

“Jordan promoted the concept of improving human genetics, through removal from the breeding pool of those deemed unworthy to reproduce,[17] in his series of publications titled The Blood of the Nation. He then chaired the first Committee on Eugenics of the American Breeder’s Association, from which the California program of forced deportation and sterilization emerged.[18] Jordan then went on to help found the Human Betterment Foundation as a trustee. The Human Betterment Foundation published “Sterilization for Human Betterment,” a text which formed a cornerstone of the Nazi eugenics program.”

The eugenics movement was strong in the US before it was adopted by Nazi Germany.

Here is a short video from The Rachel Maddow Show about the links between Eugenics and rescinding DACA.