Last week, as news broke that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis rejected an AP History course on race in America, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Pulitzer Prize winner for the ground-breaking New York Times 1619 Project, tweeted this:
Hanna-Jones, of course, has been vilified by racists for daring to write about Black history in a nation whose economic system was founded on slavery.
She’s also been criticized by many of her “both-sides” journalist brethren, whose entire point of view is to move themselves in the middle between extremism and normalcy - which only results in normalizing extremism and lies.
It was obvious to anyone watching school board meetings in 2022 that when people showed up to protest CRT - which is not taught at the elementary or secondary level - they were really protesting teaching their children about the history of racism in the U.S.
But journalists couldn’t say that. Because the people who railed against CRT also railed that they weren’t racist. And we have to take people at their word, right? We can’t observe and come to conclusions based on behavior. We just report.
(Well, I said that, but…)
Also, many journalists - who benefit from a white supremacist system themselves (which I will delve into in a future column) - reject the idea that systemic racism exists. When people say teaching about racism in the U.S. is being racist against white people, white journalists are not above thinking, “Yeah!”
And so now DeSantis has exposed the reality that we all knew we were watching to begin with. And Hanna-Jones - one of the most courageous, truth-telling journalists out there - is waiting for an apology. I’m just waiting for journalists to learn from it and do better.
Neither one of us is likely to get what we want.
I remember something similar happening 13 years ago, when the Tea Party rose up to oppose President Obama’s health care proposals by claiming that the government would impose “death panels.” And journalists just reported it as if it were a viable “side” - not an outrageous manifestation of projection. It seemed perfectly clear that people who felt the government would sentence them to death by requiring health insurance were people who would, should they be in power, sentence people to death in the name of health care.
This is the logic behind the great replacement theory, which posits that people of color will not only “replace” white people in the U.S., but implies that when they do “replace” them, they will treat white people horribly, as second class citizens who have fewer rights. In other words, white supremacists are afraid that Black and Brown people will treat them the same way white people treat people of color now. And for all of our history.
Because for them, power and subjugation exist in a zero sum game called “life.” And they don’t want to be on the bottom.
Watching this play out has given me a good amount of despair the last few weeks. Maybe I’m just in the post-holiday, January doldrums, but I can’t shake this feeling that our entire world has turned into a zero-sum race to the bottom.
But then I look at history. And it comforts me. Sort of. Because the U.S. has always treated people badly in thrall to a caste system that says some groups of people are inherently better than others. And yet we are still here, and we still have hope, and we still make (perhaps incremental) progress.
It’s ‘UGE!(genics)
Let’s get back to that “death in the name of health care” thing. Because this is not a notion that today’s white supremacists just came to. This is a notion rooted in American history from a hundred years ago. Their American history. This is a notion rooted in Eugenics.
Eugenics, according to the Human Genome Research Institute, is “the scientifically erroneous and immoral theory of ‘racial improvement’ and ‘planned breeding,’ which gained popularity during the early 20th century,” drawing “support from contemporary xenophobia, antisemitism, sexism, colonialism and imperialism, as well as justifications of slavery, particularly in the United States.”
Isabel Wilkerson notes in her book, “Caste” (which you should read if you haven’t yet) that Eugenics was such a popular idea that Hitler sent his team over to the U.S. to meet with its practitioners, then used it themselves in the 1930s.
Yes - Nazi “Master Race” theories came directly from U.S. “scientists.”
But, of course, journalism in the 1920s was full of stories in which the underlying assumption was that some groups of people were better than others. Just as it was full of local reporters writing glowing pieces about the picnics people brought and the finery they dressed in as they gathered in the town square to watch the latest public lynching.
Which just proves that journalism holding truth to power is a myth. We have always been defined more by how we uphold power than how we challenge it. Those of us who challenge it are the exceptions.
Phil Barber is one of those exceptions. The Press Democrat writer covers the area of Northern California that includes Sonoma County. In 2021, Barber decided to look into the history of the Sonoma State Home.
In the story - which is a pretty harrowing read - Barber details how the home became the premiere venue for forced sterilizations in the country.
“Between 1909 and 1952,” Barber writes, “some 5,500 or more residents were coerced or compelled into undergoing vasectomies or salpingectomies (removal of one or both of a woman’s fallopian tubes). The procedures were justified at the time in shockingly derogatory and racist language that labeled them morons, imbeciles and undesirables who should not be allowed to breed.”
We talked to Barber for episode 3 of American Dreams: Reproductive Justice, which focuses on the U.S. history of sterilization in the U.S.
Barber got much of his information from Natalie Lira, a researcher at the University of Illinois and co-director of the Sterilization and Social Justice Lab.
“Folks with disabilities were committed to these institutions,” Lira told us. “Also young people in the criminal legal system.”
Teenage boys would be “picked up by an officer, given an IQ test, labeled ‘feeble minded’ and sent off to this institution,” Lira said. Often, those boys were immigrants who didn’t speak English, or speak it well.
For girls, “it was often related to sexual deviance.” For older women it was poverty. Immigrant women with large families would be sent for sterilization because they were taking too much money from the state.
It would be nice to wave this away to the realm of ancient history, but we know it’s still happening. Last November, a Senate committee led by Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff found that in the last decade, an ICE detention facility in Georgia performed “excessive, invasive and often unnecessary gynecological procedures” on immigrants.
The white supremacists who don’t want to be knowns as racists cheered this. Just as their brethren eugenicists cheered it 100 years ago.
Sure would have been nice to have the context of forced sterilizations in the eugenics era when 21st century reporters wrote about this. Then again, not many reporters wrote about the Georgia detention center or the Senate report. They were too busy writing about inflation and a red wave.
Because ignoring history and context isn’t just for Florida governors. It’s for the journalists who cover him, too.
Listen to American Dreams: Reproductive Justice
The third episode is out and linked above. You can also listen to it here:
And here are links to the first two episodes: