Eugenics, Law, and Education

Minnesota and it’s Carceral State

Akeem Anderson

Introduction: The Contradictions of U.S. Legal Foundations and Contemporary Education

In the United States, our civic body has recently witnessed the elimination of legal precedent supporting sexual, gendered, and racial equity (Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 2022; 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, 2023; Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, 2023). These changes have been part of a larger conservative shift to move from identity-based classification laws, that create and support protected identities, to anticlassification laws that remove the ability for systemically disadvantaged groups to gain equity focused protections through legal reform. These shifts are a product of a historically informed eugenics paradigms that aim to securitize the country against perceived difference. This necessitates preserving the white nuclear family as the normative figure at the heart of American power and protectionist logics. Understanding the links between eugenics, education, and law are necessary for intervening into contagion logics that shape western universities.

When I began my graduate career, there was an excessive proliferation of identity-based professional certifications, paid positions, and costly courses, each arguing that they are the key to enhancing ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ in their respective space by what I view as “professionalizing violence” itself (Fredericks, 2009). In contrast, identity-based studies, particularly in the liberal arts, was often not relied on to understand professional equity. Instead, universities were reinforcing divisions between ‘professional’ and ‘graduate’ students. I struggled to reconcile these moves towards diversity with actual liberation for the oppressed people these missions supposedly target. Today, DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) is not as popular. Many teams at companies have been reduced if not eliminated and even uttering diversity in certain spaces can risk losing federal funding or socio-political backlash from a myriad of private and public figures.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion was significantly integrated into the educational and professional models at both private and public levels, yet it did little to transform our cultural landscape for the better. Alternatively, polarization seems to only have increased since the widespread adaptation of formal DEI practices. My participation and close attention to various DEI programs, for over half a decade, helped show me that DEI fell short because its model was easily susceptible to commodification. DEI, as a representation of neoliberal ideas of inclusion, worked by essentializing and restraining discussions of identity to under-nuanced or cherry-picked concepts from one school of thought. These programs self-validated themselves by using western scientific methods of qualitative data analysis and statistics to demonstrate the efficacy of programs without proving institutional or systemic change. These strategies turned targeted concepts from a consortium of critical theorists into an ambiguous guiding principle with no historical grounding or theoretical frameworks. In this way, the lives of people of color were again expropriated to produce a profitable market of exchange for content that only mystified violence and reified the status quo. Instead of critiquing general concepts of implicit bias, resistance to systemic violence should be centered on disturbing what Sylvia Wynter names the figure of the “man,” or the white heteronormative able-bodied man prized by early 20^th century eugenicists (Maldonado-Torres, 2003; Wynter, 1984, 2015). Additionally, instead of formalized and routine programs, discussions of resistance should be located in what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney call the Undercommons, or the space of fugitivity within and beyond the university that resists capitalist commodification (Harney & Moten, 2013).

In this chapter, I share my efforts to promote embeddedness between medical, legal, and liberal professionalization. I provide a summary of my original intersectional research, which examines science and the medical community as continual sites of violence against people of color, and particularly people who are black, disabled, and/or women. This essay disturbs this ‘genre of the man’ by highlighting the historical contingencies that rely on and reinforce the coherence of biological determinism and intersectional violence. Although science itself is not an actor, there is a eugenics-inspired consciousness that adheres to the validity and utility of science as a set of objective and proven truths. Thus, progress is viewed as for the preservation of humanity yet where notions of humanity do not shift, and black positionality is never accounted for.

(Anti)Black Realities and Eugenics as Science

Western science consistently facilitates medical violence that is inextricable from the preservation of ‘man’, evident in the manifestation of birth control, syphilis experiments, the story of Henrietta lacks and other black bodies that were experimented on without consent (PBS, n.d.; Jones, 1993; Skloot, 2011; The Associated Press, 2021; Gray, 2013; Gazit & Steward, 2003). However, during the Covid-19 pandemic black people were identified as the most unvaccinated population and were treated as a problem to be fixed (Golden, 2022; CDC, 2022). In popular media, black people were (and are) constantly critiqued for not believing in the science and the data provided by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) – even as political conservatives advocated for “bodily control” and vaccine skepticism. This is an irony that reflects unfinished tensions—that black people were (and are) critiqued for not believing in the communities that consistently disavow us even as we spiritually and historically felt the subjective nature of such science. The public felt offense that we wouldn’t believe in the foundation of what we view as their white science, riddled with dehumanizing principles and acts. Public discourse still has not come to terms with the history of state-sponsored actions of medical violence on black bodies and that has led to suspicion of any “ethic of care” in black-medical relations.

Traditional utilitarian calculus preserves the status quo, coming to dominant classes’ defense of their perceived threats, while defining the disgusting others (Sederstrom & Wiggleton-Little, 2021). This calculus produces public discourse and stereotypical narratives that justify human tragedies, such as the “Somali garbage” who should “go back to where they came from and Haiti as “shithole” country that apparently deserves instability (Associated Press, 2025; Smith & Thorp, 2018). At the same time, although itself somewhat abstract, the “scientific community” is represented as an objective truth, even though black people have always experienced the subjective reality of their prescriptions (Washington, 2006). Regardless of the specific behavior, blackness is always seen as the contagion that the state needs to securitize against, whether it was in the early 20^th century or early 21^st. These concepts persist by normalizing race as a pathogen and incorporating that paradigm into educational spaces by individuating thought and fortifying institutional disciplines. What would happen if legal, medical, or business education centered critiques of ‘man’ at the forefront of their ideological position instead of their certification programs?

I aim to facilitate an embeddedness in transprofessional education. To be transprofessional would be to decolonize the university and dismantle the categories which proliferate the separation of integrally connected areas of study (Bhambra, Gebrial, & Nişancıoğlu, 2018). Identity-based issues should be embedded in everything we do, from idea formation to methodology and then execution. As someone who grew up in a house swarming with racialized, gendered, and disabled dynamics, I (as do many others) actively live embeddedness in a palimpsestic way (Alexander, 2005). I cannot consider academic or professional positions without constantly considering how my identity is situated within them.

My research highlights the interconnected elements of identity and professional, medical, and legal spheres. I consider the ways that disenfranchisements are constantly occurring throughout history and how they inform present conditions. My hope is that future transprofessional educational models embrace the complexity of lived experiences without being consumed by taxonomical divisions

Eugenics, Dight, and the University

Minnesota has a unique history of eugenics advocacy best exemplified by robustly archived eugenicist Charles Dight. Dight was a Minnesota-based alderman, physician, professor and eugenicist. He used phrenology as a medical science to marginalize and sterilize populations experiencing disability, immigrants, blacks, and disproportionately women. Dight worked at University of Minnesota in various capacities during the early 20^th century. Dight was born in 1879 in Pennsylvania and died in 1938 in Minnesota (Buchanan & Buchanan, 2003). He had various occupations from physician and professor to alderman and author (Minnesota Historical Society). In the 1920s, he began his fight to establish Eugenics practices in Minnesota and pass legislation to sterilize and control populations of disabled people (Warren, 2022). His goal was to rid the United States of anyone with disabilities, especially mental disabilities. He worked to support societies and research towards this goal, and his fortune was later used to establish the Dight Institute to further pursue Eugenics after his death.

Dight’s work is not an individual, unique episode of a human with violent inclinations, but a symptom of larger structural and ontological issues. Thus, the theoretical underpinnings of Dight’s work and their contemporary applications are useful when interrogating his epistemology and impact on the ontological life of marginalized populations in the United States. When he died in 1938, he left a portion of his estate and eugenics research for University of Minnesota to continue to support the mission of eugenics post-mortem. Although the University of Minnesota distanced themselves from the Dight Institute for the Promotion of Human Eugenics through divestment and ultimately dismantling it in the late 20^th century, his influence on political ideologies and dehumanized bodies still lives on—to remind us of interlocking injustices.

When discussing eugenics the perfectibility of the human, many historians have distinguished between positive and negative forms of eugenics (Stern, 2016). Positive forms are generally described as social measures for the reproduction of desirable races, while negative ones are cast as efforts to reduce or eliminate those deemed unfit. What made the proponents of eugenics so powerful was their ability to set themselves in opposition to what they vividly conjured as the “other.” The production of the other, inherent in the movement, always positioned black bodies as the opposite of the ideal or, what British eugenicist Francis Galton called, the “undesirables.” This chapter considers “eugenics” as the complex assemblage of power relations that facilitate the destruction and degradation of certain identities for the ideological comfort of others.

I apply antiblackness and afropessimism as analytics for interrogating Dight, the state of Minnesota, eugenics, and ontological life, and I seek to understand these relationships discursively and affectively (Wilderson III, The Vengeance of Vertigo: Aphasia and Abjection in the Political Trials of Black Insurgents, 2011). I am most interested in how people can confront histories in ways that help us to understand our complicity in intersectional violence centered on eugenics. As citizens who ostensibly benefit from science, this process becomes a reckoning with our relationship to science. As my project serves to shift epistemes surrounding contemporary professional educational models that turn to embeddedness, I engage in this work as an act of self-exploration by also examining my own entanglements with western science and public health.

Dight’s work

Dear Sir:

We have the honor to invite you to become a charter member of the Eugenics Society of the United States of America, now being organized a result of the Second International Congress of Eugenics.

At the Congress it was pointed out by Norwegian, American and other delegates, that the time is ripe for a strong public movement to stem the tide of threatened racial degeneracy following in the wake of the War. America in particular needs to protect herself against indiscriminate immigration, criminal degenerates, and the race suicide deplored by President Roosevelt.

The Napoleonic wars are believed to have lowered the stature and reduced the stamina of the French race. The World War has destroyed the best potential parenthood in Europe. Further world wars may complete the destruction of the white race to which we belong…

[Page 2]…My eugenic measures, for instance, our burden of taxes can be reduced by decreasing the number of degenerates, delinquents, and defectives supported in public institutions; such measures will also increase safeguards against our persons and our property.

Your cooperation and leadership are needed.

The “Eugenical News” will for the present be our official organ. It will show from time to time what is being done by this committee with your contributions.

Our work will consist in the promotion of genetic and eugenic research, and eventually its practical application, through legislation and education, to economic and social betterment. The introduction of courses on Eugenics in universities and medical schools will be encouraged. Selective Immigration laws will undoubtedly be advocated, to safeguard us against the dumping on our shores of incapables now going on. It would seem in some cases that European almshouses and other institutions are, through “assisted” immigration, being emptied into America. The effect must inevitable be to damage the “American race”.

Text Source: Minnesota Historical Society approx. 1923. Location P1628. Box 5. This document is a letter from the Eugenics Committee of the United States which is a subset of the International Commission on Eugenics. The document is headed and signed by dozens of eugenicists. This text is an abbreviated version of the two-page letter.

This text is one of two pages taken from Dight’s records at the Minnesota Historical Society, dated approximately 1923. The document is a letter from the Eugenics Committee of the United States of America to Charles Dight. The letter is recognition of the value Dight had at the time to the Eugenics movement and a formal invitation for Dight to become a member of the society. The document speaks to the objective value of Dight as someone with national acclaim and recognition within eugenics, significant because this acclaim made him a valuable resource to the state of Minnesota and the University of Minnesota. It is well-established that universities thrive off of international and national acclaim of their research and researchers, which is linked to their role in capitalism, securing profit, and building heavy endowments (Engell & Dangerfield, 1998). It would not be hard to see how during a popular national era of eugenics, having a recognizable name like Dight at a university could attract benefits for the institution. Even though eugenics eventually became marginalized, and the University rid itself of the Dight Institute in 1998, Minnesota’s support of the ideology and practice speaks to complicity in a larger schema of structural and ontological violence against certain populations (Kaelber).

Dight’s letter is also useful in contextualizing the intellectual framework for the eugenics movement at that time—terms like “racial degeneracy”, “race suicide”, and “white race” can today serve as teaching prompts to discuss the racialization of black and minoritized bodies. Also evident from the letter is the committee’s fear and passion for the protection of the feminized “America” from “racial deterioration”. Their concerns also include the loss of men during war. The letter becomes an interesting study in how actors and collections of actors position themselves (and Dight) within the racial locus of the United States, as members of the white race facing attacks from all directions because of the loss of perfect white bodies. Their discussion of race is rooted in social construction of phenotype and a revealing construct of nationhood (mentioning the “French race”). Further, their notion of patriotism isn’t one that looks to protect the people within the United States but rather one that looks to protect the image of the country, which is represented by the white able-bodied male who protects the country characterized as a vulnerable female. As a composite, the letter begs intersectional analysis of racial, gendered, ableist, and capitalist norms.

Page two ends the letter sent to Dight. This section emphasizes the necessity of Eugenics and the stereotyped and negative impact that disabled populations have on sectors of white America. Capitalism and class are the focus when the committee writes about the financial burden of not permitting eugenics. The society indicates that only decreasing certain populations of criminals or people predisposed to behavior they don’t agree with, can alleviate the tax burden. Additionally, they believe in direct impact on their own personal safety and property as a result of how the “issue” of eugenics is handled. Personal property, wealth, and sense of security are justifications for sterilization under the presumption of control of other people’s bodies because they viewed themselves as threatened yet backed by the reasoning that their own safety and that of others like them was paramount. Today, these claims can be critically viewed as calculations based on utilitarian views of what constitutes humanity and thusly who deserves to be protected—in other words, a dialogue of securitization.

As a whole, the committee and Dight working on behalf of the eugenics movement reflect a program of legislation, education, practice, and immigration control with national reach intended not just to eliminate disability, but to advance and agenda centered on phobia of particular groups of people to ensure the preservation of their “white race.”

Section I. There is hereby established in connection with the Medical School of the University of Minnesota, the office of State Eugenist and a State Board of Eugenics, the functions of which shall be to protect the state against procreation by persons who are mentally subnormal to a less degree than the feeble-minded and who are designated in this act as morons or socially unfit persons who are potential parents of mentally subnormal offspring or incapable because of mental subnormality of rearing children in a normal way.

Section 2. The Governor of the state shall appoint from the Faculty of the University of Minnesota the State Eugenist, who shall be a competent student of human heredity. The Governor shall also appoint two other persons who with the State Eugenist shall constitute the State Board of Eugenics. Said appointments shall be for a term of three years, except that the first appointments shall be so made that the term of one member of the Board shall expire each year thereafter. The Board of Regents shall fix the salary of the State Eugenist as a member of the Faculty and provide a place for his work. The other two members of the Board of Eugenics shall serve without salary.

Section 3. It shall be the duty of the State Eugenist to maintain state wide surveys in order to locate socially unfit persons in the population of the state and to give instruction in the Medical School of the University of Minnesota and elsewhere on the subjects of heredity and eugenics. In the execution of his duties, the State Eugenist shall upon demand, have access to all inmate, recipient and student records of all state, county, municipal and private custodial, charitable and educational institutions and organizations maintained in whole or in part by public expense, or licensed or registered by public authority in the state, and may require from the…

Text Source: Minnesota Historical Society approx. 1923. Location P1628. Box 5. Titled “A Bill for an Act to Create the Office of State Eugenist and a State Board of Eugenics, and to Authorize Sterilization and to Prevent Procreation by Persons Who Are Mentally Subnormal and Socially Unfit.”

This is one page of a Minnesota bill to legalize sterilization as a form of eugenics – that was proposed by Dight. This bill was eventually revised and approved by the state, which allowed for legal eugenics research and sterilizations of such persons deemed “mentally subnormal” and “socially unfit”—again, open to interpretation based on white normative standards. The bill signals Dight’s active transition from theorizing eugenics to practice, underscoring people with disabilities. In comparison to Dight’s invitation from the eugenics committee, which provided more contextualization regarding broad and sweeping threats, the bill focuses primarily on mental disability (as monolith) and surrounding phobias. Regardless of whether this emphasis was made to get the bill passed through legislature, or if it is because Dight refined his focus, the bill was practically and discursively damaging. This instance highlights the University of Minnesota’s participation as Dight affirmed connection with the University’s medical school in the bill. Furthermore, again the language of securitization manifests when the bill outlines a mission to “protect the state against procreation” by essentially undesirables. This text also exemplified the patriarchal strategies that are used to maintain violence by articulating the state as an entity to protect through eugenics-inspired biological determinism. Additionally, in section 3 of this particular text, language of the carceral state is introduced,

“the State Eugenist shall upon demand, have access to all inmate, recipient and student records of all state, county, municipal and private custodial, charitable and educational institutions and organizations maintained in whole or in part by public expense...”

In Dight’s eugenics society invitation, the need for eugenics pertaining to criminal degenerates and other such entities is possible but it is not until the bill that we clearly see the explicit relationship between eugenicists, inmates, mental health, and the move to legally transform the reproductive capacities of these targeted populations.

Figure 1 was scanned from the Andersen Library at the University of Minnesota from a box and folder dedicated to the Dight Institute. These are Dight’s own crude drawings that depict eugenics candidates. Utilizing phrenology to determine that the shape of the human skull, he draws conclusions regarding who is mentally fit and who is “feeble-minded;” different skull shapes are juxtaposed to a “normal” human head. These differentiations are replete throughout anthropological and medical history—for hundreds of years considered robust scientific conclusions. In the United States, such ideas are linked to Indigenous genocide and black slavery, further justified through phenotypical differences that scientifically, intellectually, and socially have nothing to do with actual intellect or the character of a person. Rather, Dight’s sketches and writing, whether he acknowledged them or not, are evidence of the political and economic structures that benefitted from these kinds of differentiations and their associated violent projects.

Theoretical interventions: Antiblackness and Afropessimism

The story of antiblackness begins in the vertigo (Wilderson, 2011). To be in the vertigo means to be lost. Sometimes narrative precedes, sometimes it comes after, but it usually remains there…in the vertigo.

When did you become black? Was it bequeathed at birth? Was it the movements and fights for rights? Or the lack thereof? Is your blackness in your memory? Was it created? Or is it something you are constantly creating? The African wasn’t always African. The African was a forced migrant to the Americas. The African became black. Is that the loss of identity or the creation of one? It is a transformation—because nothing is created, neither destroyed?

Except that genealogy gets complicated. The African was in the hull of the slave ship. Their eyes are open but they are still lost in darkness, lost in time, lost in space (Maldonado-Torres, 2007). So much so that they became the darkness themselves. They didn’t decide to become “black” but that’s what the other consumed throughout the journey. Lost in time, lost in space, but there is a past. Remember the past that is nearby. What does it mean to be? Where regardless of your social life, you are characterized by loss (Sexton, 2011). What is loss? The loss of humanity, of life itself. The irreconcilable contradiction and the art of failure (Hartman, 2008). I am always failing; to recover my past (Sharpe, 2016). I never had a past; it is my present. The archives that are of the collective. That diagram memories in organized uncollated pages.

As student at a University that is complexly entangled in issues of science, professional education, medical violence, and public health, I draw upon theories of afropessimism and antiblackness as a foundation to interrogate these violences and my own location within them. Theories of antiblackness inform my hermeneutic for engaging in identity-based discussions around blackness and ontological racializations. They carry their own set of assumptions about capitalism and the entanglement (or disentanglement) of blackness.

Antiblackness is the structuring logic for how I understand black ontology and the possibilities for black freedom. Furthermore, its applications to Dight’s articulations of eugenics clarify the identity politics that are embedded in eugenics discussions. As an exercise, in the proceeding sections, I articulate the relationship between antiblackness, afropessimism, capitalism, and Dight’s notions of race and the racial through the lens of afropessimism.

Frank B. Wilderson III is a cultural theorist that is foundational to discussion of afropessimism. One of his books, Red, White, and Black focuses on the structural and ontological nature of blackness which is mystified by the unrelentless focus on quotidian acts of violence. Wilderson argues that to merely focus on small moments of change, denies an understanding of the truth of antiblack violence. We should be unflinching in our understanding of violence and not be persuaded by possible moments of progress because the only progress that could be is the end of civil society itself. I don’t write merely assuming the same unflinching paradigm as Wilderson; however, Wynter’s figure of the ‘man’, and the eugenicists perfect human, can be explained through its antiblack ontological violence. In this vein, Dight’s work is an important historical juncture to make sense of ontological violence in practical relations and provides a starting point to consider the practical relationality between capitalism, blackness, and eugenics as a structuring logic of science. Dight doesn’t occur in a vacuum but is rather informed by the history of colonialism that precedes him while he informs the contemporary state of eugenics in which we collectively participate.

Red, White, and Black also discusses the construction of black ontology. Wilderson utilizes cinema and media analysis mixed with personal experience and historical interrogations to develop a framework for understanding blackness juxtaposed to the white body. Here, blackness and whiteness operate along the same eugenics-inspired divided of white purity and black impurity. However, while historical conditions constructed the ontology of these bodies, Wilderson’s argument is that these categories aren’t racial ones but rather static racial ontologies which bodies move within, outside of, and across. However, understanding the construction of the spectrum helps us to understand Dight’s obsession with the various racializations that are occurring within his own space. It also helps us to understand his perceived value in the death of or denigration of the white race.

Wilderson furthermore speaks about the construction of blackness as an event that occurred during the transatlantic slave trade:

It does not matter what Black people say because Black people have nothing to say. What does matter, however, so the logic continues, is the corrosive effect that this seductive and highly stylized "nothing" has on the sovereign "something" of Indigenism” (Wilderson, 2010).

There is comparative analysis to other oppressions in order to describe the very nature of blackness itself and without qualifying the oppressive experiences of others. For example, stated simply, African peoples went through the middle passage and became black. As such, the relationship between Africans and the emblematic slave ship constitutes a paradigmatic event that changed conceptions of time, space, and race. From the creation of blackness, genealogy and life were lost in a way that was irreparable.

There are several points that I want to bring forward from antiblackness and afropessimist frameworks. First, the construction of blackness itself not only puts the importance of natal alienation, general dishonor, and gratuitous violence into significant dialogue, but explains the expropriation of black bodies that make science and eugenics coherent. Second, racial ontology is not limited to the color of flesh, rather everything can be lightened or darkened depending on the contextualization of that particular thing which reifies Manichean divides. The racial ontology helps us understand the ideas of racialization that consistently permeate Dight’s work. Third, he totalizing nature of anti-black violence is also a useful analytic for interpreting linkages between historical and contemporary eugenics. This is not to say that science is definitively totalizing and all-consuming but rather an argument that university-based scientists, medical practitioners and educators, and public health scholars and researchers need to consider their science as intrinsically linked with and embedded in capitalism and race.

Additionally, it is essential to incorporate intersectionality in looking at historical cases like Dight’s work and eugenics movements (and their motivators and lingering and glaring effects), and the securitization of life. Intersectionality is defined as, “the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual or group, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage.” My theoretical underpinnings come from Kimberlee Crenshaw, bell hooks (rest in power) and Deborah King (Crenshaw, 1991; hooks, 2000; King, 1988). This means that my understanding of intersectionality comes from black feminist thought, which attends to layered identities that magnify violence and its effects and the unique nature of different kinds of violence. Thus, when researchers like me are grappling with violence and its articulations, we must pay attention to identities or else we risk misidentifying violence and misapplying solutions to deep structural problems.

Dight’s and his fellow eugenics committee members interweave identity—they make racial, class, gendered, abilities-based, nationality, financial, and other arguments. Intersectional thought in research now forces us to reckon with the ways that violence is magnified onto particular people. For example, women were disproportionately sterilized from 1928 to 1963 (Kaelber). There is no evidence to suggest that women are more likely to suffer from mental disability than males but the pathologizing of women subjects them to scrutiny from a male gaze (Stern, 2012). As a result, they were also overrepresented in the eugenics agenda in Minnesota. Dight’s commitment to the preservation of white life and white race in Minnesota and the greater United States is not far removed from white supremacist discourse whose affiliated political positions highlight securitization of an allegedly threatened white life collective.

Zenia Kish and Justin Leroy’s discussion of the securitization of life is also valuable for interrogating this line of thinking:

The criteria for accumulating this nexus of life/bond value include avoiding substance and alcohol abuse, staying well fed and completing primary, secondary and tertiary schooling. Just as the child matures into a healthier, more productive member of society rescued from poverty, so too does the bond accrue value as a debt security. This capitalization of human potential results in what we term ‘bonded life’. Like the financial incentives sustaining slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello, life bonds generate profit by revaluing racialized life. Both technologies depend on turning life into debt. Life bonds, of course, are meant to improve the lives of the global poor, and unlike forms of financialization developed by slave owners, traders of life bonds do not have legal ownership over the bondee.” (Kish & Leroy, 2015)

Kish and Leroy identity the “nexus of life/bond value” within American society. The value of life increases based on what actions are taken, who you are, and your health. The value of your life monetarily and socially directly corresponds to these categories. These categories allow people to determine who are objectively productively members of society juxtaposed to who are debts and obligations. This debt-bond framework is also a good site to consider applications of black Marxism (Robsinon, 2005). As people gain degrees and stay in good health, the value of their life and assumed productiveness positively correlates. As Kish and Leroy describe it, “life bonds generate profit by revaluing racialized life.” Eugenicists are painfully predictable in this regard as the life/bond value manifests when discussing disabled populations—What happens to people who can’t stay in good health, can’t get a bunch of degrees, or people who enter prison? They become debt and eventually society’s waste according to Dight and eugenicists.

Conclusion

I was born differently

Adjacent to humanity

They named me insanity

With poetry flowing through my veins

And my flesh a disability

A product of scientific inquiry

Always hoping that change would come

I’ve lived in their intellectual tautologies

Racist ableist called a monstrosity

Their studies of phrenology never helped me any

I have died and died and died and died

Time and time and time and time

Again, on this table

I am the captive

Subject to abuse and persecution

I am a recluse

My present has been stolen and past has been cut out

When in doubt they said look to the shape of the reflection before you

Before the hieroglyphics of their insecurities are carved into my forehead

now they say “more meds”

I was never good enough for humanity but humanity wanted to control me

So, they started eugenics and created an artificial story

Their committees despised me,

the government surprised me

They called me a foreigner but I am the most native to this land

Yet for every lobotomy I endured

my heart AND my brain turned to sand

And as time slips through the hourglass

Teetering between the beginning and the end

The tear between these worlds will never seem to mend

So, we are lost in the limbo of our own Carceral state

Dying to live and living to die are all the same fate

These institutions fund forced abortions and plan my parenthood

But if I ever shed my tears, I would run all these rivers full

It’s been a long time we’ve been asking for change

And I am still wondering

When change gone come

Because whether I approach from love or hate

They love to hate what they’ll never understand

In my work, I acknowledge that some stories are missing and need to be added to the interrogation of history, eugenicists, universities, and science. I acknowledge the slaves and other black people who had their bodies used for scientific experimentation without their consent. The well-known Tuskegee syphilis experiment, Henrietta Lacks, and other such moments represent events that are indicative of a larger framework of antiblack violence. Black bodies were used for scientific innovation, for capitalist extraction. Their disposability and the lack of valuation made them the ideal test subjects to be sacrificed and experimented on for the sake of preserving true life, which is majority white life (Martin, ProPublica, & Montagne, 2017). Racialization enabled mechanisms that proliferated eugenics, and eugenics is not a story of the past but rather a hermeneutic for understanding the scientific and medical industrial complex today.

Charles Dight was entirely reliant on a debt-bonded framework that was permeated by the paradigm of antiblackness. These intersectional frameworks align to remind us of our own complicity and the complicity of the institutions around us. While our university intuitions distance themselves from the traditional language of eugenics, we should be clear in how the same frameworks still apply to our everyday experiences. The management of professionalization, and degree prestige, reenacts some of the same violence we hope to escape by ascribing an economic value to our bodies. Research institutions continue to rely on dangerously constructed science from the expropriation of black and unconsenting bodies with only apologies as reparations; and the rigidity of academia reminds us what disciplines and fields are separate instead of how the all come together.

Building on antiblackness and afropessimism, I suggest embeddedness to disrupt the figure of ‘man’ that is maintained through race neutral educational spaces and engaging in transdisciplinary work to resist reinforcing isolated and individuated understandings of systemic violence (Maldonado-Torres, 2007). As I continue forward in my own research, I aim to better understand Dight’s eugenics work and the contemporary violence that is inflicted on black communities in Minnesota (Piller, 2022; Mannix, 2021). I aim to put contemporary scientific and medical practice within a larger narrative of modern eugenics to draw attention to the work that lies ahead for all.

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