The History Of Science Fiction utterly fails to live up to its title
This reprehensible graphic novel could have been so much more, but instead spends time covering up history, not unpacking it
Aux Features Science fiction
The setup to The History Of Science Fiction is fairly straightforward: Guides, most of them fictionalized versions of significant white men from science fiction’s past, elaborate on the history of the genre for two robots in a futuristic museum. As comics are the art of sequentiality, a graphic novel purporting to be the sequential history of science fiction—put out by the publisher of so much seminal sci-fi, no less—is likely an intriguing prospect for many comics readers. Presented with an index and a list of principal art sources, the book is clearly attempting to be of some academic or referential use, on top of its wider appeal. But the English translation of Histoire De La Science Fiction fails utterly as a proper historic work—and worse, ends up functioning as weak hagiography.
Which is a shame, because the art shines throughout the book. It’s especially wonderful when recreating the angles of famous shots from sci-fi films. In fact, in terms of visuals alone, The History Of Science Fiction would be a commendable work. There is a literal timeline that runs through the bottom of some pages and highlights various sci-fi works, usually relevant to the content on the rest of the page.
Unfortunately, the book also claims to be the history of science fiction; but it only really presents the history of Western science fiction—and a skewed version, at that. More precisely, it primarily functions as a history of science fiction from France, the U.K., and the United States. The notable writers and editors to which the comic team gives literal voice are primarily from those locations, with writers from other countries serving as little more than window dressing. For example, though objects and ideas from Japanese sci-fi litter the futuristic museum, no Japanese author is given anywhere near the depth as writers from the aforementioned countries. Considering that one of the primary sources for this book is able to be precise about its purview (La Science-Fiction En France Dans Les Années 50, or Science Fiction In France In The ’50s), it’s a baffling decision on the part of everyone involved here to not specify this—especially while calling itself history.
Additionally, there is an ugly tendency in the book to gloss over the more reprehensible aspects of the writers featured. At one point, a fictionalized version of British author Michael Moorcock updates a fictionalized H.G. Wells on the state of science fiction after his death. The book has Moorcock say, “Although the Huxley family didn’t always agree on everything, Julian (a renowned biologist who later popularized the term “transhumanism”), Aldous, and you, Herbert, were all staunch supporters of Darwinism and eugenics that would be of benefit to the human race. In contrast to the extremist eugenic ideas of the Nazis, for example.” This statement is nonsensical; even if one accepts the possibility that the creative team wholly disagrees with eugenics but feels that Moorcock—given the opportunity to speak with Wells—would say this, it’s presented without question, when in actuality there is no eugenics “of benefit” to the human race. It literally generates inequality.
There is brief mention of how the closed-mindedness of some lionized writers affected science fiction. For example, John W. Campbell is described as being “marred by racism and rather questionable stances, particularly on pseudo-sciences such as scientology.” However, while the book imagines and renders Campbell’s moments of brilliance in illuminating flashbacks, it does nothing of the sort with his racism, even though those noxious beliefs equally shaped the science fiction of his time and place. Choices like these make The History Of Science Fiction seem absurd as a serious historical work.
Finally, the book comes off as confused about how the history of science fiction has resulted in its present. It quotes Rebecca F. Kuang’s Hugo acceptance speech, outlining what she would tell a new writer of science fiction: “The chances are very high that you will be sexually harassed at conventions, or the target of racist microaggressions, or very often just overt racism.” Yet six pages earlier, it features a hagiography of Harlan Ellison that omits his very public 2006 groping of fellow Hugo winner Connie Willis (there is literally footage of the incident).
By not mentioning this, the book itself contributes to how the larger culture of science fiction—that results in sexual harassment at conventions—is maintained, permitting acts of sexual harassment and assault. The Kuang quote continues, with her saying, “the way people talk about you and your literature will be tied to your identity and your personal trauma instead of the stories you are actually trying to tell.” By including this specific comment by Kuang, who is only mentioned in this instance, and whose work is never discussed, is The History Of Science Fiction not doing exactly what she is decrying?
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This statement is nonsensical; even if one accepts the possibility that the creative team wholly disagrees with eugenics but feels that Moorcock—given the opportunity to speak with Wells—would say this, it’s presented without question, when in actuality there is no eugenics “of benefit” to the human race. It literally generates inequality.I find it very concerning that Mark Waid edited the English translation for this nonsense as I usually respect the guy.This is probably up there with his Champions tie-in to Secret Empire where he defended the use of internment camps…And, knowing the internet, I’m certain a bunch of assholes will come out of the woodwork to say how eugenics is a good thing actually…
I’ll only say that Cho’s take there is entirely on point for the character. He’s a fucking yo-yo of competing theories and equations, to the point that he nearly starves himself from the strain (which is presented as a quirk). Plus, he’s a bit leaning toward the “everything has a rational explanation that I can understand” bent. He’d definitely pull a “Okay, let’s weigh this out” tack.
At the the end of the day, it’s still a white guy using a fictional Korean American character as a shield that alludes to a very real atrocity committed against Japanese Americans to justify the use of internment camps.
https://listverse.com/2018/06/30/10-horrifying-wwii-internment-camps-set-up-all-around-the-world/“The Japanese weren’t the only people sent to internment camps in the United States. Under the order that sent the Japanese into the camps, Taiwanese and Korean civilians were considered Japanese.”They’d been annexed into the Japanese Empire and hence got classed as in effect Japanese whether it was fair or not.
https://listverse.com/2018/06/30/10-horrifying-wwii-internment-camps-set-up-all-around-the-world/“The Japanese weren’t the only people sent to internment camps in the United States. Under the order that sent the Japanese into the camps, Taiwanese and Korean civilians were considered Japanese.”They’d been annexed into the Japanese Empire and hence got classed as in effect Japanese whether it was fair or not.
Eugenics is a lightning-rod because people don’t want things to be both pervasive and destructive. If they can’t claim that eugenics was born and died with the nazis, people try to claim that it was a quaint belief system that influenced science-fiction writers, rather than a core tenet of Western culture that still influences social policy. (There’s a medical textbook from the 1920s that precisely describes the opening of Mike Judge’s movie “Idiocracy,” and presents eugenics as necessary to prevent the nation being overrun by moral and intellectual inferiors. Even the historical “incest and rape” exception for abortion had less to do with the woman carrying a traumatic pregnancy than concern about the offspring of rapists or incestuous relationships contaminating the gene pool.)There’s a psychologist named Kathryn Paige Harden who just published a book arguing that genetics determine school performance. When interviewers have asked her about her work’s connection to eugenics, she falls back on a narrow definition of eugenics as genocide or overt racism, so that she can exist outside of it.
I’ve never been able to enjoy Idiocracy for this reason. From the first viewing, while my friends were laughing at “BRAWNDO HAS WHAT PLANTS CRAVE,” I just kept saying “. . . but this is a pro-eugenics screed.” (Yes, I am frequently a total bummer at parties.)
What part of it do you consider a “pro-eugenics screed?” You don’t have to be a backer of eugenics to think that intelligent people are more likely to give birth to intelligent children. That’s just scientifically correct. The problem arises when you use that fact to argue, for example, that less intelligent people should not be allowed to reproduce, or that children of less intelligent parents should not get an equal opportunity to demonstrate their intelligence and merit.
You don’t have to be a backer of eugenics to think that intelligent people are more likely to give birth to intelligent children…but it helps!
That’s just scientifically correct.It’s half-true at best. Like most-to-all inherited traits, it’s a mixture or genetics, epigenetics, and environment that result in what folks think of when they say “intelligence.”
So you admit that genetics are a contributing factor to intelligence, but then say that believing that genetics are a contributing factor to intelligence makes you . . . a eugenicist?
Admitting that genetics are a contributing factor to intelligence absolutely does not make one a eugenicist. Hell, even believing that if “stupid” people are the only ones that reproduce, then the intelligence of the general population may suffer long-term doesn’t make one a eugenicist. Coming the conclusion that we should take action to prevent that from happening is what makes one a eugenicist. And you know what, Idiocracy doesn’t contain that call to action, so it’s all good, right?
Well, no, because dystopian science fiction rarely contains a call to action. It sets up the worst possible outcome of the author’s chosen societal ill (religious fundamentalism in The Handmaid’s Tale; fascism in The Man in the High Castle; totalitarian surveillance states in 1984; “stupid”–but really, just poor–people dumbing down the gene pool in Idiocracy) and leaves it to the reader to draw the desired conclusion.
Anyway, it’s okay, you can still like the movie. It has some compelling set pieces and a few genuinely funny scenes, but if you’re concerned about the human race getting stupider, the solution to that is to end poverty, improve childhood nutrition, and increase funding for universal pre-K and elementary schools. That’s how you get smart kids.
The Marching Morons, where a man from the past plans the extermination of the stupid masses since the intelligent minority don’t want to get their hand dirty. – C F Kornbluth
I think you have to squint pretty hard to find the movie to be pro-eugenics (and even harder to consider it a “screed”), since the part of it that’s about that (the framing device about the educated childless couple versus the ignorant, fecund rednecks) is presented as a jumping-off point to explain why Joe is the smartest person in the future, not the focus of the plot. To me it’s much more obviously a satire of American corporate capitalism, where everyone’s been dumbed down by a constant assault of in-your-face advertising and lowbrow entertainment.
That’s kinda like saying Handmaid’s Tale doesn’t warn against religious fundamentalism and misogynistic public policy, or that Elysium isn’t a movie cautioning against the dangers of rampant environmental catastrophe. The premise of the movie is that undesirable (fat, southern, poor, stupid) people were allowed to reproduce, which lead to the collapse of society. It doesn’t come more cut and dry than that.
Still not sold, sorry. Given that Mike Judge’s other most well-known works are 1) about the two dumbest idiots in the world and how they never really suffer consequences for being dumb, and 2) about highly intelligent, educated people being venal and making stupid mistakes, it seems a lot more plausible to me that the reproduction-rate premise of Idiocracy is a mechanism to get to the social satire, and not the point. The movie contrasts a cautious, well-educated couple who chooses to use birth control and delays reproduction (until it’s too late) with a set of people who do not. It can much more easily be seen as advocating for education and birth control, not eugenics. Not to mention that both sets of people are white Americans, so it’s unclear why eugenics, which focused on racial differences, would even be relevant.
Eugenics absolutely did not focus on racial differences, but rather on overall “fitness”–physical and mental. Of course, in racist societies like the US, this impacted non-white folks disproportionately, but Buck v Bell, the landmark Supreme Court decision that is STILL used to justify forced sterilization, involved a white woman who had been sterilized due to being “feeble minded.” The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness, the totally insane and discredited, but still very influential, case study that was one of the cornerstones of the eugenics movement in America, focused on a family of white folks who traced their roots back to the Revolutionary War.
As someone who was nearly put into “special education” classes in elementary school before my family moved to a state with programs for “gifted” kids, this hits kinda close to home. I was a hairs-breadth from being deemed feeble minded myself.
Sorry, Kinja hates when I paste something from another site. Should have said . . .
but Buck v Bell, the landmark Supreme Court decision…
The principles of eugenics may have been ostensibly about “fitness,” but they just so happen to have routinely identified races outside the dominant one—in every culture—as less fit, even if they caught certain members of the dominant race as well. Scientific racism was closely associated with eugenics; it would be inane to pretend that eugenics was unaffected by racial concerns or was somehow colorblind.
There’s still little, if any, support in the text of Idiocracy for the idea that Mike Judge was advocating for eugenics. Especially given his other work, it’s a much simpler approach to assume he would prefer to increase education and access to birth control than to believe that he thinks certain people shouldn’t be allowed to reproduce.
At least you avoided it — I ended up in Learning Disabilities class for two years because the Army-run Junior High I was attending didn’t know how to deal with gifted kids!Especially those who also had ADHD like I had.
If you want to be even less fun, point out the racism associated with the use of IQ scoring!Seriously though, I wouldn’t call it eugenicist, especially since they go out of their way to emphasize that the two leads are *extremely* average.
Right, because only in a world ruined by the poor, stupid, and obese procreating can an average man be king.
Sure, you can take that away from it, and if it ruins the rest of the movie I get that. But the movie was clearly not centering some kind of argument that “smart” people should have more babies now.
As a biomedical scientist whose work deals with genetics, I’m more than a bit annoyed at the constant disingenuous conflating of anything to do with human genetics with eugenics, though. Eugenics had nothing to do with actual genetics research and was actually invented *before* the (re)discovery of Mendel’s Laws. Genetics is real, eugenics is not.
As evidenced in the comments people think eugenics IS genetic research and not some racist belief that died with Nazis.Jeezuz.
Once again, you seem to be appalled at the idea that anyone in a piece of media might voice a view you disagree with, at least without it immediately being drilled into readers that the person is wrong, wrong, WRONG. Hulk is clearly offering a view here that he recognizes is controversial, and that he himself is wary about. If you’re saying no character can voice such a view, you’re just insisting that everything you watch tediously pander to you at all times.
*yikes* wtf. The decision to make them say they’re “well cared for” is…something.
“As an Asian-American, I have a deep historical hatred for internment camps.”Only of the whites of whites could have written that phrase. Because, of course, all Asians are the same and have the exact same experiences. Why, as we all know, when the Japanese-Americans were being interned…why, the Chinese and Vietnamese and Burmese and Indonesians and Koreans and the Filipinos and- heck, all of Asia just loved the Japanese right at that moment, right? Right? Also, why does Hentai Hulk look like he’s straining to pump a mad heroin turd?
As I posted to Laserface … for the Koreans and Taiwanese at least, yes it could have been the same experience.“https://listverse.com/2018/06/30/10-horrifying-wwii-internment-camps-set-up-all-around-the-world/“The Japanese weren’t the only people sent to internment camps in the United States. Under the order that sent the Japanese into the camps, Taiwanese and Korean civilians were considered Japanese.”They’d been annexed into the Japanese Empire and hence got classed as in effect Japanese whether it was fair or not.”
I suppose I should be…grateful…that white people are slowly…slowly learning that Japan isn’t all there is to Asia. The term “Asian-American” is just a term of convenience for whites, which was my point.
Is there somewhere I could get up to speed on this discussion? Because this panel is not a defense of internment camps, it’s an argument against living as a fugitive.These people aren’t being given a choice between internment and freedom.
Did the text walk quickly past H.P. Lovecraft while holding a hand to the side of its head as a blinker?
something something *hard sci-fi* something something
I dunno, the book is written by French authors. I imagine they just ignore anything they don’t want to think about, like colonialism.
Has HP Lovecraft ever been considered “hard sci-fi”?
Doesn’t hard sci-fi deal with, you know, science rather than ancient gods and fish?
“[Eugenics] literally generates inequality.” I believe it’s what people do with it that generates that inequality. It may depend upon how you define it, but eugenics as typically defined does not itself create inequality in society. It just allows bigots, the rich and entitled, and simpletons to use bastardizations of its concepts to promote whatever awful agenda (e.g., creating the social contstruct known as race, forced sterilization, justification for wealth inequality, genocide, etc.) they have.
It’s incorrect to view eugenics as an abstract entity – it was a pragmatic concept that used early-20th century science to reinforce contemporary beliefs about social order. Technically it’s true that eugenics didn’t “create” inequality, but it was part of the scientific rationalization for existing inequality. Its presumptions about which groups possessed beneficial versus detrimental traits were very upfront.
And using eugenics in that way is terrible, full stop. Suggesting that eugenics explains the social order is not science and never was.
No? Sounds like sociology to me.
Nah, it was always pseudoscience. All that artificial selection serves to do is narrow the gene pool, which does more harm than good.
While I agree with you generally, It’s not pseudoscience to think that traits based at least in part on genes could be bred in human beings. If it can be done with animals and oplants, it can be done with humans. Now, the phenotypical expression of genes is much more complex then those of pea plants and it would be orders of magnitude more difficult.
And, as you have noted, breeding for particular traits can lead to a reduction in the gene pool, which is never good.What is pseudoscience is using eugenics as an explanation for the social order. Just like social darwinism was bullshit.
It goes deeper than that, the myth is as you agree the notion that selective breeding would create a “fitter” populace. The science of genetics is not to be conflated with the eugenics movement, which centres entirely around the notion of “better” people – the term even means “well born”. What you’re characterising as a bug is the main feature.
From Merriam-Webster (and this is just the first dictionary I used): the practice or advocacy of controlled selective breeding of human populations (as by sterilization) to improve the population’s genetic compositionEugenics in the common poulace has been associated with all sorts of horrific practices (including for the sake of clarity the above-referenced sterilization) that are not part of the definition.
The very definition you are citing is the pseudoscientific bullshit that I’m calling out.Not just how it is put into practice, but the core idea is inherently flawed.
Only it isn’t. It depends upon your definition of “improve”, but it’s 100% legitimate science.
No it fucking isn’t, it’s been thoroughly debunked. Selective breeding produces specialised organisms, not generally healthier ones – that’s why specific-breed dogs tend to be riddled with health issues, crops are easily wiped out by disease, and fruit/veg farming uses grafting to compensate for the downsides of the component plants. It’s a tool for making bigger tomatoes and fatter chickens, and in that context it’s not eugenics.The idea that selective breeding creates a fitter/more robust population is literally Nazi bullshit, and I’m about done giving you the benefit of the doubt here.
I pretty much agree with everything in your first paragraph. It does not contradict anything I said.
Selective breeding doesn’t inherently produce populations with genetic defects, or monocultures easily wiped out by disease. Selective breeding specifically FOR monocultures in a way that is neutral to health produces those things. Certain dog breeds have health defects not because of selective breeding per se, but because they were selectively bred in a way that didn’t prioritise, or even particularly value, long-term health; certain crops have become vulnerable monocultures because they were selectively bred in a way that didn’t value genetic diversity. But the mechanism of selective breeding doesn’t have to be used to those ends. You could selectively breed to encourage genetic diversity, for instance (by increasing the number of offspring allowed to rare variants and decreasing the number allowed to dominant variants); you could selectively breed to prioritise health (rather than cute faces or waggy tails or whatever).[for instance: purebred dogs on average life a few years less than crossbred dogs, which live around a year less than wild wolves. But life expectancy varies dramatically between breeds, and some breeds, like purebred Chihuahuas, actually live longer than either wolves or crossbreeds – it depends WHAT they have been bred for. (the biggest thing is that breeding for small size tends to improve longevity, all else being equal, as does breeding for active lifestyles.]Selective breeding is just a tool; its effects depends on what you use it to do. To take an extreme example: banning people from having children if they had a very high risk of dying in infancy would be selective breeding, but it would clearly increase the overall ‘fitness’ of the species (and of course morality, culture and economics all act to produce selective breeding regardless of government policy).This doesn’t affect the moral questions – do we have a right to ‘improve’ the species, do we have the foresight to identify ‘good’ and ‘bad’ traits impartially, and do we want to give the government the power that would be required to carry out any such policy? – but in purely empirical terms, yes, intelligent selective breeding to encourage desired traits does increase the prevalance of those traits in the engineered population (that’s how we have the crops and domestic animals we have), and yes this would/does apply in people as well (if we could agree what the desired traits were). It’s not pseudoscience as an abstract concept. [however, many people promoting eugenics have adopted pseudoscientific theories of which traits are desirable and why]
I always liked The Gernsback Continuum by Gibson wherein the author keeps finding himself in a world of 1930’s futurism and among other things notices how purely white it is.
Yikes! I didn’t know that happened to Connie Willis.
Seriously, what the hell. I could use a real history of science fiction.
Me too. If anyone can recommend one, that would be much appreciated.
Alec Nevala-Lee’s recent Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction, is pretty good. Yes, I know, you are going to say “but that’s just talking about four white guys”, but 1) Let’s face it, these guys *did* rule mid 20th century SF (its supposed “Golden Age”) for better or worse, and 2) Lee doesn’t paint these guys as saints. I think most people already knew that Heinlein and Hubbard were fairly awful people, but much of the recent revaluation of Campbell as a racist and sexist who used his power as editor of Astounding (the prestige SF magazine of the day) to reject stories from the sorts of people he didn’t like comes from Lee’s book, and even Asimov doesn’t come off well and was someone who female SF fans knew to avoid lest they get their bottoms pinched.
I’m with you about point 2. I read all of those authors except Hubbard pretty voraciously in high school but even then could tell they weren’t meant “for me” as much I really loved a lot of sci-fi short stories. Anyway, thanks for the recommendation. I’ll add it to my Christmas reading.
Honestly I think I learn about most of this through Twitter threads.
This just seems like a prettier spin through Wikipedia, with the “Controversy” section blanked.
So you could get this, or seek out some used book stores and look for Joanna Russ. I’d recommend the latter.
When I was a wee slip, I learned about the classics of sci-fi by reading “A Reader’s Guide to Science Fiction”, published 1980. It was literally just a list of Hugo and Nebula award winners with descriptions of some of the most prominent of the various white male authors, plus Ursula LeGuinn and Sam Delaney.This book sounds like a product of the same mindset, but with pretty illustrations, and inexcusable coming forty years later. I’d like to imagine the generations coming up now would have an easier time learning about the issues of sexism and racism and the troubled history of the genre.
Does it talk about Frankenstein?
And at least refer to Billion [later Trillion] Year Spree?I gather that science-fiction criticism and history even have some academic respectability these days (in the literature department, I mean; the trillion dollar sprees in Hollywood and the video game industry are of obvious interest down the block at the business school). The ante is correspondingly higher.
Well this piece seems to be focused on it’s progression primarily as art, but I’d agree that it’s preeminence as a money-printer is interesting too.
in actuality there is no eugenics “of benefit” to the human race. It literally generates inequality
People are using genetics to check if both partners are carriers for Tay-Sachs in order to avoid having a child with two copies of that recessive gene, and thus expressing the phenotype. That’s a form of eugenics which almost nobody objects to because it clearly benefits the next generation (and parents who don’t want their children to have that). In Iceland people often use an app to check their degree of relatedness (the average for all Icelanders is third-cousin) in order to avoid excessive inbreeding. That’s also eugenics, which basically nobody would object to.Getting into somewhat more controversial territory, doctors can now check if a fetus will have Downs syndrome while it’s in the womb. The overwhelming majority of mothers choose to abort when that’s the case, despite how many people claim to be “pro-life”. This is also eugenics. Perhaps Kejere objects to what that majority of women under those circumstances do, I don’t know.
You are completely eliding the bit where eugenics was created before we knew anything about DNA. It’s disingenous as fuck to conflate eliminating potentially fatal genetic issues with the 14 words people.
Eugenics was invented by Francis Galton, so if anyone can be considered a eugenicist it’s him. He would not have known what you meant by “14 words”, and his big idea was “positive eugenics” in which the “best” people (by his criteria, or presumably people with similar beliefs as him) would be brought together in the hopes they would marry and given money to help them. Nowadays universities are mostly co-ed and marriages are highly correlated with education (the technical term now is “assortative mating”), and various governments give couples benefits for having children. I’ve already indicated I don’t think it’s “disingenous as fuck” to use Galton’s ideas as representative of eugenics (even if we find “negative eugenics” aimed at preventing births more interesting). Instead, I would say it’s much more disingenuous to conflate H. G. Wells with a neo-nazi (just as it would be for Margaret Sanger, George Bernard Shaw or John Maynard Keynes), even if he believed in many stupid things. His stupid ideas were his own and can be critiqued as such (and were by people like G. K. Chesterton well before WW2).
Gosh I wonder who Galton, inventor of psychometrics, thought the “best” people were.
I’m not interested in this conveniently selective pedantry where “*technically* that person was a different flavor of racist than the shorthand you’re using” when you’re not also acknowledging that the 14 words are, in line with Galton’s beliefs, positive eugenics.
Galton’s focus wasn’t on white people vs non-white people (as in 14 words), but on traits within his own population (though he also imagined that population including the descendants of selective immigration). The 14 words don’t say anything about the traits of eminence Galton was interested in and relentlessly quantified, just about whiteness. Back when eugenics was popular, there were even African-Americans like DuBois who embraced it as something that could be applied within their own group… because eugenics was conceived as something that applied within a population. I don’t think this is pedantry (nor do I know why you call it “selective”) or a mere “technicality”, I think you really don’t understand any of the people I named and what they actually believed if you conflate them with neo-nazis.
This is an awfully large paragraph to rationalize Galton not being a racist just because he didn’t explicitly say “I am a racist who wants more white babies.”
Gosh I *wonder* what he meant by “more suitable.”
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/column-the-false-racist-theory-of-eugenics-once-ruled-science-lets-never-let-that-happen-again
No where in that did I say Galton wasn’t a racist. He wrote about how it would be better for the Chinese to take over Africa. But the Chinese aren’t white, and his ideas for eugenics were focused on differences in fertility WITHIN the white English population. And, as I thought I was clear enough in stating, it is because of its application WITHIN rather than BETWEEN groups that W.E.B Du Bois, whom I hope even you would not consider a white supremacist, embraced such ideas. And I suppose I can’t assume now that it goes without saying that Du Bois’ support for an idea doesn’t makes it good. What we can say more confidently is that his intellectual errors were his own, and not that of some neonazi goon.
I have no idea what the “Dismiss” button does and probably shouldn’t ragepress things, but for the people capable of reading context, Galton wanted the “more suitable” races to prevail. Not specifying which doesn’t make him not a racist.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/column-the-false-racist-theory-of-eugenics-once-ruled-science-lets-never-let-that-happen-again
Eugenics is one of those things where everybody agrees it’s BAD, in the abstract, yet there’s clearly widespread support for it in practice, as you point out. It leads to people like notochordate obscuring the dangers of eugenics by transferring the taboo to other things that eugenicists also believed. [pretending that eugenics is the same as racism is a convenient way to avoid criticising eugenics itself, because whenever you then find an example you DO like you can say ‘but look, they’re not racists, so it’s not REALLY eugenics’…]