At least half of the world population has to die.
“Eugenics,” or “good genes,” was a science based on “social
Darwinism,” or “survival of the fittest,” applied to humans. It was very popular
with those who had most of the wealth and felt like they needed a scientific rationale for it to validate the great poverty and suffering that also would
occur.
After
1900, Rockefeller, along with the Harriman family, the family that gave
the Bush family its start, began to spend millions on “eugenics” research.
Some of the Rockefeller
Foundation money went to a Swiss psychiatrist named Ernst Rudin. He later went
on to head the German “Racial Hygiene Society,” a section of the new Nazi
state. Rockefeller would also hire William Lyon Mackenzie King as a “Director
of Industrial Research” for the Rockefeller Foundation shortly after he began
the racist war on opium-smoking Chinese in Canada.
“Eugenics” soon evolved
into “racial hygiene,” a term the Nazis used to scientifically justify their
genocidal policies. Hitler was called the “physician of the German people,” who were
“killing in the name of healing.”
One member of Davenport’s office would remark that Hitler “should be made (an)
honorary member” of the ERO. (191) The ERO and Ernst Rudin, ex-Rockefeller
employee and head of the German “Racial Hygiene Society,” worked together regularly.
Rockefeller’s racist
writers were a hit. By the early 1930s, thirty states had passed compulsory
sterilization laws that gave panels of “experts” the power to sterilize
individuals who fell into such undesirable social categories as “sexual
perverts,” “epileptics,” “drunkards,” and “drug fiends.” Hitler credited
eugenics in America as the most important factor influencing his policies on
racial and hereditary science.
At least half of the
world population has to die.
Rockefeller’s Council on
Foreign Relations recently published an article stating that the US population
should be reduced to “about its size in the 1940s,” in other words, cut back by at least half.
It goes without saying that similar (if not more drastic) “cuts” are called for
in the rest of the world. Most of their attention is with the “less developed”
countries. Africa, of course... and you will not believe it... blacks in
Atlanta...
Atlanta is often
affectionately called the “Black Mecca” of the South, but the city has undergone
a dramatic demographic shift over the past four decades. Black Atlanta is
shrinking, and there are 20 major reasons, a “20-Point Plan,” that account for
this depopulation. Many of them are detailed in a book entitled “The Black
Metropolis in the Twenty-First Century” (2007).
The Center for the Study
of Racism, Social Justice, and Health
The Center for the Study
of Racism, Social Justice, and Health is dedicated to examining how and when
racism affects health, providing tools to improve the rigor with which
researchers study racism and health, and evaluating intervention strategies
that most effectively address racism’s contributions to health inequities.
The Center is
distinguished from other disparities-related research units at UCLA by its
primary focus on the health implications of racism for diverse populations.
Public health is both an academic and an applied discipline.
Therefore, the Center encourages the translation of research findings for use
by public health professionals, community organizations, and policymakers in
their ongoing health equity efforts.
Many Center affiliates
are working to identify, investigate, and explain the specific mechanisms by
which various forms of racism may produce local, national, or global health
inequities.
Others are advancing critical racial theories or building community
partnerships to guide their anti-racism and health equity work.
How does racism affect
the physical and mental health of diverse populations? What tools are available
to improve the rigor with which researchers study racism and its relationship
to health inequities?
Which intervention strategies most effectively address racism’s contribution to
specific health inequities? What are effective ways to teach public health
students about racism?
As a journal writer
for UCL of FSPH, Professor Chandra Ford writes about how study results may
be influenced by conscious or unconscious assumptions.
How can public health researchers address racism? That’s the focus of a
supplement to the latest issue of the journal Ethnicity & Disease, for which UCLA professor Chandra Ford served as a guest editor.
“Race is a social
construct and not a biological attribute, but scientists continue to design
studies that reinforce the notion that race and ethnicity are causes of health
outcomes,” said Ford, an associate professor of community health sciences and
the founding director of the Center for the Study of Racism, Social
Justice & Health at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health.
The journal supplement
includes a collection of papers based on critical race theory, a concept
developed more than three decades ago by legal scholars that illuminates the
subtle ways racism matters in any situation.
“Critical race theory
helps public health researchers avoid common pitfalls that pervade the field
and limit the capacity to achieve equity,” Ford said.
These pitfalls include erroneously targeting biological or cultural characteristics of minorities as the root cause of the disease, thus missing the true cause and conflating the effects of racism with those of race or ethnicity and reinforcing racial or ethnic stereotypes.
For example,” Ford said, “a researcher might incorrectly jump to a conclusion
that differences between white and Black people observed in a study are due to
genetic factors, even if that researcher did not actually analyze their genetic
backgrounds.
A paper by Ford and
colleagues in the supplement examines the public health version of critical
race theory, called “public health critical race praxis,” which she and Collins
Airhihenbuwa, a professor of health management and policy at Georgia State University,
coined in 2010. Scientists can use the praxis to minimize the risk of inserting
racial bias into their research.
A team led by Ford
applied the praxis to an ongoing study in which they are analyzing the type of
care received by a group of people who were diagnosed with HIV between 2008 and
2012. All of the authors of the HIV research completed brief, confidential
questionnaires asking what they believed the outcomes would be for the research
questions they plan to answer, including any racial or ethnic patterns they
expect to find.
The study of possible
bias in HIV research is not complete, but Ford and her colleagues will
compare the authors’ assumptions with the actual data the study produces to
determine whether the authors’ biases could have affected the results.
For the ongoing study, Ford and her colleagues also plan to analyze whether the
services HIV patients receive are affected by the race and ethnicity of the
health care workers who are caring for them.
“These are just two
examples of how public health critical race praxis can be applied to research,”
Ford said. “This is not a formula, but a broad, standardized approach that
researchers can use to draw attention to how racism can influence the empirical
work that they do.”
Chandra Ford, Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences. Her areas
of expertise include HIV/AIDS prevention and care; HIV testing among older
adults; the social determinants of health/social epidemiology; conceptualizing
and measuring racism, race, and ethnicity; Public Health Critical Race Praxis
(PHCRP)/Critical Race Theory; and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT)
health disparities.
Dr. Ford earned her Ph.D. from the Gillings School of Public Health at the University of North Carolina. She completed postdoctoral fellowships in the
Department of Social Medicine at the University of North Carolina and the
Department of Epidemiology at Columbia University, where she was a W. K.
Kellogg Foundation Kellogg Health Scholar. Ford has received several
competitive awards. She currently is a Kaiser Permanente Chris Burch Leadership
Awardee.
