August 22, 2025 • 22 mins
Tracy discusses the concept of race as it has and hasn't existed in European history. Both Tracy and Holly share their frustration and fury about the Buck v. Bell story.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
I'm Tracy B.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
We talked this week about Stevan, and by extension, also
talked about some very unsuccessful Spanish efforts to explore and
colonize what's now Laurada and the whole coast from there
into Mexico did not work out for them. I've had
(00:37):
him on my list for a really long time with
a question mark after it, just because I was not
sure if it was ever going to happen, and then
when I was looking specifically for something related to Morocco,
that is where.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
I wound up.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
He's got some similarities to Cede Barik Bombay, who he
talked about a couple or three months ago, not exactly
the same situation, but in both cases, like European folks,
really depending on their skill and knowledge to be able
to survive in an environment that they were not used to.
(01:13):
There are some sources that describe as Stevon as the
first African American, which I get wanting to say that,
but that is not an idea that existed in any
way in the sixteenth century when he was saying so,
one of the things that's interesting to me is how
(01:37):
this fits in with the progression of how people thought,
how specifically European people thought about race, because there wasn't
really an idea of white at that time. There was
an idea of black, encompassing most people who were African
(02:04):
and in some contexts other people not generally from Europe.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
But the.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
Folks that might be grouped together today as white were
more described as Christian right, and when what would become
sort of the European powers colonizing the Americas were getting
started in the idea of like not just having slaves,
(02:36):
but like building a society that was rooted in slavery. Initially,
it had been thought of as acceptable to enslave people
who were not Christian, so it would, you know, within
the European Christian context, it would be acceptable to enslave Muslims,
(02:59):
or enslave African people of an indigenous African religion, or
to enslave indigenous American people who were not Christian. But
then there were also missionary and evangelical efforts to convert
people to Christianity. So it's like you convert your enslave
population to Christianity, now what. And it was through that
(03:21):
shift that categories began to be created. Just the separating
black and white. These are both socially constructed things. They
do not have any basis in biology, right, or anything
like that. Their basis is in generational son.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
Expoture, right, Like I always when I boil it down
to that, it's so absurd, yeah, that it's hard not
to laugh. But I also then feel guilty for laughing,
because what a mess we have made because of it,
so much of a mess.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
I don't remember the person's name, but there is one
particular person that's like one of the earliest people to
have started conceiving of like all Africans as one race,
which is just not an idea that had existed before.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
Right.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
So Stevin lived at a time that like these categories
were still being thought of in formula and formalized and
adopted within European societies, and the idea of African American
as that means something today that was not even that
(04:40):
was so far away. He's, like, we said, the first
non indigenous person of any race to make it as
far into North America as what we know as New
Mexico and Arizona. But that is not the same thing
as being an African American, as that term means.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
Yeah, if you could speak one of the many languages
he spoke and went back in time and tried to
explain this, you would get what yah stairs up blankness.
This episode was wild to me because it's talking about
like where I grew up. Oh yeah, you know, I
after I was nine. I grew up on the Gulf
(05:22):
Coast and I actually just got back from Tampa Bay,
So like it was just like, is this the time
travel yeah of my map story? Yeah, kind of Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
I also read a number of essays that we're talking
about weather, like how his position within this group of
four changed over the course of their efforts to get
back into Spanish controlled and territory, and then after they
got to Mexico City, and how it seems like he
was in a kind of.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
Great area for a while where he.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
Maybe wasn't being seen exactly as enslaved, but also didn't
seem to be free. And there was an argument in
some of these essays that I found interesting but also incorrect,
because a lot of them were like they couldn't have
thought of him as their slave because they were relying
on him for their safety and survival. And I'm just like, yeah,
(06:26):
like the entire American South, for the entire history of slavery,
you had enslaved people who were making people's food and
delivering people's babies and driving their carriages, like literally doing
all of the things that were required for survival. That
wasn't exclusive to the American South, but like the American
(06:49):
South became a society where that was entrenched, and a
lot of enslaved African people were handling everybody's very survival
all the time. And even after you got out of
the South and slavery was abolished in places outside of
the South, there were still people who were free black
(07:10):
people being treated as second class citizens, who were still
doing all that completely critical work. And I was like,
that's just you. You cannot say he wasn't like their
slave because he had he had their lives in his hands.
I'm like that a lot of enslaved people had white
people's lives in their hands, like they literally took care
(07:32):
of their infants, Like yeah, yeah, yeah, that doesn't make
any sense. It was I was like that your argument
is not adding up to me. It does for sure
seem like that he based on other things beyond the
fact that he had their lives in his hands, that
it seems like that they he wound up in kind
of a nebulous area. But right, yeah, I was like,
(07:53):
this argument is not adding up to me. This is
one of those things where I hope, well, I don't
want to say that I was gonna say, I hope
no one ever makes a movie about him, because I
feel like it would very quickly devolve into like super
tropey feel good. But then if the right person made
the movie, it would be fine. But I just think
the odds would be long. Then it wouldn't it wouldn't
(08:14):
get a little yeah whitewashed. There are a couple of
biographies about him. One of them I think was written
in the sixties, if I remember correctly. I did not
read that one, but I did read I think read is.
I did not thoroughly read it. I did read Esteban
(08:35):
by Dennis Herrick with reading more meaning confirming particular details. Yeah,
not reading the whole thing thoroughly. And that one just
came out in twenty eighteen, so it's a pretty new
book and it is from the University of New Mexico press.
I generally found it to be more accessible than a
lot of things that are published through university presses.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
I'm not saying that university universe city presses are inherently inaccessible,
but I do read some books that have come from
university presses that are there's like more jargon from the
field of history, right, They're just more academic.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
They're not intended for a general audience.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
That's a better word than what I was trying to say.
And this one I thought, I felt like, did a
really good job of setting some context that will make
parts of it more understandable for a general audience that
a lot of times the more academic work would just
skip over, kind of assuming that the audience reading it
would already know this stuff. Yeah, and that was one
(09:38):
of the things that I was like, Oh, I like
that this is included, which is something that I would
not necessarily see coming from an academic press. And a
lot of the cases, so if people want more detail,
because there is so much more detail about this whole expedition,
that's one of the places you could go look for it.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
Again.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
That is Estebane by Dennis Harre, which came out in
twenty eighteen from University of New Mexico Press. I tried
to read a lot of stuff from a lot of
different perspectives to see how, like, how are scholars who
grew up in Morocco talking about him, How our indigenous
anthropologists and historians talk about them talk about him.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
There's a lot.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
There's definitely more about him now than there was even
ten years ago available for folks who are interested. We
talked about Buck versus Bell this week.
Speaker 1 (10:41):
Oh, we sure did.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
That, Like that case has come up in a number
of previous episodes. I did not have the experience I
expected to find when I started researching it, because I
knew I knew the basics of the case, right. I
knew that Carrie Bell had a child, and that Carrie's
(11:08):
mother had also been institutionalized, and that there was this
argument that Carrie should be sterilized, that she could not
have any more children, and that three generation of imbeciles
is enough is quoted all over the place. I did
not expect number one as much information about Carrie Buck
(11:29):
as has been unearthed. I mean, there's still big gaps
in it, but largely because of the work of Paul Lombardo,
Like there's a lot more known and documented about her
and her family today. I was not really expecting. Maybe
I should have been, but I wasn't really expecting the
(11:50):
story of the court case to involve everybody basically railroading
it through. Like I just it did not really occurred
to me at the beginning that this was going to
be a story in which the attorney that was appointed
to represent Carrie Buck was really going to be working
(12:10):
for the other side for all practical purposes like that.
I was not I did not realize that was going
to be the case. And I said already, like literally
three hours after I emailed you this outline came all
the headlines about the request to overturn Obergefell, and already
we have talked earlier this year about the request not
(12:32):
exactly requid, but like the attempts to have the Supreme
Court overturn the constitutional right to birthright citizenship. I'd already
had in my mind, like there have been a lot
of times that the Supreme Court has authored decisions that
have made things worse, and I wasn't expecting in this
(12:55):
case for that to extend to her not even really
being defended. Yeah, it was just not I don't know,
I was not expecting that.
Speaker 1 (13:04):
This one makes me such a rage monster for two,
for many reasons, but the big two. Okay, One, there
sure is a lot of discussion about what is appropriate
for her, and no discussion at all about teaching men
not to take advantage of women, right, which makes my
(13:28):
blood boil and I want to say a lot of
words that are not suitable for this podcast. Yeah. Yeah. Two,
while we were discussing this, I thought back to my
own by choice sterilization and how when I first started
(13:50):
raising that issue to my doctor, I think I was
twenty nine. I talked to several different doctors about it,
and at the time all of them wanted to talk
to my husband about it. And it's like, you know what,
even if you do want it, you still have to
get a dude's permission. Yeah, what the heck? Man? Yeah,
those two things really made me. I rate throughout to
(14:11):
read it this episode.
Speaker 2 (14:13):
Yeah, on your first point, that was one of the
lines of argument that her attorney could have pursued if
he had wanted to, because there was a lot of
discussion about like, oh, well, she's obviously irresponsible, she's obviously
just going to have a lot more children if we
don't do something about it. It was never brought up
(14:34):
that her account was that he had raped her, and
that just wasn't brought into the questioning at all. I
don't know of any consequence that ever happened to him
in any way. And as we said, like his his
aunt was the person that raised Carrie Buck's baby, all
(14:54):
of which is infuriating. And then on your your second point,
it is the same double standard as we see in
gender affirming healthcare. If you want to have a breast
augmentation because you are a cisgender woman who wants bigger breasts, great,
(15:21):
nobody is really going to challenge that. But if you
are a trans woman who wants a breast augmentation, there
are a bajillion hurdles and attempts to outlaw that entirely,
and a bunch of absolutely blatant misinformation about what is
happening with children's gender affirming care, which in the vast,
(15:47):
vast majority of cases involves things like socially transitioning, so
letting kids use the name and wear the clothing that
they would prefer to wear, and hormone blockers, which we
have plenty of documentation about because they are routinely prescribed
to kids who are going through precocious puberty, meaning going
(16:09):
through puberty too early, medically too early, and so like,
if a cisgender child is in precocious puberty, puberty blackers
no problem. If a trans child would like to put
off the physical changes of puberty until they are older
and can think about what it will mean to have
(16:32):
a permanently life changing, physically changing surgery, suddenly puberty blockers
becomes a whole big deal, and that also infuriates me.
All of this stuff is tied together. Trans rights are
connected to disability rights, all of this, there's this, they all.
(16:54):
They have a lot of similar roots.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
I am.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
I'm frustrated and infuriated the same way you are. One
of the things that I was looking up as I
was researching this was like Virginia's apology for this law.
(17:19):
There have been some states that have passed laws to
compensate people who were sterilized under their eugenics programs. One
of those is North Carolina, which is where I am from.
North Carolina was the first state to compensate victims of
its eugenic sterilization program.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
I was not.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
I don't think I was living in North Carolina when
this happened, but I was not aware until googling around
while working on this episode that North Carolina's legislation for
this was largely led by a man named Larry Womble,
who was my assistant principal. Huh, total news to me.
(17:58):
He passed away in twenty twenty, I think twenty twenty.
But yeah, like he was a big part of getting
that passed in North Carolina. Not all states passed such programs.
I don't remember if Virginia did or not. There are
limits to how much money can compensate a person for
surgeries made on their bodies without their consent or in
(18:21):
some case even knowledge. I don't know if I have
anything else to say about Buck versus Bill today me there,
I'm just super mad. I'm also super mad. I've said before.
It's been a super long time on the show. But
I've said before, but I think some of the Supreme
Court decisions that people learn the most about in the
United States and the world of like K through twelve
(18:42):
education are the Supreme Court decisions that made progress in
making sure everyone had access in recognitions of this of
the same rights. So things like Brown versus Board Right,
things like Loving versus Virginia, which overturns Virginia's antime assagination law,
(19:03):
which was also a eugenics law because it was about
protecting white racial purity. But there are many many more
Supreme Court cases that were the opposite of that, that
were like I mean, some of which we've talked about
on the show before, like Plusy versus Ferguson, dred Scott
versus Sandford. The idea that the Supreme Court is somehow
(19:25):
going to save us from horrific lawmakers has not worked
out a lot of the time.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of a lot
of the way those syllabi get put together. One a
lot of times they get put into like civics classes
that are very much in the raw ra this is
(19:51):
the best way. So of course they're not going to
include anything dicey. Yeah. Also, I mean, I will say
we joked about it in the show, but like, it
is hard to read and parse a lot of Supreme
Court opinion writing because it tends to be very long
(20:11):
and very verbose. And so the trick is that even
if somebody like especially of your high school age and
you get curious and you go looking. You really need
an assist or to find a great study guide, yeah,
to walk you through those, and those aren't always easy
to find, right.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
Sometimes they're also like Supreme Court opinions can be very
dense with citations of all of the precedents, which can
make it really hard to even get through a sentence
sometimes because it feels like there's nine thousand citations in there,
and if you're not familiar, you.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
Have to do extra homework for each sense.
Speaker 2 (20:51):
Yeah, if you're not familiar with what all of those
citations are about, then it can bog down really quickly.
The fact that this decision was so short we could
have just read the whole thing on the show really
is wild dramatically shorter than.
Speaker 1 (21:09):
Most decisions today.
Speaker 2 (21:10):
And not in a way like if you look at
very old laws in the United States, some of them
are very short and are much much shorter than today,
where bills can go on for hundreds or thousands of pages.
And it's not quite like that. It's that this one
was particularly unusually short and awful and never directly overturned.
(21:35):
On that note, I hope everybody's Saturday is better than
this episode was whatever is happening in your world? I
hope it is going as well as it can go,
and I hope you're able to take some time to
kind of center and focus on yourself. I have found
(21:56):
in my own life that if I am literally myself
in every headline and every development all day long, forever,
then I stop being able to cope with all of it.
And so I have tried to make it a point to,
at some points of the day see what's happening in
the world, but at other points in the day try
(22:18):
to be more focused on what I'm actually doing and
what I can do to help when that's possible. We
will be back with a Saturday Classic tomorrow. We will
have something brand new on Monday. Stuff You Missed in
History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts
(22:40):
from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
I'm Tracy B.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
We talked this week about Stevan, and by extension, also
talked about some very unsuccessful Spanish efforts to explore and
colonize what's now Laurada and the whole coast from there
into Mexico did not work out for them. I've had
(00:37):
him on my list for a really long time with
a question mark after it, just because I was not
sure if it was ever going to happen, and then
when I was looking specifically for something related to Morocco,
that is where.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
I wound up.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
He's got some similarities to Cede Barik Bombay, who he
talked about a couple or three months ago, not exactly
the same situation, but in both cases, like European folks,
really depending on their skill and knowledge to be able
to survive in an environment that they were not used to.
(01:13):
There are some sources that describe as Stevon as the
first African American, which I get wanting to say that,
but that is not an idea that existed in any
way in the sixteenth century when he was saying so,
one of the things that's interesting to me is how
(01:37):
this fits in with the progression of how people thought,
how specifically European people thought about race, because there wasn't
really an idea of white at that time. There was
an idea of black, encompassing most people who were African
(02:04):
and in some contexts other people not generally from Europe.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
But the.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
Folks that might be grouped together today as white were
more described as Christian right, and when what would become
sort of the European powers colonizing the Americas were getting
started in the idea of like not just having slaves,
(02:36):
but like building a society that was rooted in slavery. Initially,
it had been thought of as acceptable to enslave people
who were not Christian, so it would, you know, within
the European Christian context, it would be acceptable to enslave Muslims,
(02:59):
or enslave African people of an indigenous African religion, or
to enslave indigenous American people who were not Christian. But
then there were also missionary and evangelical efforts to convert
people to Christianity. So it's like you convert your enslave
population to Christianity, now what. And it was through that
(03:21):
shift that categories began to be created. Just the separating
black and white. These are both socially constructed things. They
do not have any basis in biology, right, or anything
like that. Their basis is in generational son.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
Expoture, right, Like I always when I boil it down
to that, it's so absurd, yeah, that it's hard not
to laugh. But I also then feel guilty for laughing,
because what a mess we have made because of it,
so much of a mess.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
I don't remember the person's name, but there is one
particular person that's like one of the earliest people to
have started conceiving of like all Africans as one race,
which is just not an idea that had existed before.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
Right.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
So Stevin lived at a time that like these categories
were still being thought of in formula and formalized and
adopted within European societies, and the idea of African American
as that means something today that was not even that
(04:40):
was so far away. He's, like, we said, the first
non indigenous person of any race to make it as
far into North America as what we know as New
Mexico and Arizona. But that is not the same thing
as being an African American, as that term means.
Speaker 1 (05:00):
Yeah, if you could speak one of the many languages
he spoke and went back in time and tried to
explain this, you would get what yah stairs up blankness.
This episode was wild to me because it's talking about
like where I grew up. Oh yeah, you know, I
after I was nine. I grew up on the Gulf
(05:22):
Coast and I actually just got back from Tampa Bay,
So like it was just like, is this the time
travel yeah of my map story? Yeah, kind of Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
I also read a number of essays that we're talking
about weather, like how his position within this group of
four changed over the course of their efforts to get
back into Spanish controlled and territory, and then after they
got to Mexico City, and how it seems like he
was in a kind of.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
Great area for a while where he.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
Maybe wasn't being seen exactly as enslaved, but also didn't
seem to be free. And there was an argument in
some of these essays that I found interesting but also incorrect,
because a lot of them were like they couldn't have
thought of him as their slave because they were relying
on him for their safety and survival. And I'm just like, yeah,
(06:26):
like the entire American South, for the entire history of slavery,
you had enslaved people who were making people's food and
delivering people's babies and driving their carriages, like literally doing
all of the things that were required for survival. That
wasn't exclusive to the American South, but like the American
(06:49):
South became a society where that was entrenched, and a
lot of enslaved African people were handling everybody's very survival
all the time. And even after you got out of
the South and slavery was abolished in places outside of
the South, there were still people who were free black
(07:10):
people being treated as second class citizens, who were still
doing all that completely critical work. And I was like,
that's just you. You cannot say he wasn't like their
slave because he had he had their lives in his hands.
I'm like that a lot of enslaved people had white
people's lives in their hands, like they literally took care
(07:32):
of their infants, Like yeah, yeah, yeah, that doesn't make
any sense. It was I was like that your argument
is not adding up to me. It does for sure
seem like that he based on other things beyond the
fact that he had their lives in his hands, that
it seems like that they he wound up in kind
of a nebulous area. But right, yeah, I was like,
(07:53):
this argument is not adding up to me. This is
one of those things where I hope, well, I don't
want to say that I was gonna say, I hope
no one ever makes a movie about him, because I
feel like it would very quickly devolve into like super
tropey feel good. But then if the right person made
the movie, it would be fine. But I just think
the odds would be long. Then it wouldn't it wouldn't
(08:14):
get a little yeah whitewashed. There are a couple of
biographies about him. One of them I think was written
in the sixties, if I remember correctly. I did not
read that one, but I did read I think read is.
I did not thoroughly read it. I did read Esteban
(08:35):
by Dennis Herrick with reading more meaning confirming particular details. Yeah,
not reading the whole thing thoroughly. And that one just
came out in twenty eighteen, so it's a pretty new
book and it is from the University of New Mexico press.
I generally found it to be more accessible than a
lot of things that are published through university presses.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
I'm not saying that university universe city presses are inherently inaccessible,
but I do read some books that have come from
university presses that are there's like more jargon from the
field of history, right, They're just more academic.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
They're not intended for a general audience.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
That's a better word than what I was trying to say.
And this one I thought, I felt like, did a
really good job of setting some context that will make
parts of it more understandable for a general audience that
a lot of times the more academic work would just
skip over, kind of assuming that the audience reading it
would already know this stuff. Yeah, and that was one
(09:38):
of the things that I was like, Oh, I like
that this is included, which is something that I would
not necessarily see coming from an academic press. And a
lot of the cases, so if people want more detail,
because there is so much more detail about this whole expedition,
that's one of the places you could go look for it.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
Again.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
That is Estebane by Dennis Harre, which came out in
twenty eighteen from University of New Mexico Press. I tried
to read a lot of stuff from a lot of
different perspectives to see how, like, how are scholars who
grew up in Morocco talking about him, How our indigenous
anthropologists and historians talk about them talk about him.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
There's a lot.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
There's definitely more about him now than there was even
ten years ago available for folks who are interested. We
talked about Buck versus Bell this week.
Speaker 1 (10:41):
Oh, we sure did.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
That, Like that case has come up in a number
of previous episodes. I did not have the experience I
expected to find when I started researching it, because I
knew I knew the basics of the case, right. I
knew that Carrie Bell had a child, and that Carrie's
(11:08):
mother had also been institutionalized, and that there was this
argument that Carrie should be sterilized, that she could not
have any more children, and that three generation of imbeciles
is enough is quoted all over the place. I did
not expect number one as much information about Carrie Buck
(11:29):
as has been unearthed. I mean, there's still big gaps
in it, but largely because of the work of Paul Lombardo,
Like there's a lot more known and documented about her
and her family today. I was not really expecting. Maybe
I should have been, but I wasn't really expecting the
(11:50):
story of the court case to involve everybody basically railroading
it through. Like I just it did not really occurred
to me at the beginning that this was going to
be a story in which the attorney that was appointed
to represent Carrie Buck was really going to be working
(12:10):
for the other side for all practical purposes like that.
I was not I did not realize that was going
to be the case. And I said already, like literally
three hours after I emailed you this outline came all
the headlines about the request to overturn Obergefell, and already
we have talked earlier this year about the request not
(12:32):
exactly requid, but like the attempts to have the Supreme
Court overturn the constitutional right to birthright citizenship. I'd already
had in my mind, like there have been a lot
of times that the Supreme Court has authored decisions that
have made things worse, and I wasn't expecting in this
(12:55):
case for that to extend to her not even really
being defended. Yeah, it was just not I don't know,
I was not expecting that.
Speaker 1 (13:04):
This one makes me such a rage monster for two,
for many reasons, but the big two. Okay, One, there
sure is a lot of discussion about what is appropriate
for her, and no discussion at all about teaching men
not to take advantage of women, right, which makes my
(13:28):
blood boil and I want to say a lot of
words that are not suitable for this podcast. Yeah. Yeah. Two,
while we were discussing this, I thought back to my
own by choice sterilization and how when I first started
(13:50):
raising that issue to my doctor, I think I was
twenty nine. I talked to several different doctors about it,
and at the time all of them wanted to talk
to my husband about it. And it's like, you know what,
even if you do want it, you still have to
get a dude's permission. Yeah, what the heck? Man? Yeah,
those two things really made me. I rate throughout to
(14:11):
read it this episode.
Speaker 2 (14:13):
Yeah, on your first point, that was one of the
lines of argument that her attorney could have pursued if
he had wanted to, because there was a lot of
discussion about like, oh, well, she's obviously irresponsible, she's obviously
just going to have a lot more children if we
don't do something about it. It was never brought up
(14:34):
that her account was that he had raped her, and
that just wasn't brought into the questioning at all. I
don't know of any consequence that ever happened to him
in any way. And as we said, like his his
aunt was the person that raised Carrie Buck's baby, all
(14:54):
of which is infuriating. And then on your your second point,
it is the same double standard as we see in
gender affirming healthcare. If you want to have a breast
augmentation because you are a cisgender woman who wants bigger breasts, great,
(15:21):
nobody is really going to challenge that. But if you
are a trans woman who wants a breast augmentation, there
are a bajillion hurdles and attempts to outlaw that entirely,
and a bunch of absolutely blatant misinformation about what is
happening with children's gender affirming care, which in the vast,
(15:47):
vast majority of cases involves things like socially transitioning, so
letting kids use the name and wear the clothing that
they would prefer to wear, and hormone blockers, which we
have plenty of documentation about because they are routinely prescribed
to kids who are going through precocious puberty, meaning going
(16:09):
through puberty too early, medically too early, and so like,
if a cisgender child is in precocious puberty, puberty blackers
no problem. If a trans child would like to put
off the physical changes of puberty until they are older
and can think about what it will mean to have
(16:32):
a permanently life changing, physically changing surgery, suddenly puberty blockers
becomes a whole big deal, and that also infuriates me.
All of this stuff is tied together. Trans rights are
connected to disability rights, all of this, there's this, they all.
(16:54):
They have a lot of similar roots.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
I am.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
I'm frustrated and infuriated the same way you are. One
of the things that I was looking up as I
was researching this was like Virginia's apology for this law.
(17:19):
There have been some states that have passed laws to
compensate people who were sterilized under their eugenics programs. One
of those is North Carolina, which is where I am from.
North Carolina was the first state to compensate victims of
its eugenic sterilization program.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
I was not.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
I don't think I was living in North Carolina when
this happened, but I was not aware until googling around
while working on this episode that North Carolina's legislation for
this was largely led by a man named Larry Womble,
who was my assistant principal. Huh, total news to me.
(17:58):
He passed away in twenty twenty, I think twenty twenty.
But yeah, like he was a big part of getting
that passed in North Carolina. Not all states passed such programs.
I don't remember if Virginia did or not. There are
limits to how much money can compensate a person for
surgeries made on their bodies without their consent or in
(18:21):
some case even knowledge. I don't know if I have
anything else to say about Buck versus Bill today me there,
I'm just super mad. I'm also super mad. I've said before.
It's been a super long time on the show. But
I've said before, but I think some of the Supreme
Court decisions that people learn the most about in the
United States and the world of like K through twelve
(18:42):
education are the Supreme Court decisions that made progress in
making sure everyone had access in recognitions of this of
the same rights. So things like Brown versus Board Right,
things like Loving versus Virginia, which overturns Virginia's antime assagination law,
(19:03):
which was also a eugenics law because it was about
protecting white racial purity. But there are many many more
Supreme Court cases that were the opposite of that, that
were like I mean, some of which we've talked about
on the show before, like Plusy versus Ferguson, dred Scott
versus Sandford. The idea that the Supreme Court is somehow
(19:25):
going to save us from horrific lawmakers has not worked
out a lot of the time.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of a lot
of the way those syllabi get put together. One a
lot of times they get put into like civics classes
that are very much in the raw ra this is
(19:51):
the best way. So of course they're not going to
include anything dicey. Yeah. Also, I mean, I will say
we joked about it in the show, but like, it
is hard to read and parse a lot of Supreme
Court opinion writing because it tends to be very long
(20:11):
and very verbose. And so the trick is that even
if somebody like especially of your high school age and
you get curious and you go looking. You really need
an assist or to find a great study guide, yeah,
to walk you through those, and those aren't always easy
to find, right.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
Sometimes they're also like Supreme Court opinions can be very
dense with citations of all of the precedents, which can
make it really hard to even get through a sentence
sometimes because it feels like there's nine thousand citations in there,
and if you're not familiar, you.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
Have to do extra homework for each sense.
Speaker 2 (20:51):
Yeah, if you're not familiar with what all of those
citations are about, then it can bog down really quickly.
The fact that this decision was so short we could
have just read the whole thing on the show really
is wild dramatically shorter than.
Speaker 1 (21:09):
Most decisions today.
Speaker 2 (21:10):
And not in a way like if you look at
very old laws in the United States, some of them
are very short and are much much shorter than today,
where bills can go on for hundreds or thousands of pages.
And it's not quite like that. It's that this one
was particularly unusually short and awful and never directly overturned.
(21:35):
On that note, I hope everybody's Saturday is better than
this episode was whatever is happening in your world? I
hope it is going as well as it can go,
and I hope you're able to take some time to
kind of center and focus on yourself. I have found
(21:56):
in my own life that if I am literally myself
in every headline and every development all day long, forever,
then I stop being able to cope with all of it.
And so I have tried to make it a point to,
at some points of the day see what's happening in
the world, but at other points in the day try
(22:18):
to be more focused on what I'm actually doing and
what I can do to help when that's possible. We
will be back with a Saturday Classic tomorrow. We will
have something brand new on Monday. Stuff You Missed in
History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts
(22:40):
from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
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