Part of Genetic Frontiers Season 2: Genetics in American Politics & Culture, Sue Currell, PhD, discusses the disturbing echoes of eugenic thinking in American politics today. She calls eugenics “the backbone of political control and a progressive meritocracy,” and argues that “grip of eugenic ideas on American politics today is a political failure to imagine a world where value is not profit.”
Visit geneticfrontiers.org to hear more episodes on the promise, power, and perils of genetic information.
KEY TOPICS
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Reading of excerpts from “This May Be the Most Dangerous Thing Donald Trump Believes”: Eugenic Populism and the American Body Politic.
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How should we understand the administration’s agenda to “forge a society that is colorblind, merit-based, and only has two genders” in light of the eugenic history of the United States?
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How are you making sense of this focus on the gender binary, and whether it has a relationship to eugenic ideologies?
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From what you know about the history of efficiency in the United States, how are you thinking about the new Department of Government Efficiency?
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What is the story we're being fed by politicians? And what is the real story?
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How would you describe Trump's relationship to disability rights?
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Can you talk about the complicated histories of eugenics and abortion rights and how you think this is influencing America today?
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How do you think clinicians and scientists should be thinking about the role of science, in particular genetics, in America today?
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