Eugenics Persuasive Essay

What prompted the rise of Eugenics in the United States was their increasing belief that deficiencies in humans were hereditary. Also, there was growing worry that Americans were providing too much support for the degenerates, and needed to place more emphasis on positively fit individuals to ‘improve’ the race. They defined an aspect of fitness with beauty while ugly as a defect (Pernick 94). Lower class people were deemed to be ‘unfit’ while the middle and upper classes were classified as superior. When concerning higher status women, Eugenicists encouraged positive eugenics, or rather procreating as much as they can conceive. They were often denied sterilization and birth control; however, lower class women, often associated with prostitutes

However, eugenic leaders advocated more for ‘selective breeding’ of the defects. American eugenic researcher, Charles Davenport stated that everyone born had the right to live, but not all had the right “to reproduce his kind” (Pernick 99) For African-Americans, they were overwhelmingly regarded as the “repulsive defectives” in film, and Haiselden often associated their skin color as ugly. Between 1932 and 1972, Tuskegee experiment provided an impetus for testing a eugenic hypothesis: racial groups have different susceptibility to infectious disease (Paul A. Lombardo, Gregory M. Dorr, 291). At that time seventy-four of the controlled subjects were still alive. Between 28-100 people had died directly from advanced syphilitic lesions. The interest emanated from doctors’ observation that black males “possessed an excessive sexual desire which threatened the very foundations of white society” because they targeted white women. It is interesting to note that at the time, men with small penises were regarded as superior, so the ‘overdeveloped’ size of the male negro’s genital made them inferior (21). Basically, black bodies were one of the targets for elimination in a secret manner, and although people promoted the death of the unfit, however, they were opposed into having the issue publicized (Pernick, Martin S.,