white is the new black

The following quotes are from Hitler's Black Victims: The Historical Experience of Afro-Germans, European Blacks, Africans and African Americans in the Nazi Era by Clarence Lusane. page 134: Praise for the eugenics movement in the United States came from many quarters in Germany, but especially from the race scientists. There was not only ideological unity between eugenicists in the United States and Germany but a direct and ongoing relationship from the turn of the century through the Nazi era. Key eugenicists in the United States, such as Charles Davenport, Harry Laughlin, superintendent of the Eugenic Records Office, and their corporate and academic supporters closely allied themselves with Eugen Fischer, Fritz Lenz, and other leading German eugenicists. U.S. and German eugenicists worked together through the International Society for Racial Hygiene. Laughlin, who successfully lobbied the U.S. Congress to pass the 1924 anti-immigrant National Origins Act, would later receive an honorary degree from the University of Heidelberg, in 1936. In 1934, the California eugenics movement organized an exhibit of the German eugenics program, showing it during the American Public Health Association annual meeting. Five years later, American eugenicists met with Fischer, then director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, and with Wolfgang Abel, the SS anthropologist who had been in charge of the sterilization campaigns against the Gypsies, the Afro-Germans, and the Africans under German colonial rule. page 135: In 1929, Gosney and Popenoe published Sterilization for Human Betterment, a study of work and efficacy under the 1922 California sterilization law. A number of German eugenicists would claim that this book was the singular inspiration for the 1933 law enacted by the Nazis. As Dorothy Roberts notes, "the Nazis modeled their compulsory sterilization law after the one enacted in California." page 136: Under the California law twice as many Blacks as Whites were sterilized. The law allowed for sterilization based on "hereditary diseases" including weakmindedness, schizophrenia, insanity, epilepsy, blindness, deafness, bodily deformities, and alcoholism. Even with all of these stipulations, there were, from the beginning, complaints that the law was not broad enough because it did not address hidden "defects" such as race or other traits that were not visible to the naked eye, a complaint that would be echoed in Nazi Germany.

Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany

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