Customer Reviews

American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism

5 star:		(4)
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3 star:		(2)
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This book provokes! Well researched (many original sources) it clearly shows how eugenics has been an on-going and central part of the national dialogue. I like the book too because it shows how both the left and the right use eugenics rhetoric to employ their politic. Turns out that eugenics is not a freakish back-room operation just used by hitler but actually saturates the way politicians, the legal system and various american factions and individuals express themselves in public policy. Racist, sexist, and homophobic ideology are the nutrients that strengthen the American eugenics movement today. Scary!

Ordover's well-focused historical eye counteracts the problematic tendency to minimize America's brutality in the constructions of race and sexual orientation; these constructions serve liberal and conservative politic and scientic thought but which yield devastating consequences for the actual lives under the microscope. Her rigorous research deserves accolades. Subtle eugenicist-thought pervades so much contemporary debate on issues from immigration to gay rights. Amazing book.

This book documents the immeasurable harm that can be generated from a pseudo-scientific concept, such as 'race.' It has been demonstrated repeatedly by the science of genetics that the concept of 'race' is scientifically invalid.

Though European physical anthropologists of the 17th and 18th centuries proposed various systems of racial classifications based on such observable characteristics as skin color, hair type, body proportions, and skull measurements, codifying the perceived differences among broad geographic populations of humans, sciences of the 20th and 21st centuries now know that these are bogus and logically unsupported classifications.

Even the term 'Caucasian'--used almost exclusively to mean "white" or "European" actually includes a variety of peoples generally categorized as nonwhite.

As 20th and 21st century science now shows, the biological aspect of race is described today not in observable physical features but rather in genetic characteristics and metabolic processes. More specifically, so-called 'racial' and 'ethnic' categorizations cannot account for either the uniqueness or the universality of human populations evident in new knowledge in human genome sequence variation research. Human identity based on 'race' is suspect in light of the preponderance of data on human genome sequence variation

Differences between human groups must be accounted for more in terms of genetic variation and genetic drift, with distribution across populations that is continuous and overlapping.

This means that a person who is considered black in one society might be nonblack in another. Most cultural anthropologists now consider race to be more a social or mental construct than an objective biological fact. Any observed correlations with traditional concepts of race are not only seriously limited but must be considered bogus.

This scientific fact may disappoint those persons of a racist bent, such as members of the National Alliance, but science does not support the concept of race. For more information, see The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company

Myrna Estep, Ph.D.

I have come to the conclusion that the influence of eugenics, often coupled with Confederate nostalgia, defined race relations in the U.S. from early suburbanization in the 1880s to WWII. Having written about this in my new book, "Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City," I was particularly eager to read Ordover's work. The deeper I got into it, the more excited I got. She writes with grace and effectiveness about such gruesome events as phycisian-ordered butchery of sexual organs. Her documentation is first rate. She has engrossing stories to tell. This is an important work on eugenics.

I gave this book 3 stars because it is completely full of Politically Correct nonsense that flies in the face of billions of years of evolutionary history plainly available to modern science. It has value to me mainly in that we can see here clearly the mind-numbng effects of social pressures and politically correct mindsets. It is very educational about the effects of the brainwashing we receive on these topics every day. She talks about race as being a "constructed" concept--basically saying we made it up--yet it is a fact of nature that we differ in various races according to a whole constellation of physical and mental characteristics. Our cultures are very different also as a result. Pretty shocking stuff that she would say this was made up... You must read this book for this reason alone. That is why I gave it 3 stars.

This books fallacious argument is that Race is `constructed' and `pseudo-scientific'. This claim alone should relegate this book to obvious inaccuracy. Anyone with even one eye can determine exactly what race someone is by looking at them, the exception being people of mixed heritage. But modern anthropology taught at every college in America teaches the physical differences of indigenous people of Africa, Asia and Europe. But beyond this false argument the book then descends into the swampish argument that Eugenics have been used in America for `sexist' and `homophobic' purposes. How is this possible? Are their more men in America then women? No. So how were Eugenic used for sexist reasons. This argument is never backed up, it is just said with the idea that the audience will gobble up this as `truth'. And how can genetics have been used to `homophobic' reasons when even the most left wing homosexual activists admit no `gay gene' exists. This argument is simply pure fallacy and this book makes many outlandish claims that seem to be in line with the statement `if you tell a big enough lie enough times people will believe it'. Not a reliable text.

Seth J. Frantzman