Corner Society for the History of Medicine: Black Eugenics

This talk will discuss the ways that African Americans understood and mobilized eugenics and racial science to challenge scientific racism in the twentieth century. African American physicians, scientists, scholars, and reformers believed that eugenics, along with other political and social activism, offered a solution to racial discrimination by improving the biological composition of the race. Though eugenic measures were ultimately weaponized against African Americans, there were some who believed that forms of eugenics could be mobilized to improve the health and welfare of the race. This talk will examine the ways by which African Americans respond to, reinterpret, and critique the scientific racism embedded within the eugenics movement as part of a larger discourse of black eugenics. Ayah Nuriddin is Assistant Professor in the History of Medicine at Yale University. She is a historian of medicine and biology with particular interests in the histories of eugenics, racial science, scientific racism, reproduction, and human subjects research. Prior to arriving at Yale, she was a Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows and Lecturer in the Council of the Humanities and African American Studies at Princeton University. She received her PhD in the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University in 2021. She is currently working on her first book tentatively entitled “Seed and Soil: Black Eugenic Thought in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.” It examines how African Americans navigated questions of racial science, eugenics, and hereditarianism in relation to struggles for racial justice in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her work has been published in the Historical Studies of Natural Science, Journal for the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, the Lancet, Nursing Clio, and Somatosphere, and she has appeared on American History TV on C-Span. Her dissertation, entitled “Liberation Eugenics: African Americans and the Science of Black Freedom Struggles, 1890-1970,” analyzes African American engagement with eugenics, hereditarian thought, and racial science as part of a broader strategy of racial improvement and black liberation. She holds a Masters in History and Masters of Library Science (MLS) from the University of Maryland, College Park.