Walter ashby plecker biography of mahatma gandhi
The Racial Integrity Act, An Attack on Indigenous Identity
At the beginning of the 20th century, the eugenics movement was gaining momentum. Eugenics is the practice of controlling reproduction to alter the genetic characteristics of a population. Some advocates of eugenics believe that methods like selective “breeding” and sterilization would benefit human society by promoting beneficial traits.
Walter ashby plecker biography of mahatma gandhi for kids He was a leader of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America , a white supremacist organization founded in Richmond, Virginia, in They gave up prohibiting their members from marrying blacks many decades ago, but this is a very common argument Blacks use to deny recognition of Virginia tribes, actually not only Virginia tribes, but the East Coast and SE region and the nation as a whole. The governor retreated. It mentions one guy who commended blacks as Irish, but not much else.But who decides which traits are desirable and which are undesirable? Historically, eugenics has been used to justify white supremacy, resulting in discriminatory policies and heinous practices like forced sterilization.
One such policy was the Racial Integrity Act, which was passed in Virginia in The new law prohibited interracial marriage and ushered in a long period of discriminatory racial designation administered by the government.
One of the Act’s main proponents was a physician named Walter Ashby Plecker. As the head of Virginia’s Bureau of Vital Statistics from , Plecker was responsible for ensuring that all infants born in Virginia received birth certificates that included their racial designation. An active eugenicist, Plecker used bureaucracy as a weapon against Black and Indigenous people across the state of Virginia.
It wasn’t until that the Racial Integrity Act was overturned by the United States Supreme Court in the Loving vs.
Virginia case.
Walter ashby plecker biography of mahatma gandhi Their existence greatly disturbed Plecker. Keeping a Native American tribe alive has nothing to do with keeping it racially pure, if that were even possible. If your relative enlisted in and the draft was enacted in then please explain this two years? News Leader, April 19,Nevertheless, Plecker’s legacy of racial discrimination still impacts communities today, in particular Tribal communities. Many find it difficult to document their ancestral lineage due to the “paper genocide” that identified all non-white individuals as “colored” regardless of their identity. Despite this challenge, seven Tribes have gained federal recognition in Virginia.
Eugenic Origins of the Racial Integrity Act
Eugenics argued that “genetic purity” could lead to a more utopian society.
The idea was to select and support the proliferation of “desired” heritable characteristics through control over the parental rights of specific communities.
Sterilization had become one of the many tools employed by eugenicists across the world, including Nazi Germany.
On July 14, , the Nazi government passed the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Defective Progeny, allowing the mass sterilization of the “hereditarily weak,” such as the deaf and blind, those with physical deformities or mental illnesses, and various groups under persecution such as the LGBTQIA+ community and Jews.
The United States was no stranger to these cruel “treatments” and likely informed the rest of the world on eugenicist practices.
In , the state of Indiana had passed the world’s first sterilization law. And, in , the “The Virginia Sterilization Act” was enacted, initially targeting the intellectually disabled.