White trash : the eugenic family studies, 1877-1919 / edited and with an introduction by Nicole Hahn Rafter.

Date:
[1988], ©1988
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Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: White trash : the eugenic family studies, 1877-1919 / edited and with an introduction by Nicole Hahn Rafter. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Introduction • 25 judgment of a fifteen-year-old Incest victim in his introduction to The Family of Sam Sixty: upon questioning, she proved herself markedly lacking in capacity to react intelligently to her short comings and the bestiality of her father (Kostir 1916:187): but why should the girl have con¬ fided in this stranger (who was, not incidentally, intent on proving her mentally inferior)? The Dacks are frequently accused of paranoia with no inquiry into possible reasons for fearfulness. Finlayson detected congeni¬ tal defects in children who failed to see any absurdity in such a statement as 'A young woman cut into eighteen pieces, was found yester¬ day: people think that she killed herself (1916:228). Yet there might have been other reasons for the children's failure to find the statement absurd. Perhaps they were horrified by the description. Perhaps they were embar¬ rassed at Finlayson's talking this way. Perhaps they thought the woman had been dismembered after she committed suicide.^® By denying their subjects an independent point of view, the authors de¬ nied them authority over their own lives. The defectives lost their voice, as the authors assumed the ability to speak for (or, rather, against) them. MacKenzle observes that the eugenlsts' typical view of human nature reduced the person... [to] potentially measurable abilities and per¬ sonality traits, an attitude he analyzes as part of a more general tend¬ ency to reificatlon, the treatment of people and social processes as if they were things.... Human capacities [such as intelligence] become com¬ modities (1981:34: also see Gould 1981). Writing more generally of the false ethic of objectivity by which sociologists separate the knower from what he^® knows, Dorothy Smith warns that We may not rewrite the other's world or impose upon it a conceptual framework which extracts from it what fits with ours. Our conceptual procedures should be capable of explicating and analyzing the properties of their experienced world.... Their reality, their varieties of experience must be an unconditional datum [1974:12]. Had our authors been able to understand such warnings, however, they could not have produced the family studies. Their work depended on objectification. Because the authors so earnestly presented their findings as objective. It is not hard to guess how the authors would have classified the mentality of two elderly American Eskimos, fathered by North Pole discoverers Matthew Henson and Robert Peary iind brought to the United States in 1987. According to a newspaper account, as the two men sat in the coclipit and pretended to steer, they called out dogsled commands to the а1ф1апе: and pass¬ ing tall buildings on the drive from New Jersey to Boston, they yelled igloo, igloo, igloo {Boston Globe June 1. 1987, 17-18). A pronoun Smith uses deliberately.