Towards a New Genealogy of Eugenics: Slavery and the Study of Race Crossing
Rana Hogarth, Associate Professor of History at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, will discuss how scientific endeavors to study mixed race people with Black and white ancestry in the early twentieth century did not emerge in a vacuum, nor did ideas about race that would later undergird eugenic race crossing studies on that very group of people. Slavery gave rise to myths and taxonomies that would come to dominate lay and scientific perceptions of mixed-race people’s bodies for years to come.