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Cartoon spoofing weight loss and weight gain patent medicines.

How the Use of BMI Fetishizes White Embodiment and Racializes Fat Phobia

Size-based health and beauty ideals emanated from eugenic pseudoscientific postulates, and BMI continues to advance white supremacist embodiment norms. 
by Sabrina Strings via AMA Journal Of Ethics on July 1, 2023
Collage of DNA sequence and scientists, reading "Your Child's IQ: What Role Does Heredity Play?"

Losing the Genetic Lottery

How did a field meant to reclaim genetics from Nazi abuses wind up a haven for race science?
by Padmini Raghunath via Distillations on April 6, 2023
A hammer is shown breaking several chunks of the earth into smaller pieces. In the background, black space.

The Wonderful Death of a State

For market radicals and neo-Confederates, secession is the path to a world that’s socially divided but economically integrated—separate but global.
by Quinn Slobodian via The Baffler on April 4, 2023
Detail of faces on a family tree.

The Pocahontas Exception: America’s Ancestor Obsession

The ‘methods and collections’ of genealogists are political because they have a great deal in common with genealogy as a way of doing history.
by Thomas W. Laqueur via London Review of Books on March 30, 2023
Designed picture of Lambert Adolphe Quetelet and Ancel Keys.

The Strange History of BMI, the Body Mass Index

BMI is a simple calculation, but how it is translated into a diagnosis is complex and flawed.
via STAT on March 9, 2023
Demonstrators protest involuntarily institutionalization of mentally ill homeless people.
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Locking Up the Mentally Ill Has a Long History

The prospect of removing people from communities to be put in institutions has been a project of social control.
by Elliott Young via Made By History on January 3, 2023
Opened standardized test booklet with pencil on top.

Can Standardized Testing Escape Its Racist Past?

High-stakes testing has struggled with overt and implicit biases. Should it still have a place in modern education?
by Deborah Blum via UnDark on December 14, 2022
Photo of the Penn and Slavery Project augmented reality tour

A Bare and Open Truth: The Penn and Slavery Project and the Public

When a university denied its legacy, students and faculty stepped in to do the research.
by VanJessica Gladney via Perspectives on History on October 19, 2022
Drawings of hands holding calipers.

Bodies of Knowledge

Philadelphia and the dark history of collecting human remains.
by Samuel J. Redman via Perspectives on History on September 15, 2022
Black-and-white photograph of black students sitting in a classroom at the Tuskegee Institute.

The Complicity of the Textbooks

A new book traces how the writing of American history, from Reconstruction on, has falsified and illuminated our racial past.
by Eric Foner via New York Review of Books on September 5, 2022
Newspaper lithograph of people fleeing the yellow fever epidemic on a boat in Mississippi.

The Sick Society

The story of a regional ruling class that struck a devil’s bargain with disease, going beyond negligence to cultivate semi-annual yellow fever epidemics.
by Malcolm Harris, Kathryn Olivarius via n+1 on September 2, 2022
Guinan Phillips, 31, attends a candlelit memorial for victims of the mass shooting at Tops supermarket in Buffalo. (Heather Ainsworth for The Washington Post)
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The Tie Between the Buffalo Shooting and Banning Abortion

The two may seem unconnected, but a centuries-long history of panic about White birth rates binds them together.
by Mytheli Sreenivas via Made By History on May 20, 2022
Lithograph of medical diagrams of a developing fetus.

Miscarriage Wasn’t Always a Tragedy or a Crime

Looking back on 150 years of history shows that American women grappled with miscarriages amid different legal, medical, and racial norms.
by Shannon Withycombe via Zócalo Public Square on May 18, 2022
Horse and rider at 1917 Kentucky Derby

Fast Horses and Eugenics

The breeding of race horses validated those aspiring to belong to an American elite while feeding into racist beliefs about genetic inheritance.
by Livia Gershon, Brian Tyrrell via JSTOR Daily on May 4, 2022
Drawing of a man looking up at a DNA strand spiraling upwards from him

Our Obsession with Ancestry Has Some Twisted Roots

From origin stories to blood-purity statutes, we have long enlisted genealogy to serve our own purposes.
by Maya Jasanoff via The New Yorker on May 2, 2022
A gate opening to the Harvard University campus in Cambridge, Mass.

Harvard Leaders and Staff Enslaved 79 People, University Finds

The school said it had benefited from slave-generated wealth and practiced racial discrimination.
by Nick Anderson, Susan Svrluga via Washington Post on April 26, 2022
Illustration of yellow fever victims in pain on park bench while another man flees

How Yellow Fever Intensified Racial Inequality in 19th-Century New Orleans

A new book explores how immunity to the disease created opportunities for white, but not Black, people.
by Kathryn Olivarius, Karin Wulf via Smithsonian on April 19, 2022
Drinking fountain on the county courthouse lawn, labeled "colored," in black and white.

Racism as Theory: A Historiography of White Supremacy Ideology

An overview of historical scholarship and socio-cultural developments in America to explain how racism became institutionalized against Black Americans.
by Bala James Baptiste via Black Perspectives on April 1, 2022
Aerial view illustration of a slave ship

‘Who’s Black and Why?’

A new book by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Andrew S. Curran examines how 18th-century academics understood Black identity.
by John Samuel Harpham via The Chronicle of Higher Education on March 31, 2022
A group of white, male college students marching with a Confederate flag at the University of Georgia, 1961
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Politicians Dictating What Teachers Can Say About Racism Can Be Dangerous

College student essays from 1961 underscore why our current trajectory could be devastating.
by Robert Cohen via Made By History on February 3, 2022
Artist Isabel Holtan's depiction of an ant. The ant has fungi on its back.

"The Last Refuge of Scoundrels"

Hiding behind "academic freedom," E. O. Wilson actively propagated race pseudoscience in collusion with white supremacists.
by Stacy Farina, Matthew Gibbons via Science For The People on February 1, 2022
Scientific drawing of a human skull

“We Left All on the Ground but the Head”: J. J. Audubon’s Human Skulls

Morton and his skull measurements have long been part of the scholarship on American racism, but what happens when we draw Audubon into the racial drama?
by Ann Fabian via Commonplace on November 12, 2021
Image of an "Meditation" sculpture in the middle of Indian Mounds Regional Park.

A Long American Tradition

On the robbing of Indigenous graves throughout the 19th-century.
by Margaret D. Jacobs via Lapham’s Quarterly on October 25, 2021
Artwork by Alanna Fields of an enslaved individual.

The Dark Underside of Representations of Slavery

Will the Black body ever have the opportunity to rest in peace?
by Latria Graham via The Atlantic on September 16, 2021

Remembering Past Lessons about Structural Racism — Recentering Black Theorists of Health and Society

A look at African-American scholars' contributions to health disparity discourse.
by Jeremy A. Greene, Alexandre White, Rachel L. J. Thornton via The New England Journal Of Medicine on August 26, 2021
Diagram relating to Black population and diagram of Georgia occupations by race

The Color Line

W.E.B. Du Bois’s exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition offered him a chance to present the dramatic gains made by Black Americans since the end of slavery.
by Annette Gordon-Reed via New York Review of Books on August 5, 2021
A scientific instrument

How the Sinister Study of Eugenics Legitimized Forced Sterilization in the United States

Audrey Clare Farley on the scientists who weaponized biology.
by Audrey Clare Farley via Literary Hub on April 22, 2021
Carrie Buck and her mother, Emma, at the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, 1924

The Chilling Persistence of Eugenics

Elizabeth Catte’s new book traces a shameful history and its legacy today.
by Chris Lehmann via The New Republic on April 20, 2021
An illustration of a man holding a photo of a naked man who is curled up defensively.

A Virginia Mental Institution for Black Patients Yields a Trove of Disturbing Records

Racism documented in files from the “Central Lunatic Asylum for the Colored Insane.”
by Britt Peterson via Washington Post Magazine on March 26, 2021
Student completing standardized test

The Racist Beginnings of Standardized Testing

From grade school to college, students of color have suffered from the effects of biased testing.
by John Rosales, Tim Walker via National Education Association on March 20, 2021
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