Eugenics and Aborigines
Genetic Science - Its Role in Indigenous Policy, Identity, Genocide
Jun 13, 2007
Our colonial history has shown that genetic research data with the potential to end racial conflict and injustice has been universally ignored, in favour of bogus "scientific" theories and myths that perpetuate the discourses and ideologies of an Anglo-dominated society.
The European invaders were in no doubt as to their genetic superiority over the conquered peoples of Australia, America and elsewhere, as evident in the popular culture of the colonial era. For example, Kipling's "White Man's Burden" was a poem that reflected and influenced the dominant ideologies of the time, evident in language such as, "Send forth the best ye breed" and "Your new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child." This racist discourse, alarmingly, was supported by the genetic science of the time.
This science was called eugenics. All over the world this science of "racial purity", mixed with religious ideology about a mythical "caucasian race" as being "God's chosen" was used to justify the some of the most horrific events in the history of the world. This mingled scientific and religious discourse was apparent in many political and popular cultural texts of the time. One of these was a diagram modeled on "The Great Chain Of Being", which placed races in order, with God and white people at the top, and monkeys and Aboriginal people at the bottom. The science of eugenics, through texts such as these, informed public opinion and government policy.
The White Australia policy, the basis of Australian federation, was based on eugenics. Its founder, Edmund Barton, publicly proclaimed, "I don't think the equality of man was ever intended to include racial equality". Policy documents and correspondence of the time used a lot of language such as the sinister word "finality" to advocate the ultimate destruction of genetically "inferior" peoples. A policy of breeding out "inferior races" is a piece of our silenced history around the "stolen generations" that has been recently reexamined in popular cultural texts such as "Rabbit Proof Fence".
These policies of genocide shaped the science of the day. When Charles Darwin stated that the human race was a "polymorphic species" taking many shapes with no actual biologically separate races, he was ignored. However, he gained much publicity when in "The Ascent Of Man" he compared "low" races such as "the negro or Australian and the gorilla", and asserted that, "The civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace the savage man throughout the world."
This selective approach to science with regard to genetics and the myth of race has continued into modern times. For example, in the 1950's UNESCO commissioned a worldwide study of race. The findings were clear - separate races do not actually exist, and there is more genetic variation within what we call "races" than there is between them. This was universally ignored, despite the fact that it came only five years after the holocaust in Germany, when Hitler used eugenics to justify the slaughter of millions of Jews, Negroes and Gypsies.
Hitlerian eugenic notions of racial purity have not disappeared with the advent of modern genetic science. Dr Jim Crow, one of America's leading geneticists, wrote an article about "race" in which he stated, "The word has a clear meaning to most people...with the realization that major human races are not pure races." These eugenic ideals of racial purity constrain Indigenous peoples the world over with narrow definitions today. Ethnicity is determined by blood quantum, especially for native Americans, who in many reservation communities can no longer identify as Indian or even remain in the community after marriage outside of their own "race".
Somehow the science has been lost from genetics, as medicines are now being developed for treatment of separate racial groups. Such groupings only exist according to archaic colonial mythology, once disproved by genetic science, now upheld as a model of scientific and social development that impacts upon the future survival of indigenous peoples the world over.
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