Racist biologist Charles Davenport creates the Eugenic Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

An American prelude to Hitler or to the Human Genome Project...perhaps both?

Eugenics was a global movement popular in the United States at the turn of the last century. Proponents believed that knowledge about hereditary genetics could be used to cultivate better human beings. They promoted ideas like “fitter family” contests, government-supported sterilization, and laws prohibiting anyone who was “epileptic, imbecile or feeble-minded” from marrying. Eugenicists were suspicious of groups they feared posed a threat to the purity of the native-born stock. Bad people, right? Not so fast. Although eugenics inspired some of Hitler’s most deplorable actions, many progressives, religious leaders, and academics initially endorsed the movement. In the past though, right? Again, not so easy...how about our current interest in using gene technology to make decisions about who should and shouldn’t be born? Isn’t this a form of engineering the future? Eugenics in the context of history, science, culture, religion, philosophy, and politics--the idea of normative and links to today's search for genetic perfection.

Featured Guests:

Lundy Braun, Associate Professor of Africana Studies, Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Brown University. Braun’s research focus includes the history of the global circulation of knowledge about race and technology in the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as, race, genomics, and health inequality.

Wendy Kline, Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Cincinnati. Kline is the author of Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom, a history of the eugenics movement.

Diane B. Paul, Professor Emerita in the Political Science Department at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where she directed the interdisciplinary program in Science, Technology, and Values. Her research has focused on historical and policy issues in genetics.

Prolific African-American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux releases Within Our Gates

Hollywood, race films and the production of African-American cinematic images

Oscar Micheaux is considered the most prolific Black filmmaker in the history of American cinema...he made forty-four feature-length films between 1919 and 1948. Micheaux founded his own production company in 1918 to produce the film version of his 1917 novel, The Homesteader. It became the first full-length feature film directed, written and produced by an African-American. With his fifth movie, "Within Our Gates," Micheaux attacked the racism portrayed in the most highly acclaimed silent movie of all time, D.W. Griffith's "The Birth of a Nation." In it, Micheaux used the same lighting, blocking, and setting as Griffith to question Grifith’s racist portrayal of Blacks. His films offered audiences a radical departure from the 1930’s Hollywood portrayal of Blacks as servants and brought diverse images of ghetto life and related social issues to the screen for the first time. We will discuss African-American representation in film yesterday and today -- how does race play a role in films and entertainment?

Featured Guests:

Charles Musser, Professor of Film Studies and American Studies; Co-Chair, Film Studies Program; and, Director of Summer Film Institute, Yale University. Musser authored several books on the early history of American cinema. He co-edited Oscar Micheaux and His Circle: African American Filmmaking and Race Cinema of the Silent Era (2001) with Jane Gaines and Pearl Bowser.

Terri Francis, Assistant Professor, Film Studies, African American Studies, Yale University. Francis’ specializes in the history and aesthetics of African Diaspora cinema, literature, and culture. Her current work is concerned with race, gender and cinema.

Don Mays, Assistant Director, Intercultural Studies, Roger Williams University. The Rhode Island-based independent filmmaker’s most recent documentary explores the history of the first Black regiment of soldiers who fought in America’s Revolutionary War.

Dissent magazine publishes Norman Mailer's “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster”

What's Black? What's White? What's Italian? What's Jewish? Are race and ethnicity a dance anyone can learn?

This essay by Norman Mailer recorded a wave of young white people in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s who liked jazz and swing music so much that they adopted Black culture as their own. It was first published in the Fall 1957 issue of Dissent, and was later reprinted in Advertisements for Myself in 1959. Mailer’s so-called “white negroes” were White American male bohemians who enshrouded themselves in Black clothing styles, language, and music while distancing themselves from White society. This movement influenced the hipsters of the 1940s, the beats of the 1950s, the mods of the 1960s, and the wigger of later decades. What is the connection between race music and dance -- including contemporary hip-hop culture -- to the music and dance of the White mainstream? We will discuss the way marginalized cultures often become models for those alienated from the culture at large and how Black culture has been stereotyped and altered in the service of others.

Featured Guests:

Joe Beats is a sampled based producer and performer from Rhode Island. His production credits are listed under many like aliases: Joey Beats, The Joe Beats Experiment, The Joe Beats Conspiracy, The Joe Beats Trio, Joey "Nose" Beats, Joe Beats & Blak, Non-Prophets, and others.

John Gennari, Associate Professor of English & Director, ALANA U.S. Ethnic Studies Program, University of Vermont. ALANA is an interdisciplinary program focused on the study of cultures, values, historical and contemporary issues relating to African Americans, Latinos/as, Asian Americans and Native Americans. Gennari’s work focuses on race and ethnic studies in literary and cultural studies.

Greg Tate, essayist, cultural critic, and longtime Village Voice journalist. Author of Everything But The Burden, Tate’s work explores the reaction and implications of White appropriation of African-American culture.

The U.S. Census allows individuals to identify themselves as mixed-race

Tiger Woods, Barack Obama, and their American stories -- how checking multiple boxes on a survey helped redefine race in America

For the first time, citizens of the United States were not asked to define themselves by checking a single ethnic box in the census. In all of the census counts through 1990, an individual's race was supposed to be indicated by checking only one of the boxes presumed to correspond to the main social racial categories. Thus, there was no allowance made for multiracial identification, although the category "other" was recognized in the 1980 and 1990 census and on many local record-keeping forms. Advocates worked throughout the 1990s to rescind this “one box” policy. This change will lead to a discussion of the demographics of hybridization and the hybridization of demographics at the turn of the 21st century in the U.S. and in the world. We will also look at the concept of race as a construct and the notion of racial purity.