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Here is the story of the white supremacist foundation that finances the underpinnings of "scientific" racism and fuels the worst prejudices in American society.
FROM AN OFFICE in New York City, the Pioneer Fund dispenses about $1 million a year to academics, most of whom do research related to establishing a genetic basis for racial differences in intelligence and personality. The fund also supports the work of scholars such as Michael Levin, who analyze and discuss the political implications of these differences. But the most important agenda for the Pioneer Fund has been the same since its founding: a movement known as eugenics.
Eugenicists believe that humans - like cattle and canines - should be bred selectively. They usually consider intelligence, which they believe is genetically passed on from parents to children, to be the most valuable human attribute. They also believe that smarter people have fewer children. So they reason that unless they get the bright to have more children and the dull to have fewer, human intelligence will not evolve. Instead it will deteriorate until the species fails to meet the demands of its environment and falters into extinction.
The eugenics movement was created by Englishmen in the late nineteenth century. They used it to try to control reproduction among the Irish, who were thought to threaten Anglo-Saxon society with their low intelligence and high birth rate. In the early twentieth century the idea of genetic management caught on in the United States, where Italians, Asians, and especially Jews were identified as the oversexed and slow-witted. The partnership of eugenics and political power reached full flower with the rise of Germany's Third Reich.
Since then eugenics has largely fallen out of favor, recognized for the most part as a vehicle for racism. From time to time, however, a highly visible proponent like the late William Shockley of Stanford University, who proposed sterilizing welfare recipients, stumbles into public view, but for the most part, the work goes on quietly, almost stealthily.
Today's eugenicists - many of them gathered under the Pioneer Fund's umbrella - focus their attention on blacks and Latinos, although a fixation with Jews still persists among the most rabid, who, like Hitler, believe the "colored races" are being used to...