Episode 36: What’s the real history of eugenics in Virginia?

Content Warning: in this episode, we discuss eugenics and forced sterilization, and a brief mention of rape in the back half. Eugenics is a term we associate with fascist regimes--a pseudo-scientific approach to control the qualities of humanity by choosing who gets to reproduce and who does not. And Virginia was one of its earliest adopters--the Virginia Eugenics Sterilization Act passed in 1924, and the nation's first state-sanctioned compulsory sterilization was performed on Virginia citizen Carrie Buck in 1927.

In this episode, we talk with author and historian Elizabeth Catte, author of Pure America: Eugenics and the Making of Modern Virginia. In this book, she examines Virginia's history of eugenics through the land we use today: considering the experiences of Virginia's disabled, Black, Native, and other marginalized communities in the 20th century--and the reasons why this period of our history has largely gone unspoken.