Ancient theories of human diversity and identity strongly influenced most modern forms of scientific racism, including eugenics, tropicalism, craniometry, environmental theories of human development, social evolutionary theories, and theories connecting ‘race’ and intelligence. This chapter explores three of these areas of influence: (1) environmental determinism; (2) models of evolution and the ‘progress’ of civilisations; and (3) population management schemes linked to eugenic thinking. These ideas spread throughout Europe as part of the Enlightenment project to classify everything and throughout much of the globe under the influence of European imperialism and colonialism culminating in the Nazi eugenics program. But this chapter focuses on developments in the United States, the country that pioneered the colour-based bioracism that still dominates contemporary racist thinking between 1870 and 1930, the years when the ‘science of man’ became academic and political dogma.

Chapter 10, Disagreements and Debates in Psychology’s History, elucidates how theories and practices in psychology are influenced by historical and cultural circumstances and modes of thought. First we look back to the nineteenth century, when some psychologists were influenced by evolutionary theory and adopted the eugenic framework, with ideas of selective breeding of “good” types of humans. We then give a brief account of psychology and evolutionary theory today. This is followed by a discussion of the history of psychological measurement, and of how, eventually, a wide-ranging imperative to use quantitative methods was established in the discipline. Next is the history of operational definitions. We then take a short tour of the histories of psychology’s words – where they come from and how they change, and the importance of being aware of the changes. In the final subsection, the topic is the history of psychological theories and practices regarding women and gender, and the debates about them.

The 1920s saw hope as well as gloom. Coexistent temporalities comingled. Key themes overarched: (a) novel metropolitan life; (b) shifting class differences; (c) changes in the state; (d) gendering of social relations, social practices, and political action; (e) Europe’s relation to empire; (f) cultural life and ideas; (g) democracy’s uneven fortunes. The welfarist complex crossed regime differences (democracy versus dictatorship), embracing population and national health; a normative family; social services delivery; goals of national efficiency. Eugenicist ideas claimed an appealing coherence, whose refusal presumed key enabling factors: intact democracy; strong labor movements; liberal systems of law; and pluralist public spheres. By 1939–1940, that left only Sweden and Britain. Widening of democracy brought the welfarist field distinct cohorts of educated young men and freshly enfranchised young women. The 1880s generation passed 1914–1918 as young adults; the “war youth generation” missed the war but craved an equivalent; interwar cohorts joined the post-1918 world as it started collapsing. Those lives turned on an enabling modernity. They knitted together the “modernist wish.”

Early-twentieth-century empire soaked into European culture. That occurred via new visual media and other imaginative means: cinema, photography, and popular press; zoos, trade fairs, and colonial exhibitions; postcards and advertisements; colonial commodity consumption; memoirs, travelogues, and exploration; quality literature and popular fiction. Europe’s relations with exotically faraway, excitingly wealth-producing, aesthetically enticing, but threatening overseas worlds saturated identity and national character. Europeans knew themselves via their racially “othered” colonized populations, who enabled a vivid topography of the imagination. Resulting languages of difference and belonging delivered many resources for individual and collective self-understanding. Cultural media were legion: mass-circulation fictions and recognized novels; children’s comic books; polar expeditions and Central Asian exploration; new Black sporting celebrity; Negrophilia surrounding Josephine Baker and Paul Robeson. “Race” acquired many sinister applications, from social Darwinism and eugenics to the hardening of the “color line.” The most aggressively elaborate version was the Nazis’ racial state.

Tuskegee, the early twentieth-century eugenics movement, and Roma studies, are examples of major research efforts that were biased and misdirected. More recent examples from the study of electro-magnetic field exposure and childhood cancer, as influenced by interviewer bias, are provided.

Human enhancement aims to make people ‘better than well’ by interventions in the human genome. I canvas four moral arguments against this – from (1) autonomy, (2) dignity, (3) inequality and (4) mastery – concluding that none is probative. Argument (1) overestimates the cost to autonomy of genetic technologies and underestimates the degree to which ordinary moral training is heteronomous. Argument (2) drives too sharp a wedge between the natural and the artefactual and thereby ignores the extent to which we already treat the body as a site of ameliorative intervention. Argument (3) invokes the spectre of a ‘genetic underclass’ that is ‘gene-poor’, but I argue that this can be guarded against by education and government policy. Argument (4) tends to rest on persuasive description and on consequentialist claims that are empirically weakly supported. I end by mounting my own, formal, argument against human enhancement. This holds that it collapses into transhumanism, this being an ultimately incoherent project, one that abandons the idea of human nature and with it any criteria for determining what it is to be ‘better than well’. Finally, I corroborate this argument from incoherence by unpacking a paper by Groll and Lott.

This chapter explains how white supremacy evolved and adapted after the US Civil War and the abolition of slavery across the British Empire. Rather than weakening, white power structures found new ways to maintain racial hierarchies through scientific racism, Social Darwinism, and eugenics. These scientific frameworks provided intellectual justification for continued oppression while appearing objective and dispassionate. The period saw the rise of immigration restrictions, voter suppression, and systematic segregation across English-speaking societies, all designed to preserve white political and economic power. New “race perils” reflected white anxieties about demographic change, while eugenics aimed to protect racial “purity” through sterilization programs and anti-miscegenation laws. Particularly significant was the denial of capital accumulation to nonwhites through housing discrimination, job discrimination, and business restrictions. Although many voices challenged these racist theories and practices as false and cynical, they were consistently overpowered by institutional forces desperate to maintain white supremacy.

Describes Meade’s family background and education at preparatory and public schools.

The term “race” was widely used in the 1500s to describe many types of blood relationships but gradually became focused on ethnicity and skin colour. The elevation of Anglo-Saxons as a superior race developed alongside “scientific racism” in the 1800s, and in turn gave an impetus to eugenics and Aryianism. By 1900, the language of race was found everywhere in England, and it declined very slowly throughout the subsequent century.

Before examining how the regulation of bioethical matters impacts the equal right to live in the world for people with impairments, Chapter 1 elaborates on key concepts relevant for the book’s later chapters: disability, eugenics, ableism, and neoliberalism. It begins with a critical discussion of the medical and social models of disability, the two dominant approaches to understanding disability in disability studies. The chapter also highlights the troubled recent history of eugenics, the concept of ableism and the persistence of ableist policies and practices, as well as the importance and shortcomings of disability rights laws in furthering disability justice and equality.

The regulation of embryo testing, selection, and gene editing, as part of assisted reproduction, is the focus of Chapter 3. The chapter argues that restricting or prohibiting the transfer of embryos with impairments during assisted reproduction is incompatible with disability rights. It also argues that if embryos can have their impairments removed through gene editing, then preventing the creation of disabled embryos would be incompatible with regulating assisted reproduction in a disability-inclusive manner.

The chapter analyzes the intersection of population control policies, Cold War dynamics, and racial considerations in the post–World War II era. It highlights the challenges faced by Western states in influencing birth control policies in postcolonial countries, with a focus on the perceived link between population growth and the spread of Communism. Key figures like Dudley Kirk and Frank Lorimer advocated for redefining relationships with developing nations to counter Communist expansion, emphasizing economic support and the reduction of fertility rates over military intervention. The chapter also explores the evolution of demographic viewpoints, moving away from racist eugenic traditions toward more democratic and liberal approaches to population control. The chapter provides insights into how intellectuals grappled with the unprecedented scale of population growth and its potential impact on global stability and resources, highlighting the strategic evolution of overpopulation discourse from Western industrialized countries to influence birth rates in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

In the US at the turn of the twentieth century, poor whites became objects of both fascination and empirical research by eugenicists and race scientists. Existing stigmas and stereotypes of poor whites were rarely challenged by these progressive reformers bent on improving American society though eugenic programs of human betterment. Researchers imagined and portrayed poor whites as a grave dysgenic threat to the racial purity of other whites. Their very existence was seen as inimical to the ideals of white supremacy that fueled the Social Darwinism of the era. As a result, poor whites were targeted for institutionalization and compulsory sterilization and durable stigmatypes of poor whites were formed.

Critical eating studies provides an important framework for understanding the construction of whiteness. This methodology allows literary critics to trace the material history of food, its marketing as well as its production, and the metaphorical valence of the body politic. Because of the tense relationship between white racial ideals and bodily pleasure, US literature often juxtaposes purity politics with the desirous, hungering body. This chapter gives an overview of major scholars at the intersection of food, literature, and race (Doris Witt, Anita Mannur, Kyla Wazana Tompkins) as well as readings of works by Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Vladimir Nabokov that feature whiteness as an ideal impossible to embody and food as a challenge to its ineffability. Contemporary foodie culture reveals the appropriative impulses of whiteness, while satires by Ben Lerner and Jordan Peele perhaps show the way to bite back against the reign of biopolitical purity.