It started with Beyoncé Bowl. The megastar’s Christmas halftime performance captivated content across media platforms during the week nestled between Christmas and the New Year. One commentary rocketed to a trend across Black TikTok; was Beyoncé one of our greatest living propagandists? A fair-skinned, blue/green-eyed biracial person proposed this thought on her platform of 80,000 to 100,000 followers in a short video that set off a cataclysmic conversation. For under a day, honest responses to her analysis popped up, with other Black creators explaining southern Black culture and Americana visuals, subversiveness in art, as well as simply defending Beyoncé being well, Beyoncé.
But rather immediately, the discussion pivoted away from the music mogul’s new endeavors into country music and became about diminishing the biracial creator’s “right” to discuss the songstress due to her having a white mother and lacking “4 Black grandparents”. What was originally a fruitful (although sometimes antagonistic and ragebait-centered) collection of thoughts between Black people about Black culture, Black history, and Black art became a devolved discussion refusing Black identity to biracial people. Many defended their conclusions not with in depth application of American history or sociological constructs of race, but instead with regurgitated eugenicist arguments supporting racial purity. The final thought being that Blackness (and Beyonce) must be protected from the racially impure, the less Black. Like all things on social media, no resolution occurred; instead, creators grew bored of giving “takes” and moved on to another outrage cycle.
But months later, a new concern from the same audience emerged, this time after two disability influencers revealed they had recently become parents. Both people live with genetic osteogenesis imperfecta, a condition that leads to an ongoing risk of easily fracturing bones from minute activities (sneezing, dressing for the day, etc.) What followed the new parents’ joy was swift condemnation:
“This should be illegal, idc idc.” “I don’t support any of this. Poor baby.” “Let’s be honest without any hard feelings, the poor kid didn’t deserve this at all.” “How they gone get the baby out of the crib?” “This was selfish.”
Opinion videos grew overnight, castigating their choice to knowingly produce another disabled person. A pediatric/NICU nurse with nearly 200,000 followers racked up almost a million views (and 76,000 likes) on a video calling the couple “severely disabled,” showing a description of the symptoms of osteogenesis imperfecta, then stating outright that the couple’s decision was “unethical.” She went on to assess the baby’s existence and value by discussing the resources that are needed to maintain the baby’s life, along with the ones being provided to the parents. A substantial portion of social media inhabitants cruelly concluded “disabled people just shouldn’t have kids” and that people with different disabilities should have less reproductive rights than others.
The vicious uproars remained at a fever pitch and hauntingly was parallel to an earlier period of imposed online loathing of another group–the impoverished mother who made a video rearranging her one-bedroom apartment in preparation to add a fifth child. The resulting opinion for many became “poor people shouldn’t have kids.” With every one of these trending chapters of online discourse there is also a relieving number of influencers and experts with sizeable platforms who rightfully point out that each of these beliefs are the basis of first wave eugenics philosophy, particularly for those who Sir Francis Galton eagerly determined to be “undesirables”.
Eugenicist thought has never left the American zeitgeist. As Angela Saini writes in her insightful book about the modernization of race science, Superior, “scientific racism has come out of the shadows, at least partly because wider society has made room for it.” But it is not exclusively the pseudoscientific race-based concepts such as polygenism or “one drop rule” policies, the entire eugenicist thought that undergirds the framework for dehumanizing dogma has found safe haven in modern political and social platforms.
When confronted with the reality that these perspectives on poor or disabled people are core staples of eugenics, many responded with dismissive or accepting comments:
“Yes, it’s 100% eugenics. I support it, for personal reasons. But people should accept what they’re supporting”, “eugenics would be saying they can’t. Logical thinking is that they shouldn’t” and “I do believe there should be a line with certain disabilities, if that’s eugenics, so be it, no child should be put through a life of pain just because you want a child.”*
Americans’ historic education fails us frequently, especially as it pertains to the philosophy of eugenics and how it is still pervasive throughout American ideologies. At its most celebrated, eugenics was not a conservative concept embraced exclusively by autocratic fascists determined to eradicate entire populations, but a liberalist fantasy of an ideal future where everyone experiences equality. What could be so wrong with the conviction that humans should be striving to build their most equal and best selves? Scientists of all backgrounds embraced the idea that humankind could one day “breed out” the most detrimental of conditions. This belief, when put into action, was included but not limited to goals such as eradicating and reducing Black and Indigenous groups, disabled communities, and social behaviors or conditions thought to be inheritable. It was not until bearing witness to the human devastation of what implementing eugenics as state policy in Nazi Germany did that it suddenly became an exiled concept.
But these views did not evaporate with time, instead, they were woven into growing sciences, stitched into advancing theories in genetics, sociology, biology, medicine, etc. A steady stream of eugenicist principles continued to be fed to the general public under the cloak of “common sense” thought, playing on the heuristics many depend on when determining a personal stance on an issue. Social media platforms thrive on pushing provocative dichotomous attitudes to viral popularity through algorithms that detect what captivates an audience’s attention, no matter how malevolent. This decision to promote topics without ethical regulation of harms that will be done to marginalized identities means that the general populace comfortably engages in relitigating human rights, and the lens that easily appeals to the simplicity many prefer is eugenics.
This virtual environment blended with eugenicist philosophy is also steeped within moralities developed inside unconscious Puritan tenets that see certain identities as proof of godly disfavor, the sinful, and cursed. Whilst this all plays out, those in power watch these conversations unfurl in the public forum and realize what language to mimic that will create buy-in. The results of such nefarious conversations become us teaching malicious actors how to sell disastrous health policies to everyone that will surely curse us all in the end.
*Note: Often when attempting to acquire citations for comments and videos on social media, the creator has turned off, deleted, or blocked comments and/or videos. There is a question for academics going forward around trying to cite original sources from social media, especially viral content. Every platform user can and does change their content and account often to stop responses, harassment, etc., but this affects citation accuracy and intention.
Evan Thornburg, MAUB is a bioethicist, public health equity officer, and TikTok creator focusing their content on bioethics, medical history, health and tech ethics, and public health communication. @EVNtheBioethicist