Eugenic States: A Contextual Archive Main Menu Introduction Critical Themes in the History of Eugenics Eugenic Practices in California, Iowa, and North Carolina What We Can Say with Data Acknowledgements

Race and Diagnosis Interactions

3 What We Can Say with Data
Sometimes we can ask new questions by paying attention to patterns in what is missing vs what is present. With the visualization below we were exploring how race and diagnosis might have been interacting in Iowa, California, and North Carolina. In particular, we hypothesized that the loose category of "feebleminded" might have been leveraged more often in cases where patients were racialized by officials. Our time with the California data and the work of colleagues about the disproportionate sterilization of people with Spanish surnames in California, suggested this hypothesis. Indeed, we see far more of the Latinx patients were described as feebleminded in California. Meanwhile, in Iowa the spurious diagnosis was used most often in records where no race was recorded (not entirely surprising given that 98% of Iowa records contain no information about race). Because race information is almost entirely missing for Iowa, we are left to wonder if the diagnosis only appeared where race was silently observed or if feebleminded was used for some other reason. 

In North Carolina, however, the label was used widely in records where patients were described as both White and Black. It was a bit of a surprise to us that the diagnosis was actually used most often in patients recorded as White, even though people racialized as Black were sterilized at higher rates. Was being Black reason enough to sterilize in North Carolina? Did poverty and race interact? We would need to do further analysis to see what, if any, other data correlate with racialization in the recommendations. 

While we would need to do deeper archival work (which might not yield answers) to understand how diagnosis and race interacted in each state, visualizing the difference between each of the states suggests to us that the interplay might itself have varied between states - perhaps as another instance of the patchwork of practices. 

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  1. Looking at Eugenic Practices Across the Nation Jacqueline D. Wernimont

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