The Dangerous Resurgence of “Bad Genes” Language

The dark history of eugenics offers lessons for today.

Reviewed by Gary Drevitch

Key points

• Psychology’s embrace of eugenics and race science is part of its dark history.
• The idea that one can categorize groups of people as having “bad” or "good" genes has long been debunked.
• Some politicians and journalists on the right in U.S. politics have begun to embrace aspects of race science.
• Lessons from psychology’s history might help people to push back against dangerous race science ideas.

In 2021, the American Psychological Association (APA) published a resolution: Apology to People of Color for APA’s Role in Promoting, Perpetuating, and Failing to Challenge Racism, Racial Discrimination, and Human Hierarchy in the U.S. In this document, the APA outlined the role that White male psychologists played in bolstering White supremacy and systemic racism through the eugenics movement in the early 1900s.

According to the National Human Genome Research Institute, eugenics “is the scientifically inaccurate theory that humans can be improved through selective breeding of populations.” This scientific racism uses the dangerous illogic of eugenics to provide credibility for long-debunked ideas that White Europeans are genetically superior to “non-[W]hite people whose social and economic status have been historically marginalized.” This unscientific sleight of hand requires discussion of ideas—about the “good genes” that White people supposedly have and the “bad genes” that others supposedly have—that are not supported by research or evidence.

Emma Wolverton, Eugenics, and “Feeblemindedness”

Science journalist Carl Zimmer traces the history of eugenics in the United States in his powerful book, She Has Her Mother’s Laugh. This book about genes includes the story of a young unwanted girl, Emma Wolverton. In 1897, at just 8 years old, Emma’s mother dropped her off at the Vineland Training School, a home for “feeble-minded children” in New Jersey.

By all accounts, Emma was not feebleminded. In fact, Emma was abandoned at the behest of her mother’s new husband, who did not want to raise any children who were not biologically his. As Zimmer wrote, “visitors commented on how normal she seemed.”

Emma’s life changed when she was 17 years old, and psychologist Henry Goddard became the first Director of Research at the Vineland Training School. Soon after his arrival, Goddard began to categorize the children of Vineland, misusing an intelligence test that was not designed for the purpose of categorization. He grouped the children into the existing categories of “idiot"— those with the lowest intelligence—and “imbecile,” the next level.

When there were children at Vineland whose intelligence was not deemed low enough to fit into these categories, Goddard invented the new term “moron.” Emma Wolverton was classified as a moron despite her obvious skills in many areas, from reading to woodworking. Unfortunately, Goddard believed that intelligence, and especially feeblemindedness, was largely hereditary. So he sought out evidence to support this belief, recruiting fieldworkers to trace Emma’s family, tracking almost 400 Wolvertons back to the family patriarch, John Wolverton. (Spoiler alert: The findings from this “research” would later turn out to be false.)

Goddard gave the family pseudonyms, choosing the surname Kallikak as a combination of the Greek words for good and bad. So, Emma became Deborah Kallikak and John became Martin Kallikak, Sr. in Goddard's best-selling book, The Kallikak Family. Goddard outlined two branches of Martin’s family tree: 1) the mostly “feebleminded” descendants from a liaison with “a nameless feebleminded girl” that led eventually to Emma, and 2) the mostly “normal” descendants from John's marriage to his “lawful wife” who was of “normal” intelligence. Holding up the supposed divergent genealogies as evidence for his theory, Goddard wrote: “The biologist could hardly plan and carry out a more rigid experiment.”

The Dark Consequences of Eugenics

As scientists now recognize, eugenics research, including that described in The Kallikak Family, was used to justify a range of harmful practices. It was used as a basis for the Immigration Act of 1924, which prevented groups seen as undesirable from entering the United States. And in 1927, it was used to support mandatory sterilization laws for those perceived to be lower in intelligence, almost always applied to women rather than men. Among those perceived as undesirable based on eugenics were people from Southern and Eastern Europe, as well as those who were Jewish, Black, Indigenous, Latino/Latina, and Asian (Chatters et al., 2022). Unfortunately, for several decades, these badly researched and false ideas were mainstream.

As Zimmer wrote in his 2018 book, the popularity of eugenics slowly decreased in the United States through the 1930s, and The Kallikak Family was out of print by the end of that decade. Disastrously, it had been translated into German in 1933 and was specifically credited for the development of Nazi policies. A film in Germany even juxtaposed the Kallikak family tree with quotes from Adolf Hitler. These ideas from the United States, including some from Goddard, were used by the Nazis to justify the sterilization of people with a range of disabilities, the murder of people with disabilities, and the sterilization and then murder of many others, including Roma people and Jewish people.

“Bad Genes”: The Resurgence of Eugenics

This dark history reminds us that any resurgence of eugenics, including referring to genes as “good” and “bad,” is dangerous. Indeed, Goddard referred to the “good side of the Kallikak family” and attributed low intelligence to “bad stock” (Smith & Wehmeyer, 2012). And remember that even the pseudonym, Kallikak, combines the Greek words for good and bad.

In her 2019 book, Superior: The Return of Race Science, science journalist Angela Saini argues that eugenics and race science never really went away, despite efforts to banish them after the Nazi atrocities of World War II. She describes current race scientists as hiding behind a veil of academic freedom, and she details the embrace of race science by authoritarian leaders to justify discriminatory and White supremacist policies. Relatedly, Linda Chatters and her colleagues (2022) discuss the historical undercurrents of modern-day White supremacy, including “The Great Replacement” conspiracy theory that White European people in the United States are being replaced by non-White people. Chatters and her colleagues describe these beliefs as “based in fears about immigration and declining [W]hite political power” and “prompted [by] anti‐immigration and pro‐eugenic attitudes.”

We see this resurgence of ideas and language from race science right now in right-wing politics in the United States. In an article for The Atlantic, Ali Breland describes Donald Trump’s response to a question about immigration from a right-wing radio host in which the former president used the language of good genes and bad genes. Referring to his perception of Vice President Kamala Harris’s policies, Trump said, “How about allowing people to come to an open border, 13,000 of which were murderers? Many of them murdered far more than one person, and they’re now happily living in the United States. You know, now a murderer—I believe this—it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.” (The 13,000 number is misleading for several reasons, including that it spans 40 years.)

Breland points out the sleight of hand that Trump may have been using, separating his discussion of immigrants from his discussion of genes with comments on murderers. “But,” Breland writes, “we can all see the point he’s making.” Relatedly, Breland points out that race science “has been surging out of the most decrepit corners of the fringe right and into its mainstream.” For example, he observes that prominent proponents of race science have been featured on both Tucker Carlson’s and Charlie Kirk’s podcasts, and that Elon Musk “has publicly engaged with posts from prominent pro-race-science accounts on X, his social-media platform.”

U.S. and global history, including that related to eugenics, represent a warning of the perils of engaging with the ideas and language of race science, especially given that race science has been debunked by mainstream scholars. As Saina has said, “The people who hardened these [racial] categories wanted us to believe that we are fundamentally different. We are not fundamentally different.”

Epilogue: The Myth of the Kallikak Family

The end of the story of Emma Wolverton is a sad one for her and a tragedy for all of us. In 2001, researchers David MacDonald and Nancy McAdams began pulling at the strings of the story of the Wolverton (Kallikak) family, and the whole tale fell apart. The field research was sloppy, and the supposed feebleminded son, the offspring of John Wolverton (Martin Kallikak, Sr.) and the “feebleminded girl,” did not exist (Chatters et al., 2022).

Zimmer wrote that that person was actually John’s second cousin rather than his son and did not seem to have been feebleminded at all; Zimmer described him as a literate landowner whose descendants included “bank treasurers, policemen, coopers, Civil War soldiers, school-teachers, and a pilot in the Army Air Corps." As we now know, this rigid experiment never existed. Intentionally or not, it was a fabricated narrative to justify false ideas.

This more recent research found that Emma herself was well read and had numerous accomplishments, including acting in and producing plays and working as a nurse’s aide. Sadly, because of her early label, Emma lived in institutions her whole life. She died in 1978 at 89 years old. Emma had remarkable insight into her own life. She stayed in touch with Goddard until his death in 1957 and said, upon receiving a Christmas card from him one year, “The nicest thing about it is that he thought I have the brains to understand it, which of course I do.”