Race suicide

For other uses, see Race suicide (disambiguation).
B&W photo of a family of 7
A newspaper photograph from 1919 of Joseph Patrick Tumulty with his wife and six children, under the headline "President Wilson's Private Secretary Is Not an Advocate of Race Suicide"

Race suicide was an alarmist eugenicist theory, coined by American sociologist Edward A. Ross around 1900 and promoted by folks like Harry J. Haiselden.[1] Per the American Eugenics Archive, “race suicide” conceptualizes a hypothetical situation in which the death rate of a particular “race” supersedes its birth rate.[2]

As a propagandistic theory akin to white genocide, race suicide was mechanized to induce fear in dominant and/or majority “races” (i.e. the “white race”) that their community was dying off and being replaced by more fertile immigrant “races.” This term was likewise deployed to proliferate the ideology of Eugenics among the international public throughout the 20th century.[2] Moreover, the concept of “race suicide” predominantly placed blame on women, as supposed agents of reproduction. With its roots in Nordicism, the application of this alarmist theory varied based on the targeted community and/or country.[3]

  1. ^ Washington, Harriet A. (2008). Medical Apartheid: The dark history of medical experimentation on Black Americans from colonial times to the present (1st ed.). New York: Harlem Moon.
  2. ^ a b "The Eugenics Archive". 2018-01-13. Retrieved 2024-03-19.
  3. ^ Bashford, Alison (2014). Global population: history, geopolitics, and life on earth. Columbia studies in international and global history. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-14766-8.