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Wilmer Leon (00:00):
Let's play a word association game. When I say eugenics, what comes to mind? What does it mean? Is the opposition to critical race theory? A eugenics construct is eugenics alive and well and still impacting our culture? Does eugenics influence the character portrayals in movies that you see in commercials? And what are your children being taught in school and why?
Announcer (00:35):
Connecting the dots with Dr. Wilmer Leon, where the analysis of politics, culture, and history converge.
Wilmer Leon (00:43):
Welcome to the Connecting the Dots podcast with Dr. Wilmer Leon and I am Wilmer Leon. Here's the point. We have a tendency to view current events as though they happen in a vacuum, failing to understand the broader historic context in which most events take place. During each episode of this podcast, my guests and I have probing, provocative, and in-depth discussions that connect the dots between these events and the broader historic and the broader historic context in which they occur. This enables you to better understand and analyze the events that are impacting the global village in which we live on today's episode. The issue before us is eugenics. Is it a warped pseudoscience of the past or is it still impacting how people view each other? My guest is a historian and journalist whose work documents deconstructs and interprets eugenics themes in popular culture, identify formation among African-Americans and reproductive apartheid in carceral spaces and within marginalized communities. She's the author of In Search of Purity, popular Eugenics and Racial Uplift Among New Negroes, 1915 to 1935, and Pop U, popular Eugenics in television and film. She is Dr. Chantel Sherman. Chantel, welcome to the show.
Dr Shantella Sherman (02:19):
Thank you. I appreciate you having me. Always.
Wilmer Leon (02:23):
Before we get to your work as a researcher and historian, let's talk about your work as a researcher, historian, and journalist. You're the founder of the Acumen Group and you're also the Acumen Group, publishes Acumen Magazine. What is the Acumen Group?
Dr Shantella Sherman (02:43):
The Acumen Group is basically an institution where we are training, it's a nonprofit where we're training folks to deconstruct the things around them, specifically related to eugenics, but also related to race to the world around them, how we construct identities not only racially, but within our families, within our nation, and how we view and observe the worlds around us. So the goal with the Acumen Group was to take what it is that we have in institutions and do a trickle down, or I like to say like a sprinkler system, so that every person has the ability to actually see what it is that we're studying, know what folks are saying when they create policy, understand the dynamics that go into creating policy and the power that they have to change it. But since most people aren't comfortable being in school anymore, or they figure once they reach the 12th grade, then that's it. They stop reading, they stop, I'm having conversations. They stop really engaging with the process of life. And so the goal is to tool people up, first of all, by making them comfortable with being in classrooms again, being armchair historians and armchair politicians so that they understand the world around them and then giving them the tools to actually go out and change the things that they need to change.
Wilmer Leon (04:06):
And Acumen Magazine, how often is it published? Where do people get it? What's in Acumen Magazine?
Dr Shantella Sherman (04:14):
Acumen Magazine came about because we have students, a lot of students who once they got the information, they were on fire. They really wanted to be able to tell this information and represented it and reproduce it. And so we created the magazine as a quarterly. It is student led, it is student produced with me at the helm doing much of the graphic design and the editing. But it is students from around the globe at this point that showcase their research. It is dialed down in a way that it's journal quality, but in a rather popular and inviting way of reading it. So it's more like a magazine, even though it feeds like a journal.
Wilmer Leon (05:00):
One of the things that has stood out to me, as you and I talk about all the work that you're doing, all the research that you're doing, all the presentations, it seems as though, and if I'm wrong, please correct me. It seems as though there's a lot more interest in your work abroad as in Europe than there is here in the United States.
Dr Shantella Sherman (05:24):
Yes, it's the quick answer. I think that there's a real passion across the globe, but specifically in these European spaces, because even though eugenics took off here in America, and I think it was the perfect laboratory for the pseudoscience, it in fact originated in Europe. And so the concept of how to create better people, the concept of how to nation build it comes from them as part of the colonial mainframe. And so it's that colonizing empire with its tentacles. But how do you manage people that you consider to be less than, to be inferior, to be the world's workers, to be low on the totem pole? How do you manage them? And so Europeans are still looking at this in other ways. They never stopped the eugenic mainframe. They never stopped the cogs and the wheels from spinning. And so when we look at things today, and I know we'll get to this artificial intelligence or people talking about genomes and helping with medicine, creating the medicine that you need based upon gene pools and gene sets, these are all tentacles and legs of the original eugenics movement.
(06:45)
And so if we don't understand what that is, then the folks in Europe understand it. And so they're courses, they're college courses are designed to fit around this, whether it's law, whether it is political science, whether it's journalism, they understand that eugenics is still a part of the conversation. So for instance, Francis Go, who's considered to be the father of Eugenics, his original laboratory, the Eugenics Records lab, those societies are still very much in existence under different names. So the original Eugenics Institute under Francis Galton has now been renamed, and it's called the Adelphi Forum. And they're still having meetings early or as late as 20 23, 20 24. So part of, again, what the Acumen Group does is we send researchers, or I will attend myself, and we go in and we listen to how eugenics is now being talked about, or genetic research is now being talked about in a rather deconstructed way, so that folks are studying what happened, for instance, with Covid trying to determine through blood types or through environment who was more prone to having contagions.
(08:07)
And that way it's no longer about the survival of the fittest, about who can survive different catastrophes and disasters based upon the help of science. Because if it's survival of the fittest, when the smoke cleared according to data, 63.7% globally of the folks who died from covid or complications from Covid were white people. So it makes sense that you then want to try and figure out if survival of the fit is about white people dominating people of color, but you have a pandemic come through, and the majority of the folks who passed away from this epidemic pandemic were white people. How do you explain that in a scientific way? So you'd start to study them all over again. So again, that's that eugenic tentacle still reaching out the way it does.
Wilmer Leon (09:00):
So let's take a step back and start with a definition of this pseudoscience known as genetics, known as eugenics. And after you define it, explain why it's a pseudoscience.
Dr Shantella Sherman (09:16):
Perfect. The term itself came about roughly 1840, though folks have believed that you could create or build better people or better societies through reproduction probably since the beginning of time. So the idea was that you can, in the same way you manufacture or manipulate the DNA, we weren't using the term DNA then, but germ plasm of plants and animals. You want to breed in certain things and breed out certain things. We believe that some point in this country and across the globe that you could actually do the same thing with people. And Francis goin took this science to a different level. And at the time it was considered a science. It was a bonafide science. The theories were that in the same way that you reproduce height and weight and hair color and eye color and things like that and pass them on to your children, that you could also pass along your characteristics.
(10:15)
So they were stuck. There was a gene for lying, there was a chromosome for stealing. It is the belief that if you mix this type of person with this type of person, you'll end up with these type of children. And the belief eugenically was that these genes sat for generation after generation after generation. So if you had a great, great grandfather who was a criminal, that criminality was in your genes and the genes of your children, and that it was just one thing that would potentially push it on out, or in other instances it just manifested itself. So we know it to be a pseudoscience. All of the theories were fallible because if that was the case that meant that we just have a world full of criminals, we would have a world full of liars. And it's not to say that this, to some extent we don't, but these are things that can't be set aside.
(11:13)
One of the things that is really defining about eugenics as well is that poverty is considered to be in your DNA. So this is the reason why, again, when we start talking about social sciences and reform work, the belief is that if you are born poor, you're going to stay poor. If your parents were burden on society, you will be a burden on society. If you had a child born out of wedlock somewhere along this family tree, that that immorality is in you and therefore you have to be watched, monitored, segregated, kept from doing things that other Americans do or other British do or other whomever do, because there is a discogenic taint, if you will, a contamination to your gene pool. And so that's where we get the marriage laws that are restricting folks. So we get segregation to restrict people from coming together.
Wilmer Leon (12:12):
So as a part of this, and I say this all the time, and usually people look at me, the whole construct of race is an artificial construct. Race does not exist. Racism exists because that is a thought process based upon the artificial construct of skin color, hair type, nose type, all of these types of elements that we attribute to race. That's an artificial construct grown out of the whole eugenics. Pseudoscience.
Dr Shantella Sherman (12:56):
Absolutely. And the reason why America became such a tremendous laboratory for the quote science at the time, is that Africans came over looking like traditional stereotypical Africans, very, very dark in complexion, very broad noses, very thick lips. And by the time you get to emancipation, you need eugenics to go through and measure noses and measure the thickness of lips because skin color is no longer attributed necessarily to white or black. You have enough black people who are, their skin tone is light enough that you cannot tell them from a white person,
Wilmer Leon (13:37):
Hence passing.
Dr Shantella Sherman (13:39):
Exactly. And there were enough at this point that you end up with your Dred Scott Case with your Plessy versus Ferguson with people saying, how can I identify this person as black when I can't by the naked eye see that they're black? And so we start to attribute within the eugenics mainframe things like 60 or 70 different measurements that every American at some point has to go through, whether it's through the school system, the public health system, which is just being birthed all around the same time. And so you have these folks like Frederick Hoffman who was a statistician who worked for Prudential Life Insurance, which is still around, who literally came up with a 330 page manifesto. He called it an article, I called it several volumes, but it was about who the Negro was and his health deficiencies and why black people as a whole did not deserve life insurance or health insurance because they were naturally predisposed genetically to cancers, to calamity, to disease, through filth, and just we were immoral, and it was our behaviors that created the discogenic bodies, the unfit bodies. So eugenics is the science of the fit over the unfit. And when you understand it that way, you also understand that there were as many, at some point as many white people who had to deal with this concept that they were not white enough. And so understand that any white person, when we start getting into things like the Racial Integrity Act, any white person who is not white enough is automatically classified in the black column. All right? Anyone who's not white, 100% white is now considered to be black.
Wilmer Leon (15:34):
So this takes us to the whole discussion about the one drop rule, and if there's one drop of black blood in your body, you are black. And in the south, particularly, I want to say Louisiana, but it might've been other places you had designations such as quadron, which meant you were one quarter black terone, you were one eighth black. That's where a lot of these designations came from. And I think it's important, I think for people to understand that if you're trying to construct a society that has in it a racial hierarchy, that white people are at the top of the pecking order, and black people are at the bottom of the pecking order, that white people are the dominant black people are the servant, then if you're trying to construct and maintain this type of social order or what you and I'll call disorder disorder, then you need this type of pseudoscience as the mechanism of proving or validating these warped racist theories.
Dr Shantella Sherman (16:44):
Absolutely. And within that same mainframe, Wilma, also understand that because you have so many people who at this time could be classified as mixed race, I could be classified as mixed race at this point based on the fact that I'm not dark enough. But then there were qualifiers that were put into place according to skin tone, even within darkness. So I think that you see the film cast, it touches on eugenics so briefly that I went, but that wasn't their purpose. That's okay. But the reality is you also had these qualifiers attached to different skin tones. So the closer a person was to whiteness, it was also debilitating to that black person.
Wilmer Leon (17:32):
Why do you say, wait a minute, why do you say whiteness and not just white? Are you being grammatically correct or is Oh,
Dr Shantella Sherman (17:38):
Yeah, I'm
Wilmer Leon (17:39):
No, no, no, but or is there a differentiator between, because when you say whiteness as opposed to just saying white, what distinction are you drawing?
Dr Shantella Sherman (17:54):
When I say whiteness, I'm taking on the character. I'm taking on the tone. Thank you. Not just the physicality of it. Thank you. I'm also taking into consideration the mentality of it. So sometimes I use film so that you'll get this, the Birth of a nation, the fear was not about the dark-skinned person that you could know and identify. It was all of a sudden about this mixed race, black person who gets into the White House, who gets into, I want you to pay attention to where I'm going with this. Who gets into Congress, who gets into these places where he does not belong? And so all of a sudden there's a different level of fear that says, if this person who I can't necessarily identify as black, black, see, we started out as docile and lazy and these characteristics, but all of a sudden you mix the parents, white man, black woman.
(18:48)
Then they're ledgers that I read that say things like the lighter the person is, they take on the sinister qualities of the white master who produced this person. So all of a sudden he's crafty, he's diabolical, he's a rapist because he's taking on his daddy's quality. So in the birth of a nation, what did the woman say? This is a fate worse than death to have a black man touch me and rape me the way his father, this white man has done previously. This is a part of that white character, eugenically showing itself in this now mixed race, black child, the virtue of white women basically is code. You're putting a mirror to those genes. And basically the fear was these are not just enslaved people or newly emancipated people. These are the sons and daughters. In many instances of the whiteness, the power structure that has been there.
(19:49)
So if you're telling me that eugenically within the DNA, all of those things that have been experienced and lived experiences and in the DNA and in the germ plasm of the oppressors are now in their offspring who are free to do whatever it is that they wish to do on the face of the earth, and they have the mobility to move about, all of a sudden this fear is driven into the average white male that says, now I have to be concerned not just with my children, my black children having sexual contact with the white children that I don't want them to have contact with. But I also have a fear that my children will have the type of sinister character that would allow them to elevate themselves in a way that corrupts genetically, socially, medically in every possible way, these children that I'm looking to protect in the first place.
(20:51)
And so you end up with, I sometimes call it a schizophrenic nature of racism, which is I must protect, there's a fear of me dying or being annihilated. And so you end up with folks like Starter who's talking about the rising tide of blackness. You're talking about fear of losing genetic power, but if this is survival of the fittest and you are superior, there's nothing in my black jeans that could possibly contaminate you. That's just not possible. So it's not logical, it's not scientific in any way, but it has become the social and medical mainframe for what we do under racism.
Wilmer Leon (21:39):
In your work, you have the ABCs of eugenics, and we don't have time to go through all of them. So folks, go to the acumen group.org, dot com
Dr Shantella Sherman (21:57):
Org.
Wilmer Leon (21:58):
Go to the acumen group and.dot org. So for example, you have the American Breeders Association, the first national membership based organization promoting Eugenics. Talk about just quickly, the American Breeders Association and breeding out and cultural lag, these kinds of constructs and ideas that this whole thing was built around.
Dr Shantella Sherman (22:28):
Well, I mean the American Breeders Association, it was about breeding cattle. It was about breeding animals, farm animals. But the belief was, again, if I can breed out certain things in my animals, why can't I breed them out of my children or the community around me? And so the American Breeders Association understand that they were the first informal university, I would say, because most people were farmers. We were in an agrarian society. Everyone was still building and growing. And so what comes out of that are your beauty contests. So when you had your state fair, you would have the American Breeders Association sponsoring it, and they would have the section for the fattest calf and the biggest cow and the nicest squash and the best tasting cherry pie. And then on the other end, they would have the baby contest, the fitter families contest. And the idea was, if you're going to have this much control over everything else in your environment, why wouldn't you also have that same level of control over your household and over the people around you?
(23:35)
And also Wiler, it sets up this thing where we do this all the time without thinking about it, you can go down the street and look at a person and them based on how they look. And I'm not saying, oh, his shoes are run over. You look at the face and you say, oh, his eyes are too close together. There's something wrong with that brother. Or Look at the slope on his head, or his lips are just way too big. Or We do this unconscious, we don't think about it. But these are all those eugenic theories and thoughts that were brought down to a playground level, if you will. And we went through this thing called the ugly laws, where anything that didn't satisfy our eyes, we could then conscript to being unfit. And so people who wear glasses, people who weren't wearing braces at this point, so if your teeth were not quite the way they could be, if your ears were bigger than folks thought they should be, you were nicknamed, you were bullied, you were pushed aside. Usually your teachers or nurse or doctor would say there was something wrong with you when really there wasn't, and you were then segregated from the rest of the children because you were an eyesore.
Wilmer Leon (24:49):
That takes me to, in your ABCs, there's language, and I'm glad you put it at the playground level, because there's language that became adopted into our dialogue that had to do with, I think the word is infirm, putting people in institutions, institutionalizing people. So words such as feeble-minded words such as retarded hearted. There were classifications that were associated or ascribed to people. And again, a lot of that language has become common parlance, but there was eugenic constructs tied to this language.
Dr Shantella Sherman (25:37):
Eugenics birthed that language, and I keep saying it did not exist in that way beforehand. You may have said this person a little slow or we're going to put the dunks cap on 'em, that type of thing. But you still saw that there was value in the person. You wouldn't segregate them from the rest of society or from the village or from the town. This was just the person who was a little slow. They still, for the most part, went to the same school. When eugenics enters into the frame though, what it says is that if other children see this, they will believe that this is normal, and we need to determine not what is natural, but what is normal, what we will and what we will not accept. And so you get terms like moron, idiot, buil, and within those high grade buil, low grade buil, medium grade buil, and each one of these was based upon iq.
(26:27)
And so you have early IQ tests. At the time, there was the term test, you had the Goddard test, you had different social scientists and psychiatrists who were coming in and basically saying, if I give this child this test, it shows that they have the aptitude of a two to 3-year-old. If they're in that range, then we're going to say that there are moron. If they have an aptitude of four to a 5-year-old, we're going to say they're an idiot. And you keep going up this way. The problem is not everyone's going to school. Not everyone is in the same region. So I mean, as of
Wilmer Leon (27:05):
20 agrarian cultures did not see the need for advanced mathematics and science and reading. You don't need that to bale hay. You don't need that to chop cotton
Dr Shantella Sherman (27:18):
Wilmer. When I do the research, I find that organizations like the four H Club was originally a eugenic organization.
Wilmer Leon (27:27):
Wow. Did not know that
Dr Shantella Sherman (27:29):
The goal was to keep all of the people who were migrating. See, black people weren't the only ones migrating from the south because this became an economic imperative. You also had white people migrating from the Midwest into these other areas. But when they did, they lost the character of the Midwest and they started doing things. They started doing way too much drinking, way too much partying. The girls went wild. They lost their biblical way, they lost their American way. And so the goal was to give them something that would make them stay in the Midwest. They'll make them shun all of the other stuff that's out there. So you started saying, the folks out there are unfit and you are fit, and you live from the land. And so the goal was to make sure you had four H folks who understood you are America. And so when we look at the IQ test and your SATs and your acts today, all of these eugenic tests were originally designed for the Midwest. And that's why folks outside of the Midwest do the worst on the test because
Wilmer Leon (28:32):
No, wait a minute, I didn't know. Now I've taken the LSAT, I've taken a lot of these tests. I did not realize that there was a geographic basis or higher that I did not know people from the Midwest do better. Why do people from Iowa do better on the exam than people from California
Dr Shantella Sherman (29:01):
Easily? Because the person who designed the test was in Iowa, creating it with the folks in Iowa so that they set the rubric. This is his name is escaped. VP Franklin, the historian who did this great piece about the test is designed for the dog. He said, A cat and the dog kept tapping each other and whatever. The dog wouldn't move. The cat is popping him in the head and running around. The dog is just sitting there. And it's like someone would say that that dog is lazy. No, the test is designed for the dog. The cat is the one with the problem, but you focused on the dog ignoring him. The cat is the one over here losing his mind. The goal is to change how you frame things. How are you looking at things? And so again, Wiler, you have to take a step back from everything that you're looking at and just kind of deconstructing and pull it back up. As a black man, if you go somewhere and you're defending your wife, they say, oh, he's brave. Depending on where you are. If you're a black man in the Midwest and you're defending your wife, I don't care from what it becomes. If it's a squirrel that runs out across her, then he's an animal abuser. Okay? It's all in.
Wilmer Leon (30:18):
He's a squirrel hater.
Dr Shantella Sherman (30:20):
He's a squirrel hater. Get him. It's all in the examination. Masculinity and manhood are defined by patriotism, Americanism fighting the rugged cowboy. It's all of that. When you see a black man stand up, he goes to save the day. They say, why is he looking like that?
Wilmer Leon (30:39):
Why is he so aggressive?
Dr Shantella Sherman (30:41):
Why is he so aggressive? He could have shot one bullet instead of 20. But you don't say that to Arnold Schwarzenegger, come on. How many times can you kill him? It is that. And so you start to pull back from all of that. Why are your children being suspended more than others? All children. It used to be you had psychiatrists, psychologists that would say all children begin to rebel between the ages of eight and maybe 12. And then again, when they hit a growth spurt of 14, 15, 16-year-old child, teenager is one of the worst animals to have to encounter because nothing is logical. Everything is either too much or too little. We used to understand that they're teenagers and they're doing teenagery things. All of a sudden they become criminals depending on who they are. And as the nation and the world becomes majority minority, many of the things that were once considered just to be the trappings of life, this is how people grow. This is a part of what children and teenagers do. They rebel a little bit. This is Jimmy Dean and all of this, all of a sudden that's out the water. It becomes, they're a menace to society. They are dangerous. They are aggressive. They're taking the funds of the nation. It's a waste because the people are a waste.
Wilmer Leon (32:09):
So let's go to, because you mentioned Jimmy Dean. I think rebel without a cause was the film. And I remember when my son was in high school, I had to say to him more than once, look, you can't do what your white friends do. You can't get away with the same things they're going to get away with. The police will come and take them home. They will come and take you away. So you need to be sure that you can't fall for that Okie-doke and the banana and the tailpipe trick.
Dr Shantella Sherman (32:46):
Exactly.
Wilmer Leon (32:47):
Right. Exactly. So you have a book called Pop You EU popular eugenics in television and film. And again, you mentioned Rebel Without a Cause, and Minister Society was the other term that you used, which is a very popular film. So how does this whole eugenics dynamic play itself out in the commercials? In fact, let me just, this is a very long-winded way, but to show my age, I remember when I started seeing interracial couples in commercials. That is a relatively new phenomenon. Folks younger than me, my son, he sees it as normal. When I first saw that, it might've been the Cheerios commercial with the biracial child, the father, the African-American father is on the couch. The biracial child comes and pours Cheerios on him while he is laying on the couch. And that child was obviously biracial. I lost my mind. What am I seeing on television? Because before that, there was no way in the world that you were going to see, particularly an African-American man with a biracial child. That had to mean the mother in terms of this dynamic was white. Oh my God, no. So that's a very long-winded way of me,
Dr Shantella Sherman (34:34):
Wil. No, but you're very right. It's a quick turn. It is been a very, very quick turn. And it's not even as if it's being presented the way it would stereotypically be presented. Again, you have to understand, this man is in the house. He's not, I don't want to mess with him because oj, this isn't something that's volatile. This is something that's very relaxed, and it normalized. It kind of evened it out. Those who had problems with it were ostracized. And
Wilmer Leon (35:03):
Of course, but a lot of people had serious, oh, a lot of folks, they took that commercial off.
Dr Shantella Sherman (35:13):
But what you do is you keep pushing against the breaker. You keep pushing against the breaker. And so one of the chapters that's coming up in the second volume of Pop U, which would be out later this year, it looks at the interracial dynamic and how you can now popularize this to a point where not only is it accept it, but it's lauded. So the series 9 1 1, you get a character like Angela Bassett leading the show who has a black husband starting out who comes to her after 20 years and says, I've been hiding the fact that I'm gay and I don't want to be with you anymore. And then enter this wonderful fire chief who's tall and blonde, and he's given all of the John Wayne in a modern context, and he's overwhelmingly in love with her, and he falls right into place. And everyone was like, oh, it's such a brilliant dynamic. And all I keep saying is, I actually love the show. I love the content, but could you have saved her husband? Could you have left an actual black family intact?
Wilmer Leon (36:28):
And why do you have to be gay? But this interracial, the introduction and the acceptance of the interracial then brought us into the LB two dynamic.
Dr Shantella Sherman (36:48):
You get to the first episode, this happens in the first episode, Angela Bass and this, and I can't, Athena and her husband. This is episode one, Athena. So if you're going to watch this, you're going to grow into this, and you're going to love the characters so much, it breaks that eugenic mainframe open. And I can understand why you have these old traditionalists who are literally watching television saying, it's garbage. It's the left. It's these people that don't, you're feeding us this garbage. They're going deep. But you're right, everything becomes, you have a lesbian couple there who's adopting biracial kids from a white drug addict. They threw in everything except the eugenic asylum. They put it all right there and then made each and every last one of them heroes. So every week you, yay. And they then the fight. So now it becomes normalized, not that it wasn't already happening around you in the first place. So is life imitating art? Is art imitating life? Who's fueling what? And so my thing is, so long as you can find a way of making sure that all sides are represented positively, you may be okay, but that's not necessarily what's been happening. So back to your original question with this, you can go back as far Sidney porter and the blackboard
Wilmer Leon (38:13):
Junk. Oh, I would say that who was coming to dinner to
Dr Shantella Sherman (38:17):
Be a waste?
(38:21)
Well, in the heat of the night. So again, I think that he was the original testing ground. All of the isms in our society went through City 48 because he was beautiful and dark and upstanding, and they put him in a good looking suit. And he went in and he did the work. So you can do in the heat of the night when you're talking about whiteness and you have a black man standing in a room where there's a white girl having sex on the top of graveyards in the cemetery with indiscriminate men. And the fight is, why did you let my little sister say that? She's basically a whor* in the presence of that black man. How dare you? We all know she's not right, but you made her say it in the front of him. You can't do that. So we're going to skip all of these other reasons why her whiteness is in question. And now the fault is on the white police chief for allowing a black man to understand she ain't really white. All of these are built into that Hollywood mainframe, and when you pull 'em apart, you kind of go, wow.
Wilmer Leon (39:31):
It's interesting that you, well, two things. One, blackboard jungle wasn't that set in London?
Dr Shantella Sherman (39:37):
No, no, no. That was the other one to start with. Love.
Wilmer Leon (39:41):
Oh, to start with love. Okay. Right.
Dr Shantella Sherman (39:44):
I'm sorry. Go ahead.
Wilmer Leon (39:45):
Well, Sidney Poitier, not African-American. Does the fact that particularly at that time is one of the reasons or one of the factors that enabled him to have those roles was because he was an African-American. Because we know at that time that foreign blacks were given much more latitude than African-Americans. That's why, for example, there were many African-American musicians that changed their names to foreign sounding names. I can't remember the brother, but there was one musician that used to wear this turban. The brother was from Cleveland, I think, and he used to wear a turban so that the promoters of the shows would think he wasn't from here, and then he would have more latitude. But you're saying that had nothing to do with Sidney Poitier.
Dr Shantella Sherman (40:55):
I think with him, he may have been slightly different. One, visually he fit the optics. And again, I think that you had a whole series of directors and producers at this point that were really trying to push the envelope. So I think originally in the first book, I deal with the fact that you have Sidney Poitier doing three different films that are dealing with discogenic children, the bad children, the teenager thing. So you get the blackboard jungle first, and then 10 years later you get to serve with love where he's in England dealing with British kids. And the first one, he is one of the students like Gordon General, he is one of the throwaways and they're calling them waste. Now, the concept of human waste, that's eugenic. There's certain people that should not be born. There's certain people who are burdened on society, and what you do is you put them in a garbage can and you have the school system sit on the lid all day so that people, you're babysitting, but you're not to teach them anything because they don't have the capacity to learn.
(41:53)
The second one, you get British students, but it's Sidney Poitier teaching young white girls that you don't do the things that they were doing in the film. He's teaching manhood to British white kids. So once again, you're like, but it's him. And then the third film is a piece of the action where you have him back in America in an inner city, and you'll see the difference in how the children are viewed and what happens when you put Sidney Poitier and Bill Cosby in front of these discogenic black kids in the middle of Chicago. How do you place them at that point? And so all of these things optically, what are you saying? Where are you trying to go with this? And so what are you saying about these kids? Are they still throwaways? And as they talk
Wilmer Leon (42:44):
About the objects, I want to be sure if you could spend just a couple minutes on, because I think a lot of times folks will look at these films and they don't realize what they're looking at. They don't understand the optics.
Dr Shantella Sherman (43:01):
Anytime you find a particularly dark-skinned man, see the darker person is the closer they are to their primitive ancestry. So anytime you get a beautifully dark black man and you put him in front of a screen, what the average person is looking for in this country is someone who's scratching their head and Yael Boston and scared and running, and whose eyes get big Manan Morton and someone who has the capacity of a child, he will have to be saved by whoever is the white hero because he doesn't have the capacity to think, to learn to do anything, but still scream and run. But you put Sidney Poitier in there, again, being beautifully black and eloquent and having integrity. Notice in each one of these films, Sidney Poitier is coming in unquote whiter than the white person that's in the film. He's coming in, they're more educated than the white people in the film.
(44:08)
He's coming in as a sex object in many of the instances that you start to see. And that was not just taboo. It was literally turning the eugenic theories upside down. It literally cut out the bias. It slid it. And so it made you have to think, am I judging the elevator operator because he's doing something else? He actually has a brain. Am I conscripting people to places where they actually have a capacity beyond what it is that I'm seeing? If he's this dark and he's this brilliant, he has this type of mind and he has this type of integrity, and he has a wife and children back, and he's making money and all of these other things. And he attended college understanding everything that we're seeing in television and film was going against the reality of what was in front of people. That's the other thing.
(45:07)
It's fantasy. It was fantasy. So all of a sudden, if folks don't have the capacity to know the difference between what is real and what is imagined through Hollywood, and all of a sudden I start giving you beautiful dark men who are brilliant and bright, I start giving you black women who have integrity and who are business women and who are matriarchs of their household and don't curse and beat their kids. And I'm walking around with the on welfare and this, this, and this, and all of a sudden you start to look at the people around you and realize you've been in fantasy land for a long time. The people around you really are wonderful and brilliant and American and all of these other great things.
Wilmer Leon (45:50):
Guess who's coming to dinner 1967. So this is a year before Dr. King is assassinated. Sidney Poitier. Talk about that dynamic in, and I think Spencer Tracy plays the father of the woman, the white woman that Sidney Poitier falls in love with.
Dr Shantella Sherman (46:12):
Well, and the whole thing, women becomes hokey after a while because it's almost as if they're preaching to you. Spencer Tracy is like, and as we go through the annals of history and just like, right. I love the fact though, in this film that you have the older black characters. You have the maid saying, you know, ain't got no business up in here with this girl coming into a house like this. Years ago, it wasn't even that you would've gone into the back door. You'd have been swinging from a tree. You ought to know better. And because you can't separate that,
Wilmer Leon (46:45):
You have to know your place.
Dr Shantella Sherman (46:47):
And I really did not like the fact that you had his parents, Sidney Poitier's parents are trying to warn him off like, listen, I didn't like that. Because it's like, in reality, those warnings are real today. Oh, absolutely. Hey, you watch where you step, right? Again, you don't do what they do
Wilmer Leon (47:06):
Well, so take us with that, because I wanted to try and show some type of lineage here. So where are we with this today? Because a lot of people would think that eugenics and how it manifests itself, that was then, we're not really seeing that. Now. You touched on it with 9 1 1 and all, but give us some examples of, because you spend an awful lot of time researching in terms of what we're seeing today. How is it manifesting itself today
Dr Shantella Sherman (47:43):
At the pendulum, wil, we quite frankly, you can swing too far in one direction and then it flips over. The reality is that many of the eugenic theories that we started with, we still have, we call them by different names. We don't say that a person is an idiot buil all of that anymore. What we say is their sub normal. We say that they need an emotional assistance program within the school. We say that we don't want to segregate them out, but we're going to find a way of pulling these things together. So even I
Wilmer Leon (48:18):
Think it's called a EP and alternative educational plan.
Dr Shantella Sherman (48:21):
Absolutely. But you keep everyone in the same space. And even the rubric is not really, it's still a eugenic rubric. Do you have both parents in your house? What is the income of the household? It's all of these other things that go back to what we call the three Ds. Delinquent dependent. What's the other one? Delinquent dependent. I always get to that last one.
Wilmer Leon (48:48):
It'll come to you.
Dr Shantella Sherman (48:50):
Yeah. All right. But it's the three Ds that most school systems, most medical systems use that determine how the child will fare in the school. But they start using this rubric when the three or four, and this is the reason why you have three year olds being suspended and expelled from school. They don't listen. They're aggressive. They're throwing tantrums. That's what three year olds do. But now there's a pathology that's attached to it. And so when you look at, yes, if I look at things like the cloning, because we moved into transhumanism and people go, oh, this AI and all of this other stuff, these are just fancy terms so that you don't understand that that original theory, survival of the fittest and white gene power and all of this, covid showed you something. So you're getting television shows where you're talking about cloning people, you're talking about orphan black, you're talking about AI integrated into things. You're talking about, we need to build better humans externally, because internally, white women are not having babies, and when they do, they're having non white men. Okay, the
Wilmer Leon (50:02):
Browning of America,
Dr Shantella Sherman (50:03):
Right? The browning of the world, right? Say there's a reason why they're calling London Stan now, because everybody, these aren't immigrants coming in. These are births in the nation. And so all of a sudden the culture of the nation is beginning to shift. So what we want to do is start having the people who would normally clean the streets or do other things. We have machines that do this now. And so what you're doing is creating a poverty class where folks won't be able to do anything except what you want them to do. And so we are getting back, you can't put 'em in asylums, but you can't put 'em in ghettos. You can't put'em in counsel housing. And so you start to understand that the television is starting to help you do this. You're getting different films about when we create better people that can assist us with being more human, you have more time to be human and go to yoga and do this other stuff. If someone else is doing the thinking for you. That becomes problematic in a number of ways. But what it does supposedly is secure your cells, your good cells, that fitness, because you're now being outnumbered.
Wilmer Leon (51:19):
I'm not even sure how to frame this question, but in listening to what you've just said, it ties to a conversation I was having yesterday in that we seem to be moving away from the collective to the individual with the iPhone and the iPad. It is a whole lot more about me as the individual and what satisfies me as the individual. I remember seeing these dance parties where kids will go with their iPods, listen to music in their own ears, in a group of people. Everybody's listening to different music. Everybody's dancing the same rhythm. Everybody's dancing to different rhythms because they're listening to different things. And this is supposed to be a party. I don't even know if that ties it, but that just came into my
Dr Shantella Sherman (52:21):
Head. No, but it does, because again, when I'm speaking of the term outnumbered, when we talk about transhumanism, the belief is that society, the world is going to basically at this point, because the good, the fit have been outnumbered by the unfit. Those who have the least ability and capacity to raise children are having the most children. Years ago, you would sterilize these folks, you would strike 'em as an idiot, em basil, you put 'em in an asylum or at the public health center for a couple days, you would sterilize them, do full hysterectomies or surgeries for the men, and then you let 'em back out on the street and say, okay, you can do all the damage you can do in your lifetime, which won't be long based upon your behavior, but you will not reproduce this foolishness into another generation. We're going to stop this. They're still doing this in prisons, by the way, today. Alright, so that's first and foremost. But what starts to happen is it's not that you want to be individual in and of yourself, you also want to be a celebrity. So everywhere you go
Wilmer Leon (53:26):
Likes taking
Dr Shantella Sherman (53:27):
Pictures of yourself,
Wilmer Leon (53:29):
I have to be liked.
Dr Shantella Sherman (53:30):
And then you can't function when enough people don't like it. But I've seen people sitting at a table and everyone's taking pictures of the food they're eating, the food they're drinking, they may look over at each other a little bit, but you all are family and you came together, but you're not even having conversations. So you're in a bubble by yourself and your own self. It's all
Wilmer Leon (53:50):
About this,
Dr Shantella Sherman (53:51):
Right? You're in a bubble by your own self and you can't relate. The mainframe is also speeding up so that I'm feeding you so much information at one time that you can't focus. And since you can't focus, it means it's doing something internally to you as well. At some point, Wilma, we may talk about the Rosetta Effect. Alright, go
Wilmer Leon (54:13):
Ahead.
Dr Shantella Sherman (54:16):
And this is one of my champion causes because it's about size and it's about weight and it's about happiness. Back in the 1950s, sixties, the country was trying to figure out where the healthiest spaces in America were, and they found that it was a little community upstate New York called Rosetta. And when they got there, they were like, this doesn't make sense. It was mostly a Italian spot, and everyone over there was just gargantuan. These are some big people.
Wilmer Leon (54:42):
This sounds like a Twilight Zone episode. No,
Dr Shantella Sherman (54:44):
No, no. And I don't mean I shouldn't say it like that, but it was the men had bellies out in front of them. The women were B, and people were short and styled. Some of 'em were tall, but based upon the eugenic theories, these should be the most unhealthy people with hypertension, diabetes, heart conditions, just heart attacks waiting around the corner. Their BMIs were just ridiculous. They got there, they started testing them, and they realized, yeah, they just eating crap. They eating prosciutto and ham and cheese and melon walking down the street. One guy says, I want to die with a meatball in my mouth. And they did that right? And they just, Kiki can and laughing and drinking a lot of wine. What they concluded in the study was that the people felt safe, they felt loved, they felt nurtured. They felt respected. The old people lived into their nineties and hundreds because they had people looking out for them.
(55:42)
The children felt free to walk around in their neighborhoods and they had other people looking after them. And the middle aged, the birthing folks realized we have a community that will look after our children to keep them safe. We used to have that in the south, even under the duress of the lynching tree and other things. And that's why the lifespan was as long as it was, even though we were eating chitlins and hog malls and whatever else, it wasn't until the duress of society comes in and starts telling you, you're too this. You're too that. You're not enough of this. This is what causes this. This is how you get to that. You're not enough. They're giving you too much of this. And that is what we are dealing with. Now, within three years of the study coming out, we came in, America came in and told them, you don't want to live up underneath your grandparents all your lives. Sell the house and put them in a home. Send the kids to daycare. They'll get behind in school. They started feeding information to them about being more American. As soon as they became more American, guess what? They
Wilmer Leon (56:44):
Started dying faster.
Dr Shantella Sherman (56:46):
Hypertension showed up. And so the eugenic mainframe right now with transhumanism is going back to this and basically saying, you need yoga and water and to rest and music therapy and chelation and all of this. And the truth of the matter is, let the robot do the heavy lifting and you just live. Let the machine carry the baby.
Wilmer Leon (57:10):
Let me give you what I think is somewhat of a parallel here. The first time I went to Iran, I'm sitting in the lobby of my hotel. When we weren't in meetings and lectures and whatnot, we would sit in the lobby of the hotel and drink coffee and interact. I saw all these women with surgical tape on their faces, Muslim women with surgical tape, and it was just odd. So after about the second or third day, I turned to my interpreter, I said, Ali, why am I seeing all of these women with all this surgical tape on their faces? And he tells me that Tehran is the nose job center of the Middle East. And that fairly wealthy Muslim women come to Tehran to get their eyes done and get their noses done. And I said, Ali, that's insane. These women are beautiful. And he says, yeah, but they're reading Western glamor magazines and they want to look like women from the west.
(58:41)
So I'm in this interview, I'm on this television show on press tv, and the host asks me my thoughts about, I was there the first time I was there for 10 days, and he asked me my thoughts and I says, well, let me tell you something. I says, you guys, you don't have to worry about General Schwartzkoff. You got to worry about Colonel Sanders. And he says, excuse me? I said, based on what I see your adopting of the Western aesthetic is for your women. When that three piece in a biscuit hits, you guys are done. Hypertension, obesity, diabetes. I said, once you get a taste of those additives in American food and that salt hits you, I said, America will take you over in a minute.
Dr Shantella Sherman (59:45):
It's a wrap. It's literally a wrap. I mean, when we have folks right now, if you go the next time interview are out in the streets, go into the nearest target of Walmart, go down the aisle, not for cosmetics, but for things like deodorant and lotion, they're now putting additives in that specifically for melanated skin. And the goal is to bleach your underarm. Pitts. The goal is to lighten your skin as you're putting on your lotion. So it's not listed as a skin bleacher, but the combination and compounds that you would actually lighten your skin with are now in soaps, deodorant, lotions, anything that you can think of. And it's for every part of your body. Understand what I'm saying? And so I'm thinking, who really needs this?
Wilmer Leon (01:00:42):
Is that where this whole, because I've noticed these new commercials with the total body deodorant. Is that where that's coming from?
Dr Shantella Sherman (01:00:50):
That's also a part of it. Yes. Come on, come had baby soda since you've had life. So come on. Say that again.
Wilmer Leon (01:00:58):
You've had
Dr Shantella Sherman (01:00:58):
What? Baking soda. Oh,
Wilmer Leon (01:01:00):
Right.
Dr Shantella Sherman (01:01:00):
Everybody said if you were worried about sweat, I mean, come on, sweat and odor. We know how to deal with this. Again, country folks, you've been Virginian and lower. You got it. So the fact that you're now creating through Suave and Dove and shame motion, every brand now has something that, and they call it melanated. They're letting you know this is for people who are brown, who don't want to be brown anymore. This is for folks who don't want to be to appear unfit. They're now girdles for your feet. They're now, you want a smaller size foot. We got some tape and stuff that we can wrap your feet in so that you get a smaller size shoe. It's bizarro, but fit over unfit.
Wilmer Leon (01:01:51):
The Acumen Group is we could talk, well, you and I, we go through this for hours. The Acumen Group, you're holding your first annual eugenics conference in the United Kingdom in October. Talk about that. Give us a little bit of that, please.
Dr Shantella Sherman (01:02:07):
Well, we're still pulling all the logistics together at this point when we're, but I'm grateful to God that we're celebrating our 10th anniversary as of this year. 2024 is also for us, the 100 year anniversary of a lot of the eugenic legislation that came about in 1924. And it's still occupying spaces in the parameters of our policymaking today. So we are partnering with a number of universities in,
Wilmer Leon (01:02:35):
Well, wait a minute, A minute, just So in 24, you had the Eugenic Sterilization Act, you had the Racial Integrity Act, and you had And Immigration Go ahead.
Dr Shantella Sherman (01:02:45):
And the Immigration Act.
Wilmer Leon (01:02:47):
Okay,
Dr Shantella Sherman (01:02:47):
So those three and two of the three came out of Virginia right up here where we are. So one just basically limited the number of immigrants that can come into the country. The second one said that anyone within a state that's considered to be socially inept and or mentally inept through those IQ tests and measurements can be sterilized for the better of the country. And then the third, the Race Purity, race Integrity Act basically said, once again, there are only two races. We aren't going to do Mongolo and Caucasoid and all of that. There are only two races, white and non-white. So even that praxis understanding that today when someone says black people are 20 times more likely to have X, Y, and Z, they aren't necessarily talking about black this way. They're talking about non-white. And so you really have to get to a point where you learn how to read these studies if you're going to repeat the information in them.
(01:03:44)
Alright, so the goal, the universities, the goal is to get all of these wonderful students from around the globe into one space, along with working scholars and the public to sit down and talk about the tentacles of eugenics and how it's become a sprinkler system. And it's still very much alive. It's still very healthy, it's robust, and it's right in front of us, but we don't necessarily recognize it. So we want to give a platform to scholars, to students, and to the public, the general public to come in, learn a little bit, share information, and go away with workable tools to combat this when and where we see it.
Wilmer Leon (01:04:23):
And for those who want to get more information, where do they go
Dr Shantella Sherman (01:04:28):
To the website? www.theacumengroup.org. You can visit us on all of the social medias, either as Dr. Chantel or as the Acumen Group.
Wilmer Leon (01:04:40):
An Acumen is A-C-U-M-N-E-N?
Dr Shantella Sherman (01:04:45):
Yes.
Wilmer Leon (01:04:46):
E-N-H-C-U-M. Hey, don't say I'm feeble-minded, please. I just can't spell. Don't do it. I went to Catholic school so I can do math.
Dr Shantella Sherman (01:04:57):
Don't do it.
Wilmer Leon (01:04:59):
Oh wow. Doctor Cantella Sherman, as always, you bring it. You brought it as you always do. Dr. Chantel Sherman, I have to thank you so much for joining me today.
Dr Shantella Sherman (01:05:12):
Thank you. Always a pleasure. Anytime
Wilmer Leon (01:05:15):
Folks. Thank you all. So much for listening to the Connecting the Dots podcast with me, Dr. Wilmer Leon. Stay tuned for new episodes every week. Also, please follow and subscribe, review, share the show. You can follow us on social media. You can find all the links below in the show description. Please go to that Patreon link and make a contribution so all the assistance that you can provide will be greatly, greatly appreciated. If you have any questions or you would like to suggest show topics, please make those suggestions as you communicate with us through the links below with your comments to the show. Remember folks, this is where the analysis of politics, culture, and history converge talk without analysis is just chatter and we don't chatter on connecting the dots. See you allall next time. Until then, I'm Dr. Woman Leon. Have a great one. Peace. I'm out
Announcer (01:06:22):
Connecting the dots with Dr. Wilmer Leon, where the analysis of politics, culture, and history converge.
