Waste and Whiteness: Zora Neale Hurston and the Politics of Eugenics

African American Review, Winter, 2000 by Chuck Jackson

Eugenic field work relied heavily on the reading of the badly-gened ("cacogenic") body. "Expert" eugenicists were trained to map a narrative of degeneracy onto the white body whose health was impaired or failing, thereby establishing an imaginary equation between the disfigured body and the inbred body, the impoverished body and the licentious body, and so on. For eugenicists, economic and emotional disenfranchisement conflate, marking the body of the "weak" or "feebleminded" poor white as always already polluted, nonproductive, and genetically unfit. Eugenic narratives sharpen the focus on the ways in which anthropologists articulate a "science" of the white trash body.

In "The Family of Sam Sixty" (1916), eugenic researcher Mary Storer Kostir traces the criminal lineage of one rural Ohio "moron." (Kostir uses the pseudonym Sixty both to re-name her subject and reflect the subject's IQ.) After much labeling and observation, Kostir concludes that "we have striking evidence of the inheritance of low mentality. Feeble-minded parents have feeble-minded children" (207-08). Some of the "striking evidence" includes a description of Jim, Sam Sixty's brother, who "looks brutal and degenerate. His neck is as wide as his head. His right eye is deeper set than his left. His nose and mouth deviate to the right. He is said to be feeble-minded" (191). Sam Sixty's wife Pearl "comes of bad stock. She is said to be slovenly and untidy." Their first child, a daughter, was "trained in immorality by her [incestuous] relations with her father, and, by the example of her mother, she began a life of prostitution. Taken from this and placed in a good family, she soon became pregnant, and accused a married man in the neighborhood of being responsible for her condition. The man had always borne a good reputation" (193). Contemporary readers might balk at this eugenic family tree, with its reliance on the grotesquery of deeply set eyeballs and natural decrepitude; however, it is precisely from these particularities that eugenics maintained its ideological force.

Notice, once more, the attention given to the grotesque body in a description of two of Sam Sixty's paternal cousins: "The second boy was placed in a good home, but as he grew older, he became ugly to his benefactor, and finally left him.... The third boy has been placed with good people. He, too, is ugly and undependable. He is unquestionably feeble-minded" (197; emphasis added). Another (distant) relative "is subject to fits [epilepsy?] as are several of her relatives" (200). Accounts of inherited shiftlessness, violence, hysterical fits, deformities, and feeble-mindedness recur throughout this narrative, which Kostir chalks up to "brains incapable of growing up like those of ordinary people. With this handicap, it is impossible to instill into them self-control" (207). The solution?

If the community deals intelligently with such people... it will recognize the fundamental deficiency in intelligence and will provide permanent custody for such persons. In custody they will produce more and be much happier, and at the same time, will not be producing broods of feeble-minded dependents.... Preventive medicine must come to the aid of courts and schools in this work of saving the social waste.... genealogical charts [such] as these, with the mental facts and social data which accompany them, are arguments which convince the fair-minded that, some control by society of the increase of the human family is imperative.... society has the right to take measures to prevent some individuals from becoming parents, because society pays taxes. (207-09; bold emphasis added, italics Kostir's)