Spilling the Truth About Eugenics
On a hidden cobblestone street near NYU’s downtown campus, the university’s Asian Pacific American Institute has put together an exhibit entitled, “Haunted Files: The Eugenics Record Office” where curators are hoping to dispel any myths about the eugenics movement. Most commonly, that the program was solely practiced by ideologist criminals like Adolf Hitler with his extermination of Jews in the Holocaust.
For those unfamiliar with the term eugenics, the Merriam Webster dictionary defines the word as “the science of improving the human race by controlling which people become parents.” In Cold Spring Harbor, NY at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, this term was used as a guideline for conducting research about family histories, asylum records, and fieldworker testimonies. The NYU exhibit uses the Cold Spring Lab’s resources and even some authentic furniture to recreate, not only the office, but also the eerie feeling of this early 20th century phenomenon.
According to the exhibit’s associate curator, Mark Tseng Putterman, “at the time [the Cold Spring Laboratory] was understood to be a respected scientific institution, but today we understand that they were much tainted by their biases…nonetheless influential in shaping ideas of racial, cultural, and intellectual hierarchies.”
In the fairly small space at the institute, visitors can flip through the almost 4,000 sheets of charts and photos or examine a wall with a full size human skeletal figure surrounded by famous historical facts and quotes by members of the movement. Adjacent to this wall, a slew of pop culture memorabilia like The Great Gatsby, lay where people can see just influential the movement really was.
The exhibit is on view Monday-Friday, 11am-5pm, until March 13, 2015.
