Animist, Anarchist, Ancestral, Anti-Black, Anti-Indigenous, Ableist Eugenics
Some A’s of Our Eugenic Past and Present / by kg
CW: mentions of white supremacy, insurrection, eugenics, ableism, sterilization, co-optation and infiltration of movements
In the past year since our white anti-racist organizing hub blew up post alt-right infiltration+co-optation (more on that in our last article), we have been resourcing, resting, and reflecting. We are clear that our next wave of white anti-racist organizing must be centered around the fact that alt-right organizing in this time is much bigger than any one infiltrator or any one “animist” eugenic group. Many of us must become more committed students, willing to study white supremacy’s global legacy. We must become discerning around who we organize with and who we are “following” on social media. For a lot of white folks, we will have to reckon with how watered-down somatics and spirituality has led to us having very little stamina to complete the intellectual work that is still essential to ensuring we don’t end up falling through alt-right trap doors.
Our time of recent reflection included attending a convening of Dismantling Eugenics during the centennial of eugenics. This, coupled with our practice and study within Disability Justice communities, has been life altering — especially during the mass disabling event we are all presently living. These frameworks, histories, and relationships helped us to emotionally survive a situation in which, after allowing (many Disabled) survivor stories to come forward, we as Disabled organizers were left to clean up the mess that presently-abled-bodied or abled-passing organizers chose to leave behind (or at worst, when those same folks continue(d) to promote the rightwing predators and their curriculum within our movements — More on that later…).
We have become convinced, as Black+Indigenous/Disabled organizers have said before us, that talking about white supremacy without talking about ableism and eugenics will not work to undo racism and its co-mingling oppressions (cite: Talila A. Lewis).
We’ll talk more later about what eugenics is and where it came from, but for a simple working definition: Eugenics is the pseudo-scientific, racist, classist, ableist theory and practice of “improving” the human race. As the eugenics emblem above demonstrates, eugenics prides itself on its multi-disciplinary root system. “Like a tree, eugenics draws its materials from many sources and organizes them into an harmonious entity.” This emblem served as a part of a certificate awarded to various exhibits at the Second International Congress of Eugenics, held one-hundred years ago in 1921 at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
Eugenics has lived, survived, and thrived not just in right-leaning movements, but also eugenics consistently and pervasively breeds among the various “disciplines” within our leftist organizing: in anarchist communities, feminist movements, “animist”/ancestral healing practices, even in our anti-racism. Just because you’re an anarchist, doesn’t mean you’re not steeped in eugenics. You can wear a pussyhat, run a “feminist”, “anti-capitalist” online business, and still spew racism and ableism. If your “anti-racist” ancestral healing practice for white folks skips over people’s colonial ancestors to their “well” (an inherently ableist term) ancestors, you’re practicing eugenics too.
Eugenics Hiding Within Leftist “Ancestral Healing”
I was on a movement podcast episode around 2017 entitled “Ancestral Healing for White Folks” that now I mostly wish I had never done. My regrets, for real. For some context, this white-spear-headed podcast was later called out by several Black organizers and organizations for white supremacy, ableism, and a pervasive lack of accountability (you can find two of those open letters here and here).
On the podcast episode I spoke alongside another white anti-racist. At the time the concept of “ancestral healing” was really new to most of us on Turtle Island. This was also around the time when discussions of “epigenetics” and historical trauma were starting to sweep our conversations, sometimes/often in really eugenic ways. I thought I was on the same page with the folks on the podcast, but as we spoke I began to sense into the difference in what I was practicing (rooted in what I had learned from anti-racist movement elders) and what many white anti-racists were beginning to practice based upon the training they had received at Ancestral Medicine (AM) via Daniel Foor and/or via other private practices that the current + former students of Foor were (and still are) operating. Again for context, here’s an open letter regarding AM.
There was a dismissal of what I was practicing and asking white folks to do on the episode— the hard work of learning the ways our racist ancestors colonized Turtle Island in order to promote structural changes, connecting to the stories of white movement ancestors — and how this (former) colleague primarily guided white people to imaginally connect to unknown “well” ancestors of the past. It felt really off, disturbingly bypassy.
When the pandemic hit, a lot was revealed about ableism. It’s not just the anti-vaxxer, QAnon folks who determined that their fun was more important than the lives of vulnerable elders and people with disabilites. The fractures within our leftist communities run deep as we realize the harsh truth that many of the folks we thought we had solidarity with won’t stay-the-fuck-home from that rave or that retreat or that wedding or that bar night in order to protect the vulnerable folks they call comrades. We’ve been hearing all of the eugenic justifications to open back up; They’re exhausting and unscientific, as eugenics always is.
While this eugenic behavior is not exclusive to white folks, there’s something really horrific that has been happening in white anti-racist, “ancestral healing” circles. I began to watch white person after white person in my life who was connected to “ancestral healing” begin to “ask the ancestors” for answers and guidance on how to move during pandemic, in the midst of uprisings and call outs. The supposed “well ancestors” these white folks had been taught to connect to gave them really interesting (and racist/eugenic) answers:
- move to Hawaii because you probably have a distant Black ancestor from an island off the coast of Portugal who wants you to / even though Indigenous Hawaiians are asking white folks to stop moving or traveling there and colonially spreading COVID like our/their actual ancestors did…
- stop talking about racism publicly and simplify your external work to being “feminist”, “anti-capitalist”, “animist”, and based in “pleasure activism”/ “eroticism” + “plant medicine” / that way you can avoid being called out, you don’t have to name white supremacy too much and upset your white “followers”, AND you can still benefit financially from the optics of doing “justice” work during uprisings while white-washing the intellectual work of (primarily) Black, feminist and/or womanist organizers
- and ultimately for some, become a digital solider on WhatsApp to promote the eugenic, racist, anti-Semetic ideology of QAnon and Q-Adjacent communities, demonizing and abandoning the anti-racist organizing you were a part of because you now “know” through your “research” that the Queen is a Reptile, Trump is Saving the Children, Black Lives Matter is funded by George Soros, and the uprisings were all done by paid antifa actors.
So what is eugenics? Where did it come from? How do we know if we’re unintentionally practicing it or absorbing it from teachers/mentors?
The English Knight of Eugenics & The Foundations of U.S. Insurrection
“Galton coined the term eugenics in 1883… so often the stuff that we hear about eugenics starts and ends with the Nazis, the story of eugenics starts further back.” — Subhadra Das, at Dismantling Eugenics
“… what is termed in Greek, ‘eugenes’, namely, good in stock, hereditarily endowed with noble qualities. This, and the allied words, ‘eugeneia’, etc., are equally applicable to men, brutes, and plants. We greatly want a brief word to express the science of improving stock… The word eugenics would sufficiently express the idea. — Sir Francis Galton, 1883
In order to understand the ideologies and behaviors of Jan 6th’s insurrectionists, we need to understand the historical foundations of eugenics. In most cases, as Subhadra Das highlights, when we think of eugenics we think of German Nazis. In white anti-racist spaces, we often hear of white folks feeling ashamed about their German lineages/ancestors, and being more drawn to their “Celtic”, “Hellenistic”, or “Semetic” roots. There’s some general agreement among some white ancestral “healers” that perhaps the more “Nordic” lineages might hold supremacist ideologies, while others would be less problematic. What we often don’t know, is that eugenics is a global phenomena, and was first upheld and named by an English Knight — Sir Francis Galton.
Galton was the half cousin of Charles Darwin, and as we discussed in our last article (The Eugenic Ancestors of Ancestral Healing), Darwin’s evolutionary theory is a foundational component of eugenics. As the Eugenics Archive of Canada highlights:
“Darwin’s theory of evolution was crucial to the eugenics movement…In the late nineteenth century, claims were being made that the ‘higher’ classes of society — the wealthy and successful — were being outbred by the so-called unfit. Taken with Darwin’s theory of evolution, this idea created public alarm and a sense of desperation…
Eugenicists felt they were able to justify predjudiced and immoral actions under Darwin’s theories… The segregation, sterilization, and murder of various groups was justified by some as being done for the greater good of evolution…”
Galton was awarded for his public service in developing and coining eugenics. He also coined the phrase “nature vs. nurture” we all grew up learning and debating. Like many new age folks today, Galton believed himself to be a humanitarian and world traveler who looked to the “more than human world” for inspiration, stating: “a passion for travel seized me as if I had been a migratory bird”. All of this while he was actively forming the foundations of genocidal theory. Is it possible that some self-identified ‘progressive’ spiritualists today could be still engaging in genocidal, eugenic thought and practice without necessarily knowing it or seeing it as evil?
To accurately talk about modern political landscapes — particularly the topic of the Jan 6th U.S. insurrection — we have to talk about eugenics. As Professor Robert A. Pape and Director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats (CPOST) states:
“…these insurrectionists [were not] typically from deep-red counties. Some 52 percent are from blue counties that Biden comfortably won. But by far the most interesting characteristic common to the insurrectionists’ backgrounds has to do with changes in their local demographics: Counties with the most significant declines in the non-Hispanic White population are the most likely to produce insurrectionists who now face charges.
…Put another way, the people alleged by the authorities to have taken the law into their own hands on Jan 6 typically hail from places where non-White populations are growing the fastest.”
CPOST conducted two independent surveys which revealed a main driver of this insurrectionist movement is in fact a eugenic one: a fear of The Great Replacement. Pape exhorts us to take this very seriously: “To ignore this movement and its potential would be akin to Trump’s response to covid-19: We cannot presume it will blow over. The ingredients exist for future waves of political violence, from lone-wolf attacks to all-out assaults on democracy, surrounding the 2022 midterm elections.”
Galton’s eugenics laid the foundations for white folks to now globally fear being “replaced” by People of Color, which according to researchers is a main driver of incel, white supremacist, and insurrectionist behaviors. And again, in this “post-racial” world, racism now requires diversity to hide within; so, it’s not just white folks that are being looped into alt-right communities. We have to begin to more critically examine the ideologies, theories, and practices that are occurring within our blue-leaning, liberal, even leftist organizing. We cannot understand the insurrectionists and “animist”/ “anarchist” infiltrators of our movements without a history of eugenics, and how this informs their fear of how humanity is “evolving” or, as some are calling it, “mutating”.
“Animist” & “Pagan” Obsessions: Q-Shamans, Playing Indian, and Eugenics in Ancestral “Healing”
excerpts from The Red Nation Podcast episode Settlers Gone Wild: Capitol Hill Edition —
“… It’s literally so on brand. Like it couldn’t be more on brand…To me, what it tells me, is that they know their history, right? They know what it means to play Indian as a part of engaging in these white supremacist patriotic movements. Why are we confused about that?”
“This return to primitivity or primitivism, whether it’s an imagined Europe or an imagined America, is the quintessential move to settler innocence.”
This podcast episode is full of the history we need to understand the political moment we are in now. I highly recommend you listen to it in its entirety, especially if you are a white person looking to ground yourself in 2022. Without the history The Red Nation shares here, it would be easy for us to write off insurrectionists like Jake Angeli as fringe, undisciplined, or even the eugenic term: “crazy”. In fact though, his choices of Nordic tattoos, faux-Indigenous clothing, face paint, and horns are all intentional and demonstrate he knows his history more than many of us white leftists do.
Playing “Indian”, even if its playing European “Indian”, is grounded in eugenic white supremacy. This behavior of playing Indian aligns with the ideologies and goals of alt-right insurrectionists who desire (even if they won’t tell you outright) the global mass murder and/or domination+enslavement of anyone not deemed worthy by eugenics: BIPOC, the Disabled, Trans folks, Women, the Infertile, etc. There’s a reason Jake chose the same wardrobe for the insurrection as the “patriots” of the Boston Tea Party. They know their history.
Eugenics is hiding smack in the middle of many self-proclaimed anarchist, animist, ancestral healing IG accounts, patreons, podcasts, practice spaces, and workshops. (Yes, even the ones that publicly denounce racism and ableism). We must learn to discern eugenics when it is present, for the sake of our political and physical safety in this time. Co-optations of movements and organizations is real. This work is going to require rooting deeply into the history, a lot of which has already been excavated for us and (sneak peak!) is even waiting at our local libraries.
We leave you with some questions to support your discernment, particuarly for white folks trying to navigate “animist”, “anarchist”, “ancestral” communities that are often steeped in anti-Blackness, the appropriation of Indigeneity, and ableism. We ask these questions not because we have answers, or in any attempt to portray that we are perfect and have not fallen into eugenics ourselves. We ask these questions because we believe our white anti-racist communities need to wrestle with them, particularly as alt-right movements gain steam in 2022.
*For white folks benefitting from what we’ve outlined here, we encourage you to send some coins to the BIPOC organizers cited here who have been uplifting this history and dynamics.*
What is the lineage of your animist and/or ancestral healing practitioners? If some of these practitioners claim to be Indigenous, how do you know they actually are Indigenous? Could they possibly be “Pretendians” that abound in academia and beyond (cite: Jacqueline Keeler)?
Does your lineage of animist/ancestral healing exhort you to bypass your recent ancestors’ legacy to connect with “well” ancestors of the past? If so, how do you feel about this given the history we’ve shared here?
Does your lineage of animism/ancestral healing encourage you to dress or practice like an Indigenous group that you’re not actually a part of? If so, how do you feel about this given alt-right white supremacist groups also encourage their members to dress and practice this way?
Does your lineage of animism/ancestral healing focus primarily on the “more than human” world? If so, how is that supporting your collective anti-racist organizing with other humans or not?
Does your lineage of animism/ancestral healing help you to prioritize structural action to undo racism and eugenics? If so, how do you know?
Is ancestral healing redeemable as a method for undoing racism and other intersecting oppressions? If so, how? If not, why?
Stay tuned: In the next piece of writing, we will examine some history of the KKK and what it illuminates for white anti-racist organizing in 2022.
References and Credits
Anarchism and Eugenics: An Unlikely Convergence, 1890–1940 by Richard Cleminson from the University of Leeds
An Open Letter & A Call for True Healing and Justice by Whitney Spencer
Dismantling Eugenics: A Convening
In solidarity with Whitney Spencer’s “An Open Letter & A Call for True Healing and Justice” by Kindred Southern Healing Justice
Open Letter Regarding Daniel Foor & Ancestral Medicine
Opinion: What an analysis of 377 Americans arrested or charged in the Capitol insurrection tells us by Robert A. Pape at The Washington Post
Sir Francis Galton from the Eugenics Archives, Canada
The Boston Tea Party, Encyclopedia Brittanica
The Chicago Project on Security and Threats at the University of Chicago
The White Supremacist ‘Great Replacement Theory’ Has Deep Roots by Reece Jones at Teen Vogue
Settlers Gone Wild: Capitol Hill Edition by The Red Nation Podcast
Working Definition of Ableism by Talila A. Lewis
