Pioneer Fund: The Legacy of the Eugenics Movement in Modern America
White folks, we need to have serious conversations on the spread of white supremacy. And yes, the Klan is rapidly becoming more active, but I want to expand the idea of what white supremacists might look like to you.
We, especially if you are also a white southerners, might imagine the likes of our fathers asking and agreeing with the rhetoric of ‘playing the race card,’ of southern heritage, on the perceived injustice that is the taboo of white pride. We might imagine the Klansman as the older white man, clutching the confederate flag, desperately wanting a return to ‘white Christian America.’ We might imagine someone who’s done time, allied with Aryan Nations, and threatening. We might imagine caricatures of neo-nazi punks, inspired by what American History X made so vivid.
But, as with all truths in life, these images are oversimplifications. We compartmentalize the ugly threads of reality into something that is not us: the denouncement of white nationalism, the open calls to protest Klan rallies, the horror we feel when thinking about the holocaust, the laughter at rural America’s stance that the “war of northern aggression was about states’ rights, not slavery.” We emphasize that these cases are outliers, the far end of a bell curve in a sea of good, loving people. But white supremacy doesn’t work that way. White supremacy is far more insidious than that. And our failing to recognize this is partially why we’re in the situation we’re in.
In 1937, a nonprofit was founded by those inspired by the eugenics movement, the pseudoscience of Nazi Germany, and the opposition to desegregation. This nonprofit, titled The Pioneer Fund, was created to financially support projects that would be otherwise deemed as “too controversial” for academia. Despite the overt racial tones, an original director of this fund was John Marshall Harlan II, a future Supreme Court justice appointed by Dwight Eisenhower, and would later be a dissenting voice on Miranda v. Arizona. This board of directors would go on to become integral counsel to expand the forced sterilization programs in North Carolina.
The Pioneer Fund continued to exist, seeding projects ranging from studying so-called racial evolution to the impact of affirmative action to anti-Semitic anthropological studies, however backlash in 1994 from the broader community forced the Pioneer Fund to withdraw from public view. It changed course, giving a grant to the New Century Foundation, an organization created to produce publications on racial homogeneity, and to create some of the most widely shared and flawed statistics on black-on-white crime and the genetic superiority of white intelligence. Their conferences have had the likes of David Duke on question and answer panels, who I remind you just ran for US Senate in Louisiana.
But the Pioneer Fund isn’t limited to academia. Funding nearly $1.3 million dollars to the Federation for American Immigration Reform between 1985 and 1994, it worked towards a goal to reduce immigration into the United States and to create stricter border control. The Federation for American Immigration Reform still exists, testifying multiple times before congressional committees on immigration bills and providing counsel through the legal arm of the Federation, Immigration Reform Law Institute. This institute enlists current Kansas Secretary of State and one of President-elect Trump’s possible US Attorney General nominees, Kris Kobach, as their national expert on immigration reform. And it is because of Kris Kobach’s work under the Federation that bills such as Arizona’s SB1070 exist, which is one of the broadest and strictest immigration reform bills in American history, and one that allowed racial profiling for border control. This bill would later be challenged in the Supreme Court during Arizona v. the United States.
The work of the Pioneer Fund continued, providing multiple grants to various white separatist causes, including one to the National Policy Institute. NPI has risen to be one of the largest white supremacist think tanks in recent years, created with the intention of destroying the Republican party and letting it be reborn into a party that would “support the interests of white people.” Their reports specifically focus on the perceived “war on white America,” with a special focus on the impact of Brown v. Board of Education and the failures of desegregation. Their publications have become the basis for the newly coined “alt right.” And, upon the appointment of Steve Bannon as chief strategist, NPI’s acting director Richard Spencer tweeted that “strategist is the best possible position for Steve Bannon in the Trump White House. Bannon will answer directly to Trump and focus on the big picture, not get lost in the weeds.”
This is partially how we’ve gotten to where we are now. And this is just the workings of a single fund among many in the white supremacist movement. There are a great many more insidious organizations, all hiding beneath the banner of paleoconservatism or ultra-conservatism. We cannot let our compartmentalizing of hate blind us from the workings of the well-oiled machine that is the “suit-and-tie klan.” If we are to fight white supremacy in all its forms, we must learn to recognize it when the hoods are off, when it’s in the shadows of the backroom conversations, when it’s in the courtroom, when it’s in our universities, when it’s writing legislation, when it’s running for Senate, and most heinously, when it’s sitting next to the President.
