Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
In Search of Purity: Popular Eugenics & Racial Uplift Among New Negroes 1915-1935

In Search of Purity: Popular Eugenics & Racial Uplift Among New Negroes 1915-1935

Sherman, Shantella Yolanda

Paperback

Black American History

ISBN10: 1537422979
ISBN13: 9781537422978
Publisher: Createspace
Published: Aug 31 2016
Pages: 258
Weight: 0.84
Height: 0.58 Width: 5.98 Depth: 9.02
Language: English
In Search of Purity: Eugenics and Racial Uplift among New Negroes, 1915-1935 is a dissertation that examines the reinterpretation of eugenic theories by Black scholars, who helped integrate the science into a social movement for racial uplift. Areas of analyses include: The Talented Tenth, links between ideas about social degeneracy and physical hygiene, eugenics courses and professors at Howard University, hereditarian, and colorism. Guiding principles of African American-led eugenic theory are examined alongside the fading imagery of the Old Negro that consisted of stereotypes scattered throughout plantation fiction, Blackface minstrelsy, vaudeville, and Darwinism. Specifically, terms like germ plasm (negative characteristics transmitted through genes through continual selection, unchanged, from one generation to the next), and racial hygiene (a public health platform designed to eliminate, among other ailments, venereal disease and promote healthy reproduction within a race) are analyzed in their relation to popular discourses about Black cleanliness that included moral fitness and intellectual ineptness. Ideologies that intrinsically tied Blackness to social degeneracy and criminality, as well as terms like full-blood and mulatto, are also examined. Links between standards of beauty, desirability, and marriage-worthiness in relation to those ideas are also critiqued. Of particular interest is the impact of racial hygiene discourses on African-American advertising through the promotion of products to lighten skin and straighten hair in order to eliminate noticeable signs of racial inferiority.

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