Race Relations
Mass deportations don’t keep out ‘bad genes’ − they use scientific racism to justify biased immigration policies
Shoumita Dasgupta, Boston University
Threats of mass deportations loom on the post-2024 election horizon. Some supporters claim these will protect the country from immigrants who bring “bad genes” into America. But this is a misguided use of the language of science to give a sheen of legitimacy to unscientific claims.
Politicians invoke genetics to confirm false stereotypes that immigrants are more violent than native-born citizens as a result of biological differences. This is despite the fact that immigrants living in the country with or without legal authorization have significantly lower crime and violent crime rates than U.S. citizens. Moreover, there is no strong genetic evidence to support a biological predisposition for committing violent acts.
As a geneticist and a child of immigrants, I study the intersection of biology and bias. I am also author of the book “Where Biology Ends and Bias Begins: Lessons on Belonging from Our DNA.” What is clear from my professional work is that this line of thinking – attempting to use science to explain human difference in ways that reinforce social hierarchies – isn’t new. It takes the playbooks of genetic essentialism and scientific racism and applies them to public policy.
The fallacy of genetic essentialism
Genetic essentialism is the concept that genes alone are the reason why someone develops a specific trait or behaves a certain way. For instance, a genetic essentialist would say that a person’s athleticism, intelligence, personality and a range of other traits are encoded entirely in their DNA. They ignore the influence that sports training, material resources and learned behaviors have on these traits.
When used to explain differences between populations, genetic essentialism discounts the role that structural biases – inequities deeply ingrained in how systems operate – play in individual differences. Structural biases create a playing field that advantages one group over another from the start.
For instance, studies seeking to identify a gene for violent behavior may use measurements that are themselves biased. If arrest or incarceration rates were used as evidence of violence, study findings would be affected by discriminatory practices in the policing and criminal justice systems that more harshly penalize people of color.
Studies trying to disentangle the relative effects of genetic and structural factors on specific traits also face similar biases. For example, mental health outcomes are influenced by the identity-related stress that racial or sex and gender minorities experience. Similarly, socioeconomic outcomes are affected by the effects of redlining and segregation on generational wealth.
Genetics of educational attainment
As another example of behavioral genetics, consider a 2018 study on the genetics of educational attainment – in other words, whether certain genes were associated with years of schooling completed. The researchers were careful to communicate their results as pertaining specifically to educational attainment. They highlighted that genetic scores explained only about 11% to 13% of the variance – meaning, 87% to 89% of differences in educational attainment were due to influences other than genetics.
However, some popular press coverage oversimplified their findings as identifying genes for intelligence, even though the scientists did not directly measure intelligence – nor is it possible to.
Educational attainment can reflect everything from generational wealth to racial biases in education. A student with access to tutors their parents paid for has fewer educational obstacles than a student who has to work after school to make ends meet. Likewise, school punishment practices that are biased against students from certain backgrounds can set them on a harmful trajectory known as the school-to-prison pipeline.
Genetic studies are not conducted in a vacuum, and social influences can confound analyses seeking to focus on biological effects. In fact, some scientists think of genes as potential controls to allow more careful study of the nongenetic factors accounting for the remaining 87% to 89% of differences in educational attainment.
Intentional misinterpretation of these observations on educational attainment have led some to conclude that Black students are simply not as intelligent as their white counterparts. They argue that these differences are genetically encoded and immutable. However, when the effects of wealth gaps and school segregation are accounted for, test score gaps substantially narrow. Importantly, educational attainment gaps actually invert, predicting that Black students complete more years of school than white students.
Slipping to scientific racism
This brings us to scientific racism: the way in which science is contorted to support preexisting views about the superiority of the white race over all others.
American physician Samuel Morton was one of the original forebears of scientific racism. He was interested in providing “evidence” to support his belief that Caucasians were the most intelligent of all races. To do this, he collected skulls and categorized them into five racial groupings he believed were derived from separate creation events. He measured skull volume as an indicator of intelligence.
When comparing the averages from each group, his results supported his original theory. However, if he had instead focused on the array of skull volumes in his collection, he would have seen substantial overlap in each of the groupings. That is, each group had a range of small to large skulls. Morton’s singular focus on proving his beliefs from the outset likely influenced his favored analytical approach. Nor is there a meaningful correlation between brain volume and intelligence.
Similar beliefs are at play when white supremacists manipulate data to create a scientific basis for their claims that white people are more intelligent than Black people. These tampered results appear in dark corners of the internet where they are shared in fringe journals, far-right social media memes and racist manifestos.
To be clear, there is no evidence that genetic differences related to intelligence or cognitive performance exist between racial groups. Instead, this is another argument growing out of replacement theory, the conspiracy theory that Jews and Western elites are deliberately replacing white populations with populations of color. Adherents believe that people of color are genetically inferior but are reproducing and immigrating at greater rates, and so threatening white power.
Human genetic variation
Scientists have systematically studied human genetic variation for decades, looking at differences in the DNA of people around the world. These studies definitively demonstrate that we are far more alike than different. The vast majority of common genetic variation is found across populations, and very few rare variants are specific to an individual group.
This may seem unexpected. Looking at the world around you, you’ll observe some differences between racially defined groups, such as skin tone and hair texture. However, there is no place in the world where you’ll be able to draw a line that cleanly separates people with dark skin tone from those with light skin tone. Skin color varies continuously across the globe, and a range of skin tones are present within any individual group.
Importantly, variation in one genetic trait is not predictive of other genetic traits. That is, you can’t extrapolate conclusions about traits such as disease predisposition from the genes that influence skin color. Even if the fallacy of genetic essentialism were true and cognitive ability was primarily a biological trait – which it is not – it would not be possible to connect an observed skin tone to predicted intelligence. https://www.youtube.com/embed/wK94PWbCmsk?wmode=transparent&start=0 President-elect Donald Trump pledged to use the military to carry out mass deportations.
Misappropriating genetics
While science does not support genetic essentialism or other underpinnings of replacement theory, this exact rationale has made its way into national immigration policy.
These policies grew directly out of the American eugenics movement, which sought to build a supposedly better human race through social engineering based on “race science.” Zoologist Charles Davenport created the Cold Spring Harbor Eugenics Record Office in 1910 to pursue his interests in evolution, breeding and human heredity. There, he and his colleagues collected records of American families, documenting their traits and ascribing genetic bases to them.
Harry Laughlin, a high school teacher Davenport recruited to serve as superintendent of the office, was later appointed as the expert eugenics agent for the U.S. congressional Committee on Immigration and Naturalization. He commissioned studies to document race-based trends in so-called biological traits such as intelligence, inventiveness and feeble-mindedness, erroneously concluding that observed patterns were due to genetic differences between populations. His findings were used to inform U.S. immigration quotas, which were set higher for populations deemed to have good genes and lower for those with undesirable traits.
These policies were codified in the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924. In signing the act, President Calvin Coolidge declared, “America must remain American,” paraphrasing a popular Ku Klux Klan slogan. This law severely restricted immigration from Asia and implemented strict quotas for immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. It also established elements of immigration that remain in 2025, including the visa system and the Border Patrol. With the passage of the Immigration Restriction Act, anti-Semitism and xenophobia became law of the land.
Coming full circle, genetic essentialism and racism continue to drive present-day rhetoric using “bad genes” to justify mass deportations of people deemed harmful to American society. Politicians and tech moguls are employing a combination of racism, willful misunderstanding of genetic science and political power to promote their own social agendas.
Politicians and hate groups have often weaponized genetics, leading to violent events carried out in the name of white supremacy. These include the 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right rally, the 2019 Christchurch shootings of Muslims at two mosques, and the 2022 Buffalo massacre of Black customers at a neighborhood grocery store.
A better understanding of science and history can empower scientists, policymakers and others to reject unscientific claims and protect vulnerable members of society targeted by racism.
Shoumita Dasgupta, Professor of Medicine, Assistant Dean of Diversity & Inclusion, Boston University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Vaccine mandates misinformation: 2 experts explain the true role of slavery and racism in the history of public health policy – and the growing threat ignorance poses today
Vaccine mandates misinformation: Florida’s vaccination rates decline as the state plans to eliminate mandates. Experts warn this could deepen health disparities, undermine public trust, and threaten community health, especially given the history of racism in vaccination practices.
Vaccine mandates misinformation:
Lauren MacIvor Thompson, Kennesaw State University and Stacie Kershner, Georgia State University
On Sept. 3, 2025, Florida announced its plans to be the first state to eliminate vaccine mandates for its citizens, including those for children to attend school.
Current Florida law and the state’s Department of Health require that children who attend day care or public school be immunized for polio, diphtheria, rubeola, rubella, pertussis and other communicable diseases. Dr. Joseph Ladapo, Florida’s surgeon general and a professor of medicine at the University of Florida, has stated that “every last one” of these decades-old vaccine requirements “is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery.”
As experts on the history of American medicine and vaccine law and policy, we took immediate note of Ladapo’s use of the word “slavery.”
There is certainly a complicated history of race and vaccines in the United States. But, in our view, invoking slavery as a way to justify the elimination of vaccines and vaccine mandates will accelerate mistrust and present a major threat to public health, especially given existing racial health disparities. It also erases Black Americans’ key work in centuries of American public health initiatives, including vaccination campaigns.
What’s clear: Vaccines and mandates save human lives
Evidence and data show that vaccines work, as do mandates, in keeping Americans healthy. The World Health Organization reported in a landmark 2024 study that vaccines have saved more than 154 million lives globally in just the past 50 years.
In the United States, vaccines for children are one of the top public health achievements of the 20th century. Rates of eight of the most common vaccine-preventable diseases in school-age children dropped by 97% or more from pre-vaccine levels, preventing an estimated 1,129,000 deaths and resulting in direct savings of US$540 billion and societal savings of $2.7 trillion.
History of vaccine mandates in the United States
Vaccine mandates in the United States date to the Colonial period and have a complex history. George Washington required his troops be inoculated, the predecessor of vaccination, against smallpox during the American Revolution.
To prevent outbreaks of this debilitating, disfiguring and deadly disease, state and local governments implemented smallpox inoculation and vaccination campaigns into the early 1900s. They targeted various groups, including enslaved people, immigrants, people living in tenement and other crowded housing conditions, manual laborers and others, forcibly vaccinating those who could not provide proof of prior vaccination.
Although religious exemptions were not recognized by law until the 1960s, some resisted these vaccination campaigns from the beginning, and 19th-century anti-vaccination societies urged the rollback of state laws requiring vaccination.
By the turn of the 20th century, however, the U.S. Supreme Court also began to intervene in matters of public health and vaccination. The court ultimately upheld vaccine mandates in Jacobson v. Massachusetts in 1905, in an effort to strike a balance between individual rights with the need to protect the public’s health. In Zucht v. King in 1922, the court also ruled in favor of vaccine mandates, this time for school attendance.
Vaccine mandates expanded by the middle of the 20th century to include vaccines for many dangerous childhood diseases, such as polio, measles, rubella and pertussis. When Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine became available, families waited in long lines for hours to receive it, hoping to prevent their children from having to experience paralysis or life in an iron lung.
Scientific studies in the 1970s demonstrated that state declines in measles cases were correlated with enforcement of school vaccine mandates. The federal Childhood Immunization Initiative launched in the late 1970s helped educate the public on the importance of vaccines and encouraged enforcement. All states had mandatory vaccine requirements for public school entry by 1980, and data over the past several decades continues to demonstrate the importance of these laws for public health.
Most parents also continue to support school mandates. A survey conducted in July and August 2025 by The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation finds that 81% of parents support laws requiring vaccines for school.
Black Americans’ long fight for public health equity
Despite the proven success of vaccines and the importance of vaccine mandates in maintaining high vaccination rates, there is a vocal anti-vaccine minority in the U.S. that has gained traction since the COVID-19 pandemic.
Misinformation proliferates both online and off. Some of the misinformation originates in the historical realities of vaccines and social policy in the United States.
When Ladapo, the Florida surgeon general, invoked the term “slavery” to refer to vaccine mandates, he may have been referring to the history of racism in the medical field, such as the U.S. Public Health Service Untreated Syphilis Study at Tuskegee. The study, which started in 1932 and spanned four decades, involved hundreds of Black men who were recruited without their knowledge or consent so that researchers could study the effects of untreated syphilis. Investigators misled the participants about the nature of the study and actively withheld treatment – including penicillin, which became the standard therapy in the late 1940s – in order to study the effects of untreated syphilis on the men’s bodies.
Today, the study is remembered as one of the most egregious instances of racism and unethical experimentation in American medicine. Its participants had enrolled in the study because it was advertised as a chance to receive expert medical care but, instead, were subjected to lies and painful “treatments.”
Despite these experiences in the medical system, Black Americans have long advocated for better health care, connecting it to the larger struggle for racial equality.
Vaccination is no exception. Despite the fact that they were often the subject of forced innoculation, enslaved people helped to lead the first American public health initiatives around epidemic disease. Historians’ research on smallpox and slavery, for example, has found that inoculation was widely accepted and practiced by West Africans by the early 1700s, and that enslaved people brought the practice to the Colonies.
Although his role is often downplayed, an African man known as Onesimus introduced his enslaver Cotton Mather to inoculation.
Throughout the next century, enslaved people often continued to inoculate each other to prevent smallpox outbreaks, and enslaved and free people of African descent played critical roles in keeping their own communities as healthy as possible in the face of violence, racism and brutality. The modern Civil Rights Movement explicitly drew on this history and centered health equity for Black Americans as one of its key tenets, including working to provide access to vaccines for preventable diseases.
In our view, Ladapo’s reference to vaccines as “slavery” ignores this important and nuanced history, especially Black Americans’ role in the history of preventing communicable disease with vaccines.
Lessons to learn from Tuskegee
Ladapo’s word choice also runs the risk of perpetuating the rightful mistrust that continues to exist in communities of color about vaccines and the American health system more broadly. Studies show that lingering effects of Tuskegee and other instances of medical racism have had real consequences for the health and vaccination rates of Black Americans.
A large body of evidence shows the existence of persistent health disparities for Black people in the United States compared with their white counterparts, leading to shorter lifespans, higher rates of maternal and infant mortality and higher rates of communicable and chronic diseases, with worse outcomes.
Eliminating vaccine mandates in Florida and expanding exemptions in other states will continue to widen these already existing disparities that stem from past public health wrongs.
There is an opportunity here, however, for health officials, not just in Florida but across the nation, to work together to learn from the past in making American public health better for everyone.
Rather than weakening vaccine mandates, national, state and local public health guidance can focus on expanding access and communicating trustworthy information about vaccines for all Americans. Policymakers can acknowledge the complicated history of vaccines, public health and race, while also recognizing how advancements in science and medicine have given us the opportunity to eradicate many of these diseases in the United States today.
Lauren MacIvor Thompson, Assistant Professor of History and Interdisciplinary Studies, Kennesaw State University and Stacie Kershner, Deputy Director of the Center for Law, Health & Society, Georgia State University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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The Other Side of LA’s Sprawl: Race, Real Estate, and Division
Race and Real Estate: Discover how redlining, white flight, and racial segregation shaped Los Angeles’ sprawling growth. From housing discrimination to the Watts and 1992 uprisings, explore how history still impacts LA’s neighborhoods and future.
Last Updated on September 6, 2025 by Daily News Staff
The Other Side of LA’s Sprawl: Race, Real Estate, and Division
When people think about Los Angeles sprawl, the first images that come to mind are freeways, cars, and endless suburbs. But beneath the surface lies another story—one shaped by real estate practices, racial discrimination, and policies that shaped where people could and couldn’t live. The sprawling Los Angeles of today was built not just by developers and freeways, but also by a long history of racial divides that left a lasting imprint on the city.
🏘️ Redlining and Housing Discrimination
Beginning in the 1930s, federal housing agencies and banks used maps to classify neighborhoods by their investment risk. Areas with large Black, Latino, Asian, or immigrant populations were outlined in red—this practice became known as redlining.
Families in redlined areas were routinely denied mortgages and loans. White neighborhoods and new suburban developments received FHA-backed loans and investment, fueling growth. The result: homeownership, the single most important tool for building generational wealth in America, was largely out of reach for minority families.
This meant that even as Los Angeles boomed, many Black and Latino residents were effectively locked out of suburban growth.
🚙 White Flight and Suburban Growth
After World War II, the automobile and freeway expansion opened vast new areas for development—the San Fernando Valley, Orange County, and beyond. Coupled with federal housing subsidies, suburban homes were affordable for many white families.
But this migration was also driven by white flight—the movement of white residents out of central Los Angeles into segregated suburbs. Realtors often stoked racial fears, using tactics like blockbusting (warning white families that Black families moving in would lower property values).
The sprawl of LA was therefore not simply a neutral process of growth, but one deeply tied to racial exclusion.
🔥 Racial Divide and Civil Unrest
The legacy of segregation and economic exclusion left lasting scars. By the mid-20th century, many minority communities in South Los Angeles and East LA faced poor schools, limited job access, and heavy policing.
Police arrest a man during the riots on August 12. New York World Telegram
Two major uprisings highlighted this divide:
Watts Uprising (1965): Sparked by police brutality, but fueled by frustration over unemployment, poor housing, and systemic racism. LA Uprising (1992): Following the Rodney King verdict, long-standing inequalities exploded into violence, exposing the city’s deep racial and economic divides.
Aerial view of two buildings on fire on Avalon Blvd. between 107th and 108th Streets during Watts Riots, Los Angeles. Image: George R. Fry, Los Angeles Times
These events weren’t isolated—they were directly tied to decades of disinvestment and exclusion from the prosperity of Los Angeles’ sprawl.
🌆 What’s Different Today?
Los Angeles today is one of the most diverse metropolitan areas in the world, and many once-segregated neighborhoods are now multicultural. Federal laws have ended official redlining, and some efforts have been made to encourage fair housing and reinvestment.
But challenges remain:
The racial wealth gap persists, as the legacy of denied homeownership still echoes. Zoning laws continue to favor single-family housing, limiting affordability and reinforcing old divides. Gentrification in areas like Boyle Heights, Echo Park, and Leimert Park raises fears of displacement for longtime residents. Meanwhile, the homelessness crisis reflects structural inequities in housing access across communities.
Instead of white flight, today’s trend is wealth flight—higher-income residents moving outward or even leaving California, while working-class and immigrant communities remain central to LA’s cultural identity.
✨ The Real Story of LA’s Sprawl
Cars and freeways shaped Los Angeles, yes—but so did policies and prejudices that determined who could live where. The city’s fragmented geography isn’t just about mobility—it’s about power, opportunity, and exclusion.
Los Angeles is still working to overcome these divisions. Understanding this history is essential to building a more connected and equitable city for the future.
📚 Related Links & Resources
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