Segregation's Science

There is a deft symmetry in Gregory Michael Dorr's Segregation's Science: while exposing the conceptual weakness (but social strength) of scientific racism in Virginia from its inception until 2002, when the state's governor apologized to victims of its eugenic policies, Dorr has created a detailed “family tree” of eugenics in Virginia starting with Thomas Jefferson as first father and tracing his scientific progeny to the end of the twentieth century. This “pedigree” of eugenics in the state illustrates a disturbing racial justification for the extreme treatment of the poor, African American, female, disabled, or other designated “misfits” for over two centuries. Dorr shows how science was used to justify segregation in the state even before eugenics was construed in modern terms, linking Jefferson's ideals of heredity with the discourse of American independence and revolutionary segregation as the basis of a new American nationality or “type.” During the period before and after the Civil War, this “type” became increasingly fixed in the elite definitions of Southern segregationists and white supremacists. Through Jefferson and in particular “the fruit of his intellect,” the University of Virginia, Dorr shows how science rationalized a racial template to amalgamate scientific modernity alongside traditional elitism, calling the university the “institutional ‘womb’ for the propagation of his intellectual ‘germ’ across time” (p. 33

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