We have entered a new stage of erasure of children, of the disabled, and of the vulnerable. Healthism and its sibling, eugenics, have been unapologetically espoused during the COVID pandemic by our country’s leadership.

…

I believe we are watching, in real time, the development of a new system of permanently burdening people we do not value. This experience causes me to see more clearly the many inequities we have long endured as somehow normal, even though they could easily have been addressed. Why do we not have adequate ventilation in schools? Why do we allow evictions to occur without an immediate provision of social services to protect those who lose their homes? Why should a diabetic ever go without the best medicine to control their blood glucose levels? Why do we allow drinking water to be polluted? Why is our built environment so hostile to people who do not fit within our narrow norm of ability? Because this is who we are.

There are two kinds of eugenics. The first is positive eugenics, related to selective breeding. One frequently cited example is the Nazi SS matching its members with “worthy” Aryan women to improve the German stock. But positive eugenics is also inherent in opposition to immigration, race mixing and desegregation. White leaders like Theodore Roosevelt, for example, worried about the “mongrelization” of the Anglo-Saxon race.

The other eugenics, the negative kind, involves actively preventing certain individuals from living or reproducing — in other words, removing them from the gene pool. The Holocaust is an extreme example, but the basic concept was embraced in the United States early in the 20th century. Laws permitting forced sterilization of women, the mentally ill, gay people and those considered child rapists were passed across the country; they intended to purify the population.

Despite his ultra-radical leanings, Lay has been almost entirely excised from modern history books. “The wildness of his methods of approaching antislavery is part of it,” Rediker says. “He was extremely militant and completely uncompromising.” This level of abolitionist militance was unprecedented, and only began to become common after the 1830s. Lay sits outside of the standard narrative of the movement, and his disability and lower socioeconomic status make him difficult to place in a clear historical model. “He just didn’t fit the story,” Rediker says.

this is violence.