Coming up on THE COLOR INITIATIVE ON PRI'S THE WORLD

                
                     Eugenics Singapore Style

Eugenics was the so-called science of improving a population by controlled breeding to increase the occurrence of desirable heritable characteristics. In the 20th century it lead to millions of forced sterilizations worldwide and was linked to Nazi atrocities. In modern times China enacted a form of eugenic policy to control population and to restrict marriages between persons with certain disabilities and diseases. Singapore also briefly experimented with eugenics. The program, introduced in 1984, sought increased fertility for university-educated women and provided major subsidies for the voluntary sterilization of poor and uneducated parents. The official program has long been abandoned, but “social Darwinism” or what many historians regard as the ideological underpinning of eugenics is the dominant view still promulgated by Singapore’s founder and long standing mentor, Lee Kuan Yew, in his quest to create the perfect society. 



Critics of Singapore’s social engineering argue that the resulting policies are invariably skin color-coded and hierarchical since the “poor and uneducated” are disproportionately tan skinned Malays and charcoal-colored Tamils, rather than the politically-dominant Chinese ethnic majority. How does this view measure up objectively to Singapore’s quest to create a racially balanced society?

THE COLOR INITIATIVE on The World (PRI, BBC and WGBH) http://www.theworld.org/2009/07/24/color-initiative/

SUMMER OF 2011 ON THE COLOR INITIATIVE

A GLOBAL VIEW OF THE COLOR BLACK
(photo by Nancy Thomas)

In an upcoming series on PRI's The World, we'll look at the global perception of black skin color. We speak with a cognitive psychologist who has studied initial reactions to skin phenotypes, political scientists, a refugee from Darfur, historians, Chinese students, a development specialist from Yemen, African expats, Latin American activists and others.

There have been many attempts to understand blackness. Among the most classic explorations was Frantz Fanon’s "Black Skin, White Masks". (see video clip) Fanon observed that the most common view of black skin –which exists in hues from tan to charcoal and shades of gray –was a denial of recognition. Other perceptions at the time of the Algerian Revolution, and still in force today, are heavily weighted down in stereo-types.

So we ask these questions: Can anything or anyone change the universal or global perception of blackness? Is it even necessary in a world where perceptions of race and racism are changing, albeit slowly?   Does the fact that race is a social construct in any way mitigate anti-black skin prejudice? And does the ascendency of prominent individuals of African descent (Obama, Mandela, Rice, Powell) connote "post-racial" progress, or merely obfuscates what some regard as an immutable negative frame of reference to black skin color?