Friday, June 24, 2011

This Happened In America: Not In Some Dictatorship



Before the George W. Bush administration came to power was know as a defender of Human Rights not a violator. Following the September 11 attacks everything changed and not for the better instead veering towards the authoritarian as they sought justification for the abuses which occurred in Iraq and Afghanistan thanks to the likes of John Yoo and Jay Bybee who wrote the legal justification for the torture of prisoners at Anu Ghraib prison in Iraq and Bagram airbase in Afghanistan. Yet minorities in America have been abused since the Europeans arrived.

One of the methods used to justify this violation of peoples Civil Rights was Eugenics an ideology that saw and portrayed non-whites as less the human this was especially popular in the Southern United States beginning in the late 19 century. The results of which led to forced sterilizations of thousands of African Americans.

Nearly 7,600 men, women and children as young as 10 were sterilized under North Carolina’s eugenics laws. While other state sterilization laws focused mainly on criminals and people in mental institutions, North Carolina was one of the few to expand its reach to women who were poor.
Sterilization was seen as a way to limit the public cost of welfare. Social workers would coerce women to have the operation under threat of losing their public assistance.[...]
The North Carolina Eugenics Board was created in 1933 and operated for decades with little public scrutiny. It used rudimentary IQ tests and gossip from neighbors to justify sterilization of young girls from poor families who hung around the wrong crowd or didn’t do well in school. Girls like 13-year-old LeLa Dunston, who had just had a baby. Dunston is now 63.

North Carolina the U.S. state where these hearings took place is considering Paying Forced Sterilization Victims.

Somehow considering paying the victims of this state sponsored abuse and torture doesn't quite cut-it. If others can be brought before the International criminal Court for human rights abuses why not Americans?

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