I was reading Louis Menand's "Metaphysical Club" (which won the Pulitzer Prize a number of years ago), and in it I found a curious fact -
Back in 1841, the then-23 y.o. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. is on the record as saying that minstrel shows are demeaning to black people...
Which is a full 150 years ahead of the Dutch!
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Even the United States Supreme Court endorsed aspects of eugenics. In its infamous 1927 decision, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, "It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind…. Three generations of imbeciles are enough." This decision opened the floodgates for thousands to be coercively sterilized or otherwise persecuted as subhuman. Years later, the Nazis at the Nuremberg trials quoted Holmes's words in their own defense.
I wonder how the Dutch would poll out about eugenics vs. Americans.
That would be an interesting dissertation, to ask that question after making up fictitious case studies to introduce the question, e.g. "Last year a [Moroccan vs. African-American] woman with an IQ of XYZ and 5 children ran afoul of the law, and a judge ordered her tubes to be tied..."
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