A Source Of Bigotry

Stacy Kranitz: The Rape of Appalachia — BagNews:

...Just 10 years after the War on Poverty was declared, Caudill saw that nothing was changing for the Appalachian people. After becoming the first person to successfully call attention to the dark reality of what was happening in Appalachia, Caudill’s thinking changed. He concluded that Appalachia could not be fixed because its people were broken. He came to believe that Appalachia’s gene pool had been watered down by inbreeding among what he called “dullards” who lived on welfare in remote mountain hollers (1). He concluded that poverty is “genetic in origin”(2) and invited the eugenicist William Shockley to his home in Kentucky Together they proposed to study poor eastern Kentuckians as part of a research project on inherited intelligence.Cash bonuses would be offered to participants in exchange for sterilization (3). The man, who proclaimed that Appalachia had been raped, now wanted to rape certain Appalachian people of their ability to procreate...