North Carolina’s compensation to victims of forced sterilisation is a chance to illuminate a gruesome US tradition of racial ‘science.’
Twenty-seven American states joined a decades-long pseudo-scientific crusade to create a white, blond, blue-eyed, biologically superior “master race”. Their misguided utopian quest was called eugenics. But only one state, North Carolina, is now readying a massive plan of financial repatriations to its survivying victims. Just how much North Carolina should pay is now the subject of a historically wrenching debate.