An “eugenics adjacent” project

If neoliberalism, with its constant chipping away at social policies, normalized precarity while rendering some lives disposable, this new ideological turn to the extreme right takes us a step further. This is what I refer to as an “eugenics adjacent” project. It’s not merely that some lives are considered acceptable collateral damage but that some lives are explicitly considered an unnecessary burden. While in its pure form, eugenics is an ideology aimed at controlled breeding to increase desirable heritable characteristics it also involves the systematic death of those who do not possess these desirable characteristics. What else if not “eugenics adjacent” politics are the disproportionate deaths of Black people in the hands of US police, the rates of mass incarceration for Black and Latino populations also in the US, the mass deaths of migrants in the Mediterranean, the institution of policies of control through EU funding that result in mass deaths across African nations to control migrant flows or the promotion and advertising of policies that facilitate the death of the chronically ill, disabled and elderly? When each of these instances lead to the deaths of specific groups that are deemed “undesirable” by these extreme right groups, how else are we supposed to name these policies if not “eugenics adjacent”? The necropolitics as the institution of death affirming technologies and policies, finally officialized through the ascent to power of one of their own.

Flavia Dzodan in When the personal is necropolitical: on Inauguration Day and alliances of hate (Thispoliticalwoman)