As a Tamil student, reading eugenicist writings about my own community revealed how much work remains beyond public apologies and photographic displays.
It is an uniquely disembodied feeling to walk down from the library, as you write your dissertation, to a special reading room to read a book on eugenics about your people.
During my dissertation research into the migration patterns of Tamil peoples to London, I came across the curious book titled, The Problem of the Dravidian Head. A copy of the book was once stored in UCL’s Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics.
I booked an appointment on my final day of research. I had a burning curiosity to find out what could be written in this eugenicist text, once stored in UCL’s libraries. Reading Edgar Thurston’s account of South India, I was neither shocked nor surprised to see the racist rhetoric describing people from South India and Sri Lanka.
Descriptions of local peoples' rationality are deemed as of the “rudest and primitive kind” and “low”. This is followed by horrific descriptions of ‘head-hunting’ expeditions and images of starved men with hollow ribcages, staring emptily at the camera. The language used to describe the Dravidian people is unscientific and bizarre.
Thurston describes how the Tamils “remind” him of the Aboriginal Australians due their similar hair and face shapes. Apparently, Dravidians were on a “very low rung of development” and “hardly made any progress worth mentioning”. To see my traditionals, my customs, my people, written about so callously, with such surety in the superiority of the author and ‘white-ness’ is continually shocking.
These texts were written over 200 hundred years ago, you might say. Things have changed, UCL has modernised, changed, and these old, racist tropes are undoubtedly wrong and rejected — right?
But in reality, eugenicist conferences took place at UCL from as late as 2014 until 2018, only four years before I joined the university. In fact, the conference, titled the “London Conference on Intelligence”, was not barred from being held in 2018 after a massive exposé. It simply moved to Skanderborg in Denmark.
The term eugenics itself was invented by Francis Galton. Until 2000, a building at UCL was named after Galton. He used statistical methods to justify his white supremacy racism. The Galton Lab existed from 1907-1963 and “UCL established the Galton Chair in National Eugenics in 1911, which was not abolished until 1996”.
The institution that once kept a copy of this book, detailing the ‘problem’ of the Dravidian skull shape, in its eugenics laboratory, now happily hosts hundreds of Tamil students. Tamil is the oldest spoken language in the world. And yet, no university in the UK, including UCL, has a Tamil chair to support academic research. The investigation into the contemporary connections UCL has to eugenics only happened after the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020. As far as one can see, direct action to provide for the communities affected by UCL eugenics legacy is limited.
What is further absurd to me is the undeniable tokenism of UCL — promoting diversity and inclusion across the university through UCL200, using Black and Brown faces to showcase their diversity whilst forgetting their struggles.
It’s almost as if these students did not fight for their right for education at this institution, facing systemic barriers, microaggression, and challenges at UCL. It feels like these poster images dismiss the ongoing difficulties of minority students, especially female, international, racialised, queer, disabled, and working class groups.
These students continue to face extraordinary barriers to access their education. It’s a rose-eyed view of UCL’s history: displaying Black and Brown excellence, without acknowledging UCL’s position in creating and promoting discriminatory knowledge and systems and without supporting current students for ongoing challenges they might face because of their identity.
The public apology, as UCL well knows, is woefully inadequate for how eugenicist knowledge was used across the world. The knowledge created at UCL was fuel for some of the most violent acts in human history. From genocide and oppression, the words did and continue to segregate humans on race, gender, physicality, and more. The Prejudice in Power programme, who created the exhibition in the Student Centre, feels like one step out of many more that must be taken.
This year, the explanation of UCL’s role in eugenics, displayed on the Student Centre stairs was replaced by the bland, purple gradient used for UCL 200. This is representative of a wider issue: you can’t simply acknowledge UCL’s eugenic legacy without taking direct action about it.
Don’t just tell us that you support diversity and inclusion, diversify and include minoritised students in your senior leadership. Showcasing representation and rejection of eugenics isn’t enough — only action is.
This article was featured in CG98.