The Mysterious Eugenics of Aesthetic Taste

In the 11th essay in the Legacies of Eugenics series, Michael Rossi shows how American scientists and artists used their discovery of racial ‘types’ to buttress eugenicist notions of aesthetic taste.

By Michael RossiJanuary 11, 2026

• Science & Technology

• History

• Sports

This is the 10th installment in the Legacies of Eugenics series, which features essays by leading thinkers devoted to exploring the history of eugenics and the ways it shapes our present. The series is organized by Osagie K. Obasogie in collaboration with the Los Angeles Review of Books, and supported by the Center for Genetics and Society, the Othering & Belonging Institute, and Berkeley Public Health.

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Por encima de la eugénica científica prevalecerá la eugénica misteriosa del gusto estético.
[Above scientific eugenics, the mysterious eugenics of aesthetic taste will prevail.]
—Jose Vasconcelos, La raza cósmica (1925)

ON OCTOBER 10, 1931, Malvina Hoffman stood on the beach at Waikiki, Hawaii, surveying the parade of beautiful men before her. As she recounted in her notes, she beheld “typical beach boys quietly basking in the tropical sunlight.” She thrilled as they rode “their surfboards over the crests of the breakers.” She ogled them as they “plunge[d] in and out of the azure seas, and toast[ed] their splendidly developed bodies until they bec[a]me [a] rich brown.” True, she regarded these men as existing in a state of atavistic primitivity, all of them evolutionarily “retarded, in sun-baked rhythm,” but boy, were they attractive.

A world-renowned sculptor, Hoffman was on assignment from the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Her goal was to produce a series of life-size bronze statues depicting “the races of mankind” for a Field Museum exhibition of that title—a comprehensive account of the world’s racial types. For that, she needed human subjects, models that would embody the characteristics of the races they were meant to represent.

From among the athletic figures cavorting in the surf, Hoffman singled out 21-year-old Sargent Hiikua Kahanamoku. A Native Hawaiian swimmer and surfer, Sargent belonged to a famous family of Native Hawaiian athletes. His oldest brother was Duke, an Olympic gold medalist in swimming and the world’s most famous surfer. His second oldest brother, David, was one of Waikiki’s first lifeguards and possibly a better surfer than Duke. His third brother, Sam, was also an Olympic swimmer and considered by some connoisseurs to be the best surfer of all the Kahanamoku brothers.

Hoffman introduced herself to Sargent. He gave her a surfing lesson. She shot motion picture film of him riding his surfboard. Then she took him back to her makeshift studio in Honolulu where she carefully measured and photographed him, made a plaster mold of his face, and set about sculpting a small clay statue of him.

When the statue was finally finished, enlarged, cast in bronze, and put on display in 1933, it was one of the most popular sculptures in The Races of Mankind: a life-size bronze figure balanced on a bronze surfboard, borne aloft on a rushing bronze wave. The figure’s knees were slightly bent, and its face was ablaze with concentration and pleasure. It was not a convincing likeness of Sargent Kahanamoku himself, but Hoffman subsequently made clear that her intent was not to make a sculpture of a specific individual but of an exemplar of his race—a “Polynesian Male,” perpetually at play in the surf, eternally a “physical and mental youth.”

All of Hoffman’s figures in the The Races of Mankind similarly depicted race as frozen in a particular moment of conjoined biological, psychological, and cultural evolution. In her notes for a bust of an Orang Ulu woman, for instance, she described her subject as staring “with wide and ignorant primitiveness […] dazed by life and devoid of any mentality.” A male figure from Indonesia had the “strength and swiftness of a jungle current.” Hoffman imagined that the “wilderness is his inheritance” and “his actions are controlled by the terror of offending his gods. Nothing else.” A “Japanese Male,” meanwhile, was more perplexing to Hoffman: “Behind a mass of masks and vibrations, one senses order, intelligence, calculation, far-reaching power across the sea.” Hoffman wondered whether members of the Japanese “race” were, in cultural-evolutionary terms, “miniatures or mastodons.”

The Races of Mankind was not specifically or didactically an endorsement of eugenics. It did not, for instance, mention or praise the eugenic sterilization laws that were, by 1933, on the books in 30 US states. Nor did it provide viewers with charts detailing the genealogies of accomplished men and degenerate families. It made no explicit claims about the intelligence of human groups or the fitness of particular people over others, or the ways in which populations might benefit from future medical or even genomic intervention. Indeed, Hoffman, who by all indications considered herself a progressive thinker, insisted that her sculptures—dynamic, elegant, realistic—avoided pernicious racial stereotypes.

Nevertheless, the very premise of the exhibit reflected and popularized a principle central to eugenics—not simply that race was biologically real, with behaviors determined by genes, but also that the invisible mysteries of human genetics and human nature could be plainly, even stereotypically, observed in the bodily features of individuals. In other words, the exhibit asserted that the beliefs, behaviors, and societal value of any given individual should be discernable through aesthetic judgment. In its most superficial instantiations, this principle suggested that physical beauty was a reliable guide to social worth. For many eugenicists, socially desirable qualities, such as intelligence, thrift, industry, bravery, and so on, literally showed in the faces and carriage of individuals. Any observer who possessed honest aesthetic discernment—and, therefore, were themselves possessed of convincing moral worth—would be able to see these qualities. On a more complicated level, however, the literal observability of human nature reflected a confidence, bordering on paranoid conviction, that whatever was familiar and appealing to the aesthetic judgment of the observer must perforce be socially beneficial, morally righteous, and epistemologically true.

This was the principle that allowed Hoffman’s single, elegantly rendered sculpture of Sargent Kahanamoku to represent every Polynesian male, permanently (if allegorically) at play in the surf, just as it allowed eugenicists to find biological meaning in countless other aspects of human appearance and culture. It was, moreover, a belief with considerable staying power: it continues to animate contemporary eugenic aspirations in this century, manifested in the assumption that human genetics, human nature, and the value of human life are simultaneously visible and obvious to the senses of anyone with the perspicacity to look. By these lights, those who think otherwise are simply denying reality, dabbling in postmodern abstraction, idling in ideological decadence.

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On November 8, 2024, a very different exhibition from The Races of Mankind opened at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. Entitled The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture, the exhibition assembled 82 sculptures made between 1792 and 2023 by almost as many artists. The goal of the show, as the curators note in their introduction to the exhibition catalog, was to demonstrate how sculpture has given “palpable physical forms to racist ideas, classifications, and hierarchies,” and how it “has also been a vital means through which artists have resisted, contested, and refuted racist ideas.” The exhibition included one of Hoffman’s sculptures from The Races of Mankind—a Solomon Islander climbing a tree—as an example of the ways in which, as James Smalls put it in his catalog essay, the “slippage between aesthetics and science” gave rise to “racial and cultural hierarchies based on scientific and pseudoscientific processes.” It also included sculptures such as Roberto Lugo’s DNA Study Revisited (2022), an exuberantly colored, full-body cast of the artist that deliberately echoed the anthropological sculptures of the previous century, with the intent of countering “the dehumanizing historical practice by museums and universities of collecting body casts to classify individuals into the disproven belief of ‘biological races.’”

The show attracted widespread critical praise—and one notable dissent. President Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14253, signed on March 27, 2025, and titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” accused museum curators, historians, and the Biden administration of “a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.” The particular “ideology” that preoccupied the writers of the executive order concerned discussions of race and racism in American history. Rather than simply arguing that national parks, museums, and the like had overemphasized injustice and oppression in public education initiatives—a familiar conservative complaint—the order posed such discussions as outright fabrication and insanity: “ideology” as opposed to “truth.”

The executive order singled out The Shape of Power as a prime example of “divisive, race-centered ideology” that encourages “narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.” It incredulously (and accurately) accused the exhibit of arguing that “[s]ocieties including the United States have used race to establish and maintain systems of power, privilege, and disenfranchisement.” In a tone of disbelief, it continued: “The exhibit further claims that ‘sculpture has been a powerful tool in promoting scientific racism’ and promotes the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct, stating ‘Race is a human invention.’”

Sculpture a tool of scientific racism? Race a human invention? Never!

Of course, the very point of works like The Races of Mankind was to concretize scientific racism. There would seem to be little that is ideological about this observation, at least not in the executive order’s sense of “ideology” as opposed to “truth.” But the executive order’s pearl-clutching astonishment at the Smithsonian exhibit’s premise neatly concretizes, in a kind of reverse syllogism, a logic that demands an adherence to racialist aesthetics. The order implies that race is a “biological reality.” Following this reasoning, sculptures like Hoffman’s did not “promote” scientific racism but just showed the world as it would naturally appear to anyone exercising common aesthetic judgment. Social inequalities based on race, if we follow this logic, are likewise not a result of “racism” but rather, like the notionally commonsense visual appearance of race, simply features of the world as it is. Sculptures like Hoffman’s—figurative, realistic, appearing to depict the world as it is—are an important aesthetic instantiation of this narrative of “truth.” To suggest a different narrative—one that is aware of its own perspectivism, for instance—must be “ideological” in the sense that it defies the objective apprehension of nature itself. In short, to approach the world in any way other than that depicted by, say, Hoffman’s sculptures is to suggest a different (and deliberately malignant) way of (literally) seeing history.

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The Races of Mankind exhibit wasn’t the first time the Kahanamoku family encountered scientific racism or eugenics. A decade before Hoffman recruited Sargent to be her model of a “Polynesian Male,” a group of scientists at the American Museum of Natural History in New York became fascinated by the physique of his older brother Duke. Henry Fairfield Osborn, the museum’s director and a leading proponent of eugenics in the United States, had visited Hawaii on a working vacation in April 1920. There, he took a fateful surfing lesson with Duke, becoming fascinated with both Hawaiians in general and Duke in particular.

The basis of Osborn’s fascination with Duke—and of his understanding of eugenics—was his highly aestheticized theory of evolution. For Osborn, as historian Marianne Sommer has written, the process through which species changed over time was fundamentally rooted in both body and mind. Just as species would retain adaptive physical traits, so too were “behaviors and experiences […] stamped on a species’ germplasm or germ cells” through an unknown but (in the early 20th century) plausible-seeming association between the nervous system and reproductive cells. This meant that human beings all possessed a deep sort of “race memory,” a genetic predisposition to particular habits and behaviors that corresponded, in occult ways, to the mental traits of individuals and the cultural traits of societies.

Osborn, along with many of his peers, subscribed to the view that the “Caucasian” race—white people—had originated on the steppes of Eurasia, imagined as a harsh environment that cultivated daring, intelligence, and spirituality. Many anthropologists of the 1920s also believed that this was the same place that Polynesian people had originated from before embarking on their remarkable diaspora across the Pacific. Polynesian people were, to their way of thinking, “the Caucasians of the Pacific.” As such, the two races shared a strong affinity. As anthropologist Clifford E. Gates put it, Polynesians showed a “distinct European cast of feature,” and “in character […] are exceedingly merry, gentle, courteous and hospitable.” Quite in contrast to what he unashamedly referred to as more “repellent” races, Gates proposed that “the Polynesians have cast a charm over the civilized world,” and he noted approvingly that “with these people cultured Europeans have not hesitated to from marriages [and] to live among them.”

What’s more, anthropologists tended to emphasize to their audiences that Polynesian people were exceedingly beautiful, “the physical superiors even of Europeans,” as Gates wrote. Vaughn MacCaughey, a eugenicist at the College of Hawaii, echoed this sentiment, writing that “anthropologists agree that the ancient Hawaiian was one of the finest physical types in the Pacific, and compared very favorably with the best types from any other part of the world.” Naturalist William Alanson Bryan concurred in terms that made the connection between physiology and psychology clear, noting that the facial features of ancient Hawaiian people were “strong, good-humored, and in many instances, when combined with their splendid physiques, produced a striking and impressive personality that gave the impression of their belonging to a very superior race.”

Osborn, for his part, marveled at the “perfect muscular development” of the “primitive Hawaiian” and held Duke Kahanamoku up as a “model youth”—a man at once physically perfect and mentally sound, if not precisely the social or racial equal of Osborn. Conflating physical types and cultural behaviors, Osborn speculated without embarrassment that surfers represented the ideal type of Indigenous Hawaiian men. (The ideal type among Hawaiian women was, he felt, the hula dancer.)

At the same time, Osborn worried that men like Duke would not endure in the modern world. Less than 200 years before Osborn’s visit, Hawaii had been an isolated island with a population of somewhere between 200,000 and 1,000,000 people, all of them of Polynesian descent. By 1920, it was a US territory, with a population of roughly 255,000 people hailing from all over the globe. Scientists like Osborn were certain that the Hawaiian race had degenerated with exposure to European diseases, intermarriage, and the deliberate marginalization of traditional activities like surfing. The once magnificent physique of Hawaiians had diminished, their radiant beauty had dimmed, and their culture was on the decline.

This was precisely why Osborn was fixated on Duke. He represented a throwback to a noble, primitive past shared by white people and Hawaiians alike, his bodily form preserved because his great athleticism mobilized a reserve of ancient genes held in common between white and Polynesian people. Osborn essentially saw Duke as a living fossil—and, like other fossils in the Museum of Natural History, he thought Duke had to be carefully preserved so that future generations could learn about the past magnificence of humankind.

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In order to secure a truly accurate image of Duke, Osborn dispatched a young curator of anthropology, Louis R. Sullivan, to Hawaii with orders to take a full-body cast of the athlete. Sullivan and Osborn spent a year trying to persuade the athlete to sit for the casting, but he continually demurred. He was a busy man who participated in swim races and surf exhibitions, organized community events, greeted important visitors to Hawaii, and hustled surf and swimming lessons for well-heeled tourists. But he was also most likely not interested—and perhaps even a bit creeped out—by the idea of being covered in plaster by eugenicists. In any case, he avoided Sullivan and Osborn.

Eventually, under pressure from Hawaii’s territorial governor, Duke agreed to show up to the basement studio in Honolulu’s Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum that served as Sullivan’s laboratory. At the last moment, however, Duke sent his brother David in his place. David was four years Duke’s junior, but the two men looked similar (or at least close enough to suit the scientists). If Duke was, in the words of one commentator, the “most magnificent human male God ever put on earth,” David had a body that made “sculptors’ hands itch for clay, and women’s eyes turn green with envy.” Both men were, in other words, beautiful, and thus both men were ideal specimens for eugenic study.

Stripping down to his underwear and assuming the pose of a fisherman about to spear a fish, David reluctantly allowed himself to be cast. The process was hot, grueling, and, as he recounted, unexpectedly frightening. At one point, when David was completely encased in a shell of hardening plaster, Sullivan and his assistant went for lunch, leaving him alone in the studio, immobilized and sweating profusely as plaster compressed around him. A man of his word, David completed the session when Sullivan returned, but (according to Hoffman’s 1936 memoir Heads and Tales) he vowed that never again would he or his family be the subjects of “museum artists.”

From the molds they made of his face and body, the eugenicists created a full-size sculpture of David in the guise of a fisherman from ancient Hawaii. They crated the statue and sent it back to New York. Unaware that the museum’s new sculpture of a Hawaiian fisherman was not, in fact, Duke Kahanamoku, Osborn proudly placed it on display in a prominent location during the Second International Eugenics Congress, held at the museum in 1921.

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The sculptures produced by Hoffman, Sullivan, and countless other artists and scientists working in a similar vein were more than just art objects. They were, in their way, genetic technologies: ways of making visible the invisible action of genes on human bodies and minds alike. Among the commonplaces of eugenic thinking was the conviction that behavioral and psychological attributes showed up in the physical forms of individuals. As early as 1878, Francis Galton, the British polymath who coined the term “eugenics,” superimposed several photographs of criminals in order to produce a composite photograph of the typical criminal. Although such portraits had what Galton called a “surprising air of reality,” he emphasized that they represented no particular individual but rather the type of “man who is liable to fall into crime.” They had, that is, prognostic and diagnostic power.

Sculpture could work in similar ways. The 1921 Eugenics Congress, for instance, featured twin sculptures representing two possible futures for white America. At one end of the exhibition hall stood a statuette by the physician-turned-sculptor R. Tait McKenzie purporting to depict the essential attributes of the “30 strongest men of Harvard,” a sculpture often referred to as Composite Athlete. Created from an amalgamation of measurements that McKenzie had taken from the university’s athletes, the bronze figure was well muscled and confident, leaning forward on one foot while gently fondling a sphere. At the opposite end of the hall, another composite sculpture depicted the “average young American male.” Made by Jane Davenport Harris, this sculpture told a darker story. Based on measurements of 100,000 white American soldiers taken during the First World War, the statue showed a slump-shouldered and slightly paunchy figure, his arms hung limply at his sides, his expression bland and sheepish. Even the material used for the sculpture was less noble than that used to model the 30 strongest men at Harvard: soft plaster rather than hard metal. The cream of white America’s crop was better-looking, lither, and made of sterner stuff than the average American male. At the same time, although elites would doubtless always be valued for their enduring strength and incorruptibility, the future of the American male was pliable, which meant he was amenable to eugenic intervention.

By the same token, it was also possible to read concepts of average or ideal beauty into individual people. As eugenics booster Albert Edward Wiggam rhapsodized, “heredity does hand down in the living minds and bodies the ideals that animated the marriage selections of past ages.” When eugenicists found their subjects aesthetically pleasing, they felt that this was a sign of moral and societal worth. A November 2, 1924, article in Michigan’s Bay City Times titled “Too Much Cosmetics, Not Enough Eugenics” noted that “beauty and intelligence are much more likely to be found traveling together than apart,” asserting that “physical beauty […] is an indicator of superiority in mind and soul.” Knight Dunlap, founder of the Journal of Psychology, president of the American Psychological Association, and ardent eugenicist, put the matter bluntly in 1920, stating that physical beauty “is for the race and for civilization of such profound importance that no other fundamental consideration of human welfare and progress can be divorced from it.”

Physical imperfections, on the other hand, could be signs of moral decay. As Dunlap put it, “significant deviation from the average is a negative characteristic,” and “one who looks like an imbecile or like a criminal is never beautiful.” (For that matter, Dunlap remarked that “it is difficult to conceive of a baldheaded musical genius or artist; although even to the rule implied here, exceptions do occur.”) At the extremes, films such as The Black Stork (a.k.a. Are You Fit to Marry?, 1916) suggested that physical disability was entangled with moral depravity, arguing that doctors and parents should allow disabled children to die as infants, lest they become morally corrupt dangers to society as adults. Seen in this light, aesthetic judgments were not just abstract concepts—they were also spurs to action.

Eugenicists insisted that sentiments about what constituted beauty were consistent across notional races of people. Notwithstanding the subjectivity of the observer, Dunlap thought that, although people could find members of their own race beautiful, everyone found the European race most beautiful of all. This was because, he explained, “the type which is highest in value tends to approximate the European type, wherever the European type becomes known.” Hoffman’s sculptures were a case in point. By employing idealized, figurative aesthetics, they showed that it was possible to make beautiful, even noble, sculptures of non-white people that nevertheless insisted on racial difference and preserved racial hierarchy.

Certainly this was the case with the cast of David Kahanamoku. Responding to the Museum of Natural History’s cast, one commentator remarked that, “besides being modeled like a young, bronze god, David has a charming personality.” His calm bearing, athletic ability, and physical being all echoed one another. Before sculpting Composite Athlete, McKenzie had encountered Duke Kahanamoku during one of the swimmer’s practice sessions in Philadelphia. A writer for The Honolulu Advertiser reported that the sculptor found Duke the “most wonderfully muscled and magnificent physical specimen he had ever seen.” However, it was “not only the beautiful grace of muscles” that captivated McKenzie, reported the article, “but the proud carriage, the calm, peaceful Hawaiian dignity” as well. McKenzie set out to capture “Duke’s character as a man” and produced a small maquette that would serve, in the 1930s, as the model for a full-scale sculpture of Duke, though MacKenzie died before completing it.

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Slowly, over the course of the latter half of the 20th century, this overdetermined way of thinking about biology and aesthetics began to feel unfashionable, even absurd. Museums quietly removed those exhibits that previously had touted the “science of good generation.” The American Museum of Natural History closed the Hall of Man, in which the original cast of David Kahanamoku had stood for decades, and the statue disappeared into the bowels of the museum (and presumably into the trash). At the Field Museum, the Races of Mankind exhibit went into storage in 1968, reemerging in 2016 for an exhibition about the legacies of scientific racism in natural history.

The more careful of contemporary geneticists are now at pains to avoid eugenic tropes that link genes, appearances, and behaviors. In a 2022 article in Nature Genetics, the authors, a team of geneticists including Daniel Benjamin and Michelle N. Meyer, discuss powerful new tools like genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and polygenic inheritance scores. These technologies appear to hold the promise of genetically optimizing future populations, but the authors warn that such prognoses are illusory. “Although it was once believed that scientists would discover a few strong associations between genes and outcomes,” they write in the study’s supplementary material, “we have known for a number of years that the vast majority of human outcomes are complex and influenced by many thousands of genes, each of which alone tends to have a small influence on the relevant outcome.” In the often-studied case of genes that appear to correlate strongly with higher levels of educational attainment, for instance, the authors write that “DNA does not ‘determine’ an individual’s level of education.” More broadly, they insist, “genes and genetic variation do not determine our choices or who we become.”

Nevertheless, the possibility of finding genetic explanations for complicated cultural behaviors is tantalizing. GWAS researchers have proposed correlations between particular genes and behaviors as disparate as time spent watching TV, the type of transportation that people use to commute to work, and pleasure taken in light do-it-yourself tasks. This doesn’t mean that there are causal connections between these highly environmentally modulated activities, but the impulse to look for such correlations is irresistible—and it’s difficult not to make the mental leap between correlation and causation, and from causation to operationalization—even in the case of surfing. In his 2007 book Surfing: The Ultimate Guide, Douglas Booth insists that “the biological and sociocultural characteristics of extreme surfers […] interact and reinforce each other”; Booth goes on to provide a brief rundown of the different genetic, neurochemical, and hormonal factors that supposedly prompt people to take to the waves. While the author admits that science has not proved “adept at explaining the obsessive pleasures of surfing,” he holds out hope that one day biology, behavior, and aesthesis will be united.

The kinds of aesthetic judgment that underwrote early 20th-century eugenics have continued to haunt debates not simply about what kinds of bodies are valued but also about how bodies ought to be understood and depicted. (See also: Nancy Etcoff, Rachelle M. Smith, Dalton Conley.) While many geneticists are skeptical of the value of racial designations for evaluating gene causality and frequency, others quite willingly assert—without evidence—that genes for morphological characteristics like skin color must be causally linked to genes for academic accomplishment. Hoffman, meanwhile, has found a renewed audience among members of the “human biodiversity” movement—a reactionary attempt to contradict the overwhelming consensus among geneticists that race isn’t a biologically meaningful category.

Following Executive Order 14253, for instance, Steve Sailer, founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute, published an opinion piece asserting that Malvina Hoffman was a great artist whose work represents “America’s most spectacular trove of human biodiversity depictions.” She was driven “out of fashion,” Sailer contends, “in a 20th Century art world obsessed with abstraction” and “because of her sins against racial correctness.” Against the Field Museum’s contention that the sculptures were taken out of view because they “weren’t realistic,” Sailer responds that “Hoffman published photos of many of her subjects in her autobiography. The only thing unrealistic about them is that Hoffman […] no doubt made them all a little healthier, handsomer, and more heroic looking. Is that so bad?” Biological race, Sailer chortled, should be evident to anyone “watching sports on TV.” The executive order represented a victory against “soft subject intellectuals” and “their Race Does Not Exist Biologically dogma.”

Sailer’s readers got the point. As one of the piece’s commenters put it, “yes [Hoffman’s] sculptures are beautiful. Some non-natural history museum should display them. They could even leave off the text explaining the races of man crap.” Of course, the idea that the “races of man crap” could be left off and the sculptures’ message would still shine through was precisely the intent of Hoffman’s attempts to meld race and culture into a single sculptural idea. The figures were meant to speak for themselves, collapsing aesthetic qualities and natural facts.

Another commenter put the idea even more succinctly: “Trump’s most enduring achievements will be cultural changes—which is to say perceptual ones.” In one sense, this commenter is correct: the executive order is precisely about perception—seeing and depicting American history in a way that calcifies complex behaviors into the bland reassurance that all of humanity can be explained by simple mechanisms. This way of seeing the world—this aesthetic judgment—does not, however, represent “change.” Rather, it is a throwback to a century-old way of thinking and seeing. If it is not, in itself, a legacy of eugenics, then it is certainly a legacy of the kind of aesthetic reasoning that makes eugenics possible.

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Featured image: A. R. Gurrey Jr., from The Surf Riders of Hawaii, ca. 1914, is in the public domain. Accessed January 6, 2025. Image has been cropped.