Our findings suggest that such a backdoor-to-eugenics process may be underway. First, a content analysis of news articles published between 1985 and 2008 revealed that articles about race, genetics, and health in general, and more specifically articles resembling our Backdoor Vignette, which focused on a specific health-related genetic difference between blacks and whites, increased significantly over the study period. These findings cohere with those of Morning (2008), who found that messages such as those described by Duster largely account for the reemergence of the subject of race in high school biology textbooks in the 1990s. Remarkably, indirect discussions of race in the context of medical disorders (i.e., backdoor messages) appeared in 0 percent of textbooks from 1952 to 1962 but appeared in 93 percent of textbooks from 1993 to 2002. Moreover, as expected from Duster’s perspective, we found that articles about race, genetics, and health were significantly less likely to mention racism, to raise ethical issues, or to raise questions about the validity of genetic causation than articles that did not discuss health.
