In this month’s episode of “everything is racist,” the American Medical Association (AMA) has declared body mass index (BMI) discriminatory.
On June 14, the largest council of doctors in America passed a new policy critiquing the use of BMI as an indicator of metabolic health because the current index “does not appropriately represent racial and ethnic minorities.”
“Our AMA recognizes,” the new guidelines state, “the issues with using body mass index (BMI) as a measurement because: (a) of the eugenics behind the history of BMI, (b) of the use of BMI for racist exclusion, and (c) BMI cutoffs are based on the imagined ideal Caucasian and does not consider a person’s gender or ethnicity.”
The AMA doesn’t describe BMI’s history with eugenics, but a post by the Australian Broadcast Corporation explained the index was first created by Belgian mathematician Adolphe Quetelet who set out to find “l’homme moyen,” or the “average man.” Francis Galton, a prominent eugenicist who coined the term “eugenics” in 1883, expanded on Quetelet’s ideas of the “average man” when developing his own theories, according to an article in the Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research.
Eugenicist Origins of Abortion
If even a loose connection to eugenics, however, should warrant the abandonment of incumbent medical practices, the AMA might reconsider its own approach to abortion. Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was a champion of the eugenics movement who established the “Negro Project” to control or eliminate the black population. It was also the Nazis who
