Monday, January 09, 2023

Obsessed with oral health lately?

"Poor Teeth" by Sarah Smarsh, who got the most blessed dental genetics in adulthood, but still writes about others who didn't: 

 https://getpocket.com/explore/item/poor-teeth

"Upper-class supremacy is nothing new. A hundred years ago, the US Eugenics Records Office not only targeted racial minorities but ‘sought to demonstrate scientifically that large numbers of rural poor whites were genetic defectives,’ as the sociologist Matt Wray explains in his book Not Quite White:White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness (2006). The historian and civil rights activist W E B du Bois, an African American, wrote in his autobiography Dusk of Dawn (1940) that, growing up in Massachusetts in the 1870s, ‘the racial angle was more clearly defined against the Irish than against me. It was a matter of income and ancestry more than colour.’ Martin Luther King, Jr made similar observations and was organising a poor-people’s march on Washington at the time of his murder in 1968. Such marginalisation can make you either demonise the system that shuns you or spurn it as something you never needed anyway. When I was a kid and no one in the family had medical or dental insurance, Dad pointed out that those industries were criminal – a sweeping analysis that, whether accurate or not, suggested we were too principled to support the racket rather than too poor to afford it."  

~ S. Smarsh


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