The Mysterious Eugenics of Aesthetic Taste

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.

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...