In the early-twentieth century, the United States government attempted to deworm poor, “white trash” children across the rural South and Appalachia. They theorized that poor, white folks were sickly, uneducated, superstitious figures, and that their “primitive” sanitary and pedagogical practices had created a breed of children who, acting like animals, picked up hookworms. These worms gave them soft minds and bloated bellies, made them tired, and the worm-induced anemia made them perform strange practices, causing the “‘dirt-eating,’ ‘resin-chewing,’ and even some of the proverbial laziness of the poorer classes of the white population.” They particularly obsessed over white children, “the ‘puny children,’ the ‘runts,’ springing from sturdy stock.” They did not ignore Black children but blamed them: through Black influence on “white trash” kids, even white folks had started leaning into African diasporic religious practices like conjure and hoodoo. This Black superstition, they argued, disabled white children, keeping them in “the dark ages” by “stunting the mentality of the children,” and thus making them susceptible to the very hookworms that made runts out of “pure Anglo-Saxon stock.” This was, zoologists assured, fantastic news. The state sponsored agricultural scientists and zoologists to work with runts, nurture them, study how to make them profitable. Finally, with some extra care from the farmer, runts could easily become worthy of slaughtering.
This paper argues that the “hookworm crusades” of the early-twentieth century, at home and abroad, imagined disability in children through religious, racial, and animalized ideas. Namely, they saw racialized religious formations—“superstition” imagined as Black and mainline Christianity imagined as white—as routinized animal behaviors, a useful biopolitical mechanism in sorting the sick from the healthy, disabled from the able-bodied, costly from the productive. Industrial agriculture created a large proliferation of runts because farmers bred sows to produce larger litters as frequently as possible, resulting in some being born smaller and weaker. “Runt” is not an ontological category, though, but a performative one; runts were not defined by their biology or even birthweight but rather defined by the assistance required of the farmer for the pig. Similarly, state zoologists argued that disabled, white children simply needed more close care by religious schools and churches. Scientists worked to develop curriculum that could teach "runty" children about religion and sanitation simultaneously and even handed out thymol and other aid at Christian churches to enforce attendance. The true cure for hookworm’s debilitating results was not thymol, but white, heteropatriarchal, Christianity; enforcing a religious separatism that demonized Africana religious practices and heralded mainline Christianity became state-sanctioned medical practices for purifying disabled children into hard-working Appalachians and Southerners. Such medical ableism, then, upheld racial and religious discrimination. Rendering white trash children as disabled, as runts, allowed the state to continue imagining them as still white biologically, but simply afflicted with a racialized disability that could be cured with religion. Disabling rural children meant upholding their whiteness. Circulating images of “puny, lazy, little runt[s]” aroused affects of sympathy and nationalism beneath the disgust of showcasing bodies deemed abject, in that the state assured that such debilitation could be medically and spiritually sanctified. And upon disability’s sanctification, even “white trash” children with hookworm could become worthy of slaughtering in the factories, coal fields, and cotton mills popping up in rural America.
To make this argument, I place religion and disability studies in collaboration with Black studies, queer theory, and animal studies. As scholars in Black studies and queer studies have especially shown, the optimistic futurity of the imagined child has never been granted to queer and Black children. Scholars like Jules Gill-Peterson, Tiffany Lethabo King, and Dorothy Roberts have argued that families and children deemed beyond the proper purview of “the family” and “the child” were surveilled, policed, incarcerated, medically harmed, disallowed privacy, and often subject to violence at the hands of the state. This paper helps argue that some children were never articulated through the discourse of “the child” as being angels of middleclass domesticity, but were rather sacrificed at the altar of an imagined (white, straight, Christian, able-bodied) child. That is, like the animals these zoologists studied, disabled children became meat. Animal studies helps discuss meat as rendering, as a re-presentation of an animal, a transcorporeality rendered knowable and literally consumable via markers like race, class, sexuality, and disability. But making something (or someone) into a piece of meat is hard work. Following scholars like Gabriel Rosenberg, Alex Blanchette, and Carol Adams, this paper showcases the work it took to render certain populations of children disabled, Christian, and then the meat of industrial capitalism in that order. Disability studies, then, helpfully elucidates how the imagined “normal body” is fictive, always the body rather than a body, as Vivian Sobchack writes, and one predicated not on accurately describing human bodies as they are experienced but serving to depreciate bodies deemed beyond the norm, following Lennard J. Davis’ work on ab/normality and disability. This paper brings an interdisciplinary analysis of religion, disability, and childhood, to showcase how the scientific management of flesh sharpened in zoology through scholarship on runts became further weaponized against certain populations of children aimed at extracting as much resources and labor as possible from a body and its surrounding ecology.
Any interdisciplinary analysis of children, disability, and religion must grapple with the racialized parameters surrounding who is allowed to hold certain categories—both “child” and “disabled”—and who is barred from the possibilities of public life entirely through state policing. Black children and queer children were disqualified from counting as children for the state, and poor white children represented the perforated boundaries of citizen and subject. As we see the state presently seek to exclude certain children from public life altogether, this paper helps uncover the scaffolding that upholds such nauseating violence enacted through legislature. Further, it showcases how both religion and disability functioned under capitalist extraction. While only some of us are targeted to be legislated out of public life, all of us live under the capitalist articulations of the body that seek to debilitate so many.
This paper traces disability, religion, and animality through the category of the “runt” in twentieth-century America. It argues that the US government saw the racialized category of “superstition” as inherently debilitating for white children, and that such superstition rendered white children incapable of possessing the laboring body necessary for industrializing the rural South and Appalachia. Zoologists likened “white trash” children to the “runt of the litter” in pigs and theorized that their runtiness came from contact with Black religion: conjure and hoodoo disabled white child by giving them hookworm. Thankfully, runts could be rendered productive if treated like sickly animals. To shift from sickly animals to able-bodied children, though, required religion. Narrating the state’s medical zoology around children unearths new histories of religion and disability, particularly how the state came to sacrifice many actual children at the altar of the potential economic gains imagined in the futurity of the child.