Weirdly, as the example of the Zong demonstrates, insuring slaves wasn't actually lucrative for these companies. The assholes who took out such policies also tended to be the type of assholes who killed their own slaves. To make things worse, it's not like great records existed of which slave was which, so policyholders often cashed in when any of their slaves died, whether or not they were the specific person on the insurance form. But the practice still continued right up until the Civil War, with even longstanding insurance companies offering policies until as late as 1856. In 2002, a lawsuit was filed against Aetna, along with other companies, claiming they should pay reparations for their part in slavery. It was dismissed two years later.

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If a woman or man had genetic defects, Sanger advocated they be literally sent to a farm somewhere and segregated from the rest of the population for the entire lives ... unless they were medically sterilized. She didn't want any more "hordes of people ... who have done absolutely nothing to advance the race an iota ... Such human weeds clog up the path, drain the energies and the resources of this little earth." Somehow this doesn't look like a quote you'd find at the top of your "I think I'm pregnant, now what?" pamphlet.

Library of CongressDang, that's rough even by 1920s standards, when eugenics was the answer for every problem above "misplaced keys."

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Now, Georgetown had sold off individual slaves here and there for decades, but they'd never before considered a full-on human blowout sale. But wait! Several of the priests at the university objected to sending those people down to plantations. Except they weren't so much worried about the brutal working conditions as the possibility that those filthy Southerners might try to convert slaves from Christianity to ... different Christianity. Basically, the fear was the slaves might no longer be allowed to practice Catholicism, and would instead become Protestant.

Maryland Province Archives/Georgetown UniversityIf you can get past the facny-pantsiest writing the 1830s had to offer, you might note that his sense of charity didn't extend to not trading humans like baseball cards.

Of course, religious concerns are rarely more powerful than monetary ones, so the slaves were promptly sold and the institution saved. Georgetown could get back to charging $24,112 more than the national average for their majority-white university to bless the world with that guy who voiced an anthropomorphic raccoon. To date, we've found over 8,000 descendants of former Georgetown slaves. No word on whether they're Catholic, Protestant, or *gasp* non-denominational.

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That's because over the course of America's history, environmentalism in general and the Sierra Club in particular have been shockingly racist. This has included longtime opposition to immigration, and even support of "population control" for nonwhites. After all, only pasty-ass people can be trusted to really care about the environment. In 1988, John Tanton, a former Sierra Club national population committee chairman, asked: "What will happen when [the white population] goes into minority status, and the groups that comprise the new coalition majorities don't share the same [environmental] values?" All this despite the fact that white people tend to profit off environmental disasters, while people of color suffer. Weird how that works out!

FredDlbel743/Wikimedia CommonsSometimes you have to stop and admire the trees between compiling a resume that Richard Spencer probably fantasizes about when he masturbates.

And Tanton isn't some one-off weirdo. The Sierra Club's founder, John Muir, often talked about "lazy sambos" and "dirty Indians," and wrote in 1901 that white people shouldn't be afraid to visit national parks because "as to Indians, most of them are dead or civilized into useless innocence." Some environmentalists didn't even bother to blame their racism on environmental concerns. In fact, one of the biggest early environmentalists was a guy named Madison Grant, who both helped launch the national parks movement and wrote a book called The Passing Of The Great Race. This tome was so goddamned racist that Hitler claimed it as his "Bible." Grant was a cookie-cutter white supremacist shithead who happened to also really like to spend time in parks, smelling pretty flowers and watching birds.

More recently, some environmentalist organizations like Sierra Club are (finally) grappling with their pasts. It just took, you know, over a century to get there.

Jordan Breeding also writes for a whole mess of other people, the twitter, and a weird amount of gas station bathrooms.

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