Not Just Against Overpopulation: White Supremacy in Population Control Initiatives

ABSTRACT Despite extensive scholarship on mid‐twentieth‐century global family planning, the motivations of American elites in launching these initiatives in Asia, Latin America, and Africa remain debated. Based on archival research, this paper reveals that these programs were driven by a racial ideology rooted in white supremacist anxieties, intrinsically tied to fears about demographic changes. Elites framed “non‐white” people as lacking rational capacity, creating both the urgency and legitimacy for interventions aimed at controlling their growth. By tracing how narratives evolved—from early fears of racial degeneration and race suicide to the eugenics movement and the application of the Demographic Transition Model—this paper argues that the global population control campaign was not primarily a response to overpopulation. Instead, it aimed to limit the growth of “non‐white” population as a means of consolidating white supremacy.