When Doctors Invented “Black Race”

Delivered. at Black bodies and white doctors. Racial Prejudice Factory, XIX^e-XX^e CenturiesDelphine Peretti Curtis takes a meticulous dive into the heart of medical and scientific archives. It shows how science has invented the black race and the false prejudices that can persist.

In fact, from the eighteenth^e century and the discovery of new peoples, vivid controversies between polygenists and monogenists; Scientists seek to determine whether there is one or more species of humans. Then the Enlightenment, contemporaries of the slave trade, invented races and placed them in a hierarchy. While the debate between nature and culture rages on, they value the white man as a model by which other peoples are judged. In this graph, Africans are gradually seen as the missing link between European man and ape. Scientists observe and measure corpses from all angles (skull, bones, hair, hair, smell, gender…) and dissect them to understand the mystery of the other.

Persistent stereotypes

Drawing on texts from the widely cited period, Delphine Peretti Cortes shows how science, sometimes of imaginary elements, made the bodies, cultures, and psychology of the peoples studied essential to the formation of stereotypes that were taken up and disseminated through political speeches, textbooks, dictionaries, and advertisements. The media and major colonial exhibitions.

Scientific discourse ends with the “service” of the colonial project, becoming ideological. Deepening research on the black race has both a political and a practical function, The historian writes. It is a matter of knowing the biological quality of the bodies, their resistance and their possible consequences. “ The goal of the Colonial Physicians, convinced of their “civilizing message”, was to preserve the health of the local workforce as well as the white race and to reduce interbreeding that might jeopardize the colonial enterprise.

“Blacks, men and women without distinction, will be “lazy“And the “Zombies“And the “lustful“And the “sensitive“And the “excessive“ And the “With peace of mind“, to name a few of the most common clichés. These defects are often seen as inherent in African nature and are therefore fixed. “ The biases that scholars have disseminated for more than a century and a half, and that questioning the concept of race after the Holocaust and developments in genetics will not be enough to completely eliminate it.

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