Colonial science blamed slave wet-nurses for creole men’s lust

Evidence

Michel Etienne Descourtilz, a naturalist who lived in Saint-Domingue in the late 1790s, proposed a more sinister theory for why creole men were drawn to slave women—whom he called “animated machines”—and threw themselves into relationships driven by base instinct rather than reason. … Black women fed “corrupted milk” to the white boys, and this “pernicious drink” communicated the “germ” of “impudent desires.” Creole mothers were to blame for instilling in their boys a lust for slave women by handing them over to them at a young age rather than breast-feeding them themselves as they should have. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 246

Categorization

• DEFINE: Shows how a naturalist constructed a pseudo-biological causal chain — corrupted milk transmitting desire — to explain and justify race relations.
• XREF: connects to: Colonial ‘scientific study’ projected the very savagery it claimed to find — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 887; Colonial erotic literature fantasized slave lasciviousness for four centuries — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 402; Nineteenth-century sexual morality taught mistresses to blame enslaved women for rape — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 112 (+5 more)
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Colonial ‘scientific study’ projected the very savagery it claimed to find — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 887; Colonial erotic literature fantasized slave lasciviousness for four centuries — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 402; Nineteenth-century sexual morality taught mistresses to blame enslaved women for rape — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 112 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Colonial feminization of subject men aimed at effeminizing and disempowering them #complicates (0.73) — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 150