Cuvier’s posthumous dissection of Baartman enacted scientific racism on her body

Evidence

Sometime in late December 1815, Baartman died, perhaps of pneumonia. No Black woman was the subject of more obituaries in Parisian newspapers in the nineteenth century than Sarah Baartman. Cuvier secured her corpse and brought her to his laboratory. He removed her clothes, cracked open her chest wall, removed and studied all of her major organs. Cuvier spread her legs, studied her buttocks, and cut out her genitals, setting them aside for preservation. After Cuvier and his team of scientists finished their scientific rape, they boiled off the rest of Baartman’s flesh. They reassembled the bones into a skeleton. Cuvier then added her remains to his world-famous collection. In his report, he claimed to have “never seen a human head more resembling a monkey’s than hers.” The Khoi people of South Africa, he concluded, were more closely related to the ape than to the human. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 369

Categorization

• XREF: Perfect test case for the reader’s hypothesis: does the racist idea (Cuvier’s polygenesis beliefs) precede the policy/act here? Cuvier’s dissection is better read as racist power exercising itself on a body — the act comes first, the ‘monkey’ label validates it. Direct evidence for the Kendi inversion.
• QUESTION: The reader wants to test the inversion against a case where ideas seem to precede policy. Cuvier’s fixed beliefs clearly existed before the dissection — but the dissection itself reads as an act of domination, not the application of a prior conclusion. Worth interrogating whether ‘racial science’ is ever truly disinterested knowledge-production or always already power.
• DEFINE: ‘Scientific rape’ is Kendi’s term for the dissection; worth holding onto as a category name for the colonial extraction of Black bodies for science.