Eugenicist pseudoscience was used to justify colonial racial segregation and pay discrimination

Evidence

Another clear example of eugenicist thinking penetrating colonial circles is provided by two articles that appeared in La Revue Indigene-a colonial journal devoted to “native affairs”-on the eve of World War I. The first article reported on the latest findings of the Eugenics Society: that “children of mixed parentage resemble most the parent in whose original habitat they are born and raised.” This meant that French-Indochinese children were “destined to return rapidly to the Indochinese type.” And the article concluded, “Is it because they have known this law for a long time that the English have avoided in general metissage in the colonies?” (“La science et les metis”). Another article by French colonial employees argued that no Indochinese could acquire the requisite degree of civilization to be admitted to the colonial service at the same pay as Europeans. As proof, the signatories cited “the regression which takes place when descendants of metis intermarry”; they “return slowly but surely to the inferior origin” (“Lettre des Amicales”). — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 1280

Categorization

• SEED: The claim that mixed-race children regress to the ‘inferior origin’ — a pseudo-biological argument deployed to deny equality to educated colonials — could anchor an essay on how supposedly scientific racial law was reverse-engineered to serve administrative pay and hierarchy decisions.
• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s core interest: how republican civilization doctrine in French West Africa carried within it race-based exclusion logic that ran against its universalist claims.