Eugenics and immigration anxieties revived racist stereotypes of Africans in the 1920s

Evidence

Both the apparent failure of freed slaves in the West Indies to prosper after emancipation, in the 183o’s, and the “scientific” findings of French physical anthropology after 1850, encouraged the image of the lazy African; the wartime use of colonial labor combined with the growth of eugenic thinking and the flood of new immigrants in the metropole gave racist stereotypes another lease on life in the 192o’s. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 746

Categorization

• XREF: The revival of racial stereotypes via eugenics and immigration anxieties parallels the interwar return of scientific racism across Europe and the US, echoing themes in histories of eugenics and anti-immigrant politics.