French eugenics framed Africans as inferior yet requiring better care

Evidence

The burgeoning pro-natalist and eugenics movements in France cut two ways for Africans. Both doctrines encouraged the idea that these workers were inferior to white workers, and therefore it was France’s duty and right to coerce them into productivity. But these same doctrines also insisted, in theory at least, that France’s African workers now had to be more adequately fed, paid, and vaccinated, so they would grow more numerous and more robust. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 748

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: The double-edged logic of eugenics parallels the tension between coercion and protection in other racialized labor regimes.

Related

• French pro-natalism and eugenics simultaneously justified coercion and mandated better care for Africans (similarity 0.94)
• Interwar eugenics, hygiene, and pronatalism were older discourses that newly gained state backing. (similarity 0.81)
• Even race-regeneration concern never made French officials question forced labor itself (similarity 0.81)
• Industrial superiority convinced the French that they monopolized civilization (similarity 0.79)
• West African manpower scarcity drove deeper French intervention in African labor (similarity 0.79)
• French respect for African custom was justified by biological race-regeneration thinking tied to eugenics (similarity 0.78)
• African inclusion demands triggered stricter racial boundary-drawing by French officials (similarity 0.78)
• Eugenicist pseudoscience was used to justify colonial racial segregation and pay discrimination (similarity 0.78)
• Racist beliefs about African laziness justified forced labor as necessary schooling (similarity 0.78)
• Coerced labor made Africans hate work and hurt France’s long-term economic goals (similarity 0.78)