To combat the racist stereotypes that persist against black women and men in French society, we must return to their origins. From the end of the 18th ^century to the middle of the 20th ^century , medical literature elevated racial prejudices about black bodies to the rank of scientific truth: intellectual inferiority, physical resistance, predominance of emotions or even hypersexuality.

Delphine Peiretti-Courtis's work constitutes a first in-depth investigation into how this question was treated in the specialized writings of the period: medical dictionaries and treatises, monographs on human races, reports of colonial missions. She thus documents the appearance in French medical sciences of racial theories applied to African populations, then their development before their decline. She sheds light on the processes of racialization of the body, gender and sexuality of the peoples of Africa. In a society where science gradually replaced religion as the source of knowledge, the racialist schema developed by scientists was then reinforced by political power to serve the colonial project: the body became a tool of colonization.

By highlighting the mechanisms of the formation of stereotypes as well as their progressive contestation, this work allows us to understand how prejudices have become scientific “knowledge”, anchored in the minds for a long time, even after their complete invalidation.