Civil War

Via questionnaires aimed at documenting black soldiers’ physical characteristics, the USSC “created reams of data purporting to show that Black people were innately interior,” reports “that stabilized the racialist ideology that had justified Black people’s enslavement in the first place.” By positing a medical argument about Black inferiority, the USSC “assigned scientific authority to medical case studies that provided evidence to stabilize the racial order after emancipation.” In so doing, by placing statistics about facial categories in the hands of male doctors, it “obfuscated women’s work,” and denied women a platform in the USSC (Downs, 134-135).