How Historians' Beliefs about Race Have Influenced Histories of Racial Thought

Abstract

'Race/ Ashley Montagu proclaimed just before midcentury in his landmark study Man's Most Dangerous Myth, a term for a problem which is created by special types of social conditions and by such types of social conditions alone. concept of race, he went on, was false and misleading, just as previous eras7 fascination with pixies, satyrs, and Aryans had proven. In short, the concept was mythical.1 For those in the humanities writing in the postwar period, Montagu's claims, and those of subsequent theorists, encouraged the view that race was a social construction. By implication it made sense for scholars of race to investigate the social institutions that produced it: court decisions, congressional hearings, community associations, craft unions and the like all served as the focal points of their inquiries.2 Those familiar with Howard Winant and Michael Omi's seminal study, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (1994), will know that the work's pivotal chapter is titled The Racial State.3 Science and its attendant disciplines, while never completely absent from this immense literature, have nevertheless been accorded a marginal position within it: casualties of a belief that from 1945 on such fields had little of importance to say on the subject, and what they did have to say was certainly no more valid than opinions found in other domains. When historians of race discuss the UNESCO Statement