Race, Racism, and Antiracism: UNESCO and the Politics of Presenting Science to the Postwar Public

Abstract

In December 1949, with Holocaust still raw, immediate memory, an international group of scholars gathered in Paris to author final authoritative rebuttal to Nazi-style racism. Organized under auspices of United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), project reflected postwar liberal optimism about power of internationalism and science itself to prevent human tragedy, as well as collective sense of remorse. Just thirty years earlier, according to project director, Europeans could still regard race prejudice as phenomenon that only affected areas on margin of civilization. The war had been a sudden and rude awakening. Like many contemporary social scientists, project directors believed that Nazism, and more generally, had thrivefd] on scientifically false ideas and . . . ignorance. Education as remedy for was liberal article of faith shared by many scientists, as well as many of American and European functionaries in UNESCO. Charged by United Nations with creating programme of disseminating facts designed to remove . . . racial prejudice, UNESCO leaders proudly, and somewhat naively, declared in 1950 that UNESCO now had the will and means to make available to everyone achievements of science.1 For science, they believed, had already produced correct antiracist knowledge about race when it traded in old scientific racism of cataloguing, and occasionally fabricating, innate racial differences for new paradigm emphasizing an environmental and genetic understanding of human variation.2 Although many scientists remained blind to subtle permeating