The Orthodoxy Had an Address: How UNESCO Manufactured the Consensus Wade and Reich Confront

The social scientists’ official view of race is designed to support the political view that genetics cannot possibly be the reason why human societies differ—the answer must lie exclusively in differing human cultures and the environment that produced them. The social anthropologist Franz Boas established the doctrine that human behavior is shaped only by culture and that no culture is superior to any other. From this point of view it follows that all humans are essentially interchangeable apart from their cultures, and that more complex societies owe their greater strength or prosperity solely to fortunate accidents such as that of geography.

The orthodoxy maintains that the average genetic differences among people grouped according to today’s racial terms are so trivial when it comes to any meaningful biological traits that those differences can be ignored. The orthodoxy goes further, holding that we should be anxious about any research into genetic differences among populations. The concern is that such research, no matter how well-intentioned, is located on a slippery slope that leads to the kinds of pseudoscientific arguments about biological difference that were used in the past to try to justify the slave trade, the eugenics movement and the Nazis’ murder of six million Jews. I have deep sympathy for the concern that genetic discoveries could be misused to justify racism. But as a geneticist I also know that it is simply no longer possible to ignore average genetic differences among “races.”

In 1997, Akira Iriye characterized UNESCO as a hub for cultural internationalism in the wake of World War II, and recent research has confirmed the impression of the organization as an excellent prism reflecting ways of thinking that became popular on a global scale and that it has sometimes even served as the initiating and powerful promotor of concepts that became popular and widely used, such as ‘world heritage’ and ‘global citizenship’. In this article, I have sought to demonstrate another example of the proactive role of UNESCO. The articles has focused on the organization’sefforts to launch a program supposed to combat racial inequality, which is not mentioned by Iriye, but which according to other scholars, placed the organization in the middle of a dispute in international scientific circles over the correct definition of the concept of race. Thus, in the article I have combined Iriye’s focus on the importance of cultural internationalism for global peace-making and UNESCO’s important role with the studies of the organization’s work within the field of race as well as my archival findings in order to draw a conclusion as to whether its showdown with the race concept had a global impact. What we see is that, from 1950 to 1967, UNESCO managed to issue four statements of race formulated by some of the world’s leading yet simultaneously carefully-chosen scientists, most Western and all stressing human equality. The organization’s preference for social scientists rather than physical anthropologists at the same time made the organization a centre of a dispute organized around the question of whether the natural or social sciences should take precedence in determining the origins of human difference, of social division, and the attribution of value. Outside of UNESCO headquarters, the statements for the same reasons caused severe criticism in a time still characterized by European colonialism, American segregation, and South African apartheid policies. Only on one occasion, in 1964, was a researcher chosen despite being overtly critical towards the organization’s work and only in 1967 could the panel of scientists be characterized as truly global in its scope and composition. UNESCO also issued a series of publications that were able to infiltrate national educational systems and which represented a steady bombardment of publications that at least physical anthropologists had to deal with. Critique of their content nonetheless only added to public awareness of the organization’s work. As the cases on segregation reached the U.S. Supreme Court, the outcome of UNESCO’s race program would also play a role. This article shows that experts affiliated with the organization were on several occasions brought in as expert witnesses and that the statements on race highlighted as the newest available research, paving the 16 P. DUEDAHL way towards the eradication of state-approved segregation in the U.S., whereas South Africa chose to withdraw from UNESCO. In sum, the statements and the authority with which the experts spoke had an impact and came to play a major part in imposing the new post-war view of man in several countries. However, it is only after 1960 that UNESCO’s cultural internationalism within the field of race can be said to focus on racism as a problem that had to be solved on a global scale. The main reasons for this was that discussions within academic circles ahead of UNESCO’s race efforts had mainly been going on among Western scholars, that UNESCO failed to locate non-Western scholars, and that dealing with racism was perceived as most urgent in the U.S. and South Africa. Also the expensiveness of translating UNESCO’s findings into all languages, the difficulties of promoting the content in a way that would have an impact on a larger group of people, and the lack of control over the many national environments that received and were supposed to distribute news from UNESCO made a difference. Only after a range of anti-Semitic incidents, the demands of a number of new Asian and African member states, and pressure from the UN, did the initiative gradually change. Altogether, it proved to be more difficult and to take a considerably longer time than initially imagined by UNESCO to turn a few scholar’s idea of race into one with a truly global appeal and impact.