![]() ![]() Within a year, scholarly criticism forced UNESCO to assemble a second gathering to rewrite the statement. Project directors discovered that little consensus existed beyond agreement about the wrongness of Nazism, and scholars who had begun to challenge the scientific basis of the race concept itself proved to be in an increasingly embattled minority. ![]() 4īut the statement project, which involved more than one hundred scientists directly and many more indirectly, as well as various diplomats and UN member states, soon became mired in transnational scientific and political controversies and ultimately, and perhaps predictably, fell short of its ambitious goals. The resulting statement went so far as to declare that race was more “social myth” than “biological fact,” and the term might be dispensed with altogether. 3 Accordingly, the first project assembled experts in Paris to “define the concept of race” itself. 2 Although many scientists remained blind to the subtle racism permeating the predominantly Western scientific establishment, a large number were newly committed to “breaking the bioscientific tie of race, blood, and culture” that had enabled wartime genocide and now threatened postwar unity. Charged by the United Nations with creating a “programme of disseminating scientific facts designed to remove … racial prejudice,” UNESCO leaders proudly, and somewhat naïvely, declared in 1950 that UNESCO now had “the will and the means to make available to everyone the achievements of science.” 1 For science, they believed, had already produced the correct antiracist knowledge about race when it traded in the old “scientific racism” of cataloguing, and occasionally fabricating, innate racial differences for a new paradigm emphasizing an environmental and genetic understanding of human variation. Just thirty years earlier, according to a project director, “Europeans could still regard race prejudice as a phenomenon that only affected areas on the margin of civilization.” The war had been “a sudden and rude awakening.” Like many contemporary social scientists, the project directors believed that Nazism, and racism more generally, had “thrive on scientifically false ideas and … ignorance.” Education as a remedy for racism was a liberal article of faith shared by many scientists, as well as many of the American and European functionaries in UNESCO. Organized under the auspices of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the project reflected postwar liberal optimism about the power of internationalism and science itself to prevent human tragedy, as well as a collective sense of remorse. I n D ecember 1949, with the H olocaust still a raw, immediate memory, an international group of scholars gathered in Paris to author a final authoritative rebuttal to Nazi-style scientific racism. ![]()
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