The remnants of race science : UNESCO and economic development in the Global South

"In standard histories, shifts in racial thought after World War II are described as a North Atlantic project of abandoning false scientific ideas about race in response to the Holocaust. Redeeming Race reveals how this was in fact a much more complex project-often led by scientists from the global South. At stake in this shift to antiracism in science, this book argues, was the issue of how to redeem and disassociate the study of society and human variation from its fraught connections with the violence of European colonial conquest and dispossession. The book examines this shift by tracing the history of UNESCO's antiracism initiatives after 1945, illuminating an international campaign that sought to educate people worldwide about the differences between conceptions of race anchored in science and those mired in ideology. This campaign emphasized the plasticity and alterability of racial groups and, in its focus on racial improvement, was aligned with the UN system's emphasis on economic development and international health in the newly coined "Third World." So while new thinking stood in stark contrast to the rigid conceptualizations of Mendelian eugenicists, it perpetuated projects of modernization, acculturation, and social hygiene that proliferated in the southern hemisphere during the twentieth century."