This essay revisits the drafting of the first UNESCO Statement on Race (1950) in order to reorient historical understandings of mid-twentieth-century anti-racism and science. Historians of science have primarily interpreted the UNESCO statements as an oppositional project led by anti-racist scientists from the North Atlantic and concerned with dismantling racial typologies, replacing them with population-based conceptions of human variation. Instead of focusing on what anti-racist scientists opposed, this article highlights the futures they imagined and the applied social-science projects that anti-racist science drew from and facilitated. The scientific experts who participated in drafting the first UNESCO Statement on Race played important roles in late colonial, post-colonial and international projects designed to modernize, assimilate and improve so-called backward communities - typically indigenous or Afro-descendent groups in the global South. Such connections between anti-racist science and the developmental imaginaries of the late colonial period indicate that the transition from fixed racial typologies to sociocultural and psychological conceptualizations of human diversity legitimated the flourishing of modernization discourses in the Cold War era. In this transition to an economic-development paradigm, 'race' did not vanish so much as fragment into a series of finely tuned and ostensibly anti-racist conceptions that offered a moral incentive for scientific elites to intervene in the ways of life of those deemed primitive.

T he Open Conversations section is a new format for Isis. "Diversifying the Discipline or Disciplining Diversity?" is a conversation among seven scholars that has been edited by Projit Mukharji and myself, with some of our own thoughts contributed to frame and introduce the various themes and threads that emerged in these exchanges. Each contributor was asked to respond to a set of questions about a proposed plan from the Editorial Board of Isis to collect demographic information about those who submit articles to the journal. After the initial round, the contributors were all asked to respond to at least two other pieces in a follow-up reflection. Projit and I then wove all these together into this set of exchanges.

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This essay outlines the various analytical frameworks related to the history of race science that contribute to a “Latin” intellectual culture and tradition. In addition to defining Latinity as applied to the history of science, this article examines the troubled relationship between Latin American history and histories of science characterized as global. Similarly, it explores intellectual linkages across the Global South regarding racial mixture and the legacy of colonialism. It concludes by considering how a Latin perspective can illuminate the continued hegemony of ideas and scientific practices originating in North America and northern Europe.

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