Race, Anthropology, and the American Public

What Is Race? UNESCO, mass communication and human genetics in the early 1950s

“…The 31-page booklet The Races of Mankind (Benedict and Weltfish, 1943) – originally ‘designed to fit a serviceman’s pocket’ – was illustrated with humorous line drawings by New Masses cartoonist Ad Reinhardt. 25 Prepared in collaboration with a committee of the American Association of Scientific Workers, which included Dunn and Otto Klineberg, The Races of Mankind was one of a collection of educational volumes published by the US Public Affairs Committee designed to convey ‘in inexpensive form’ research on economic and social problems specifically in relation to American policy (Teslow, 2014: 246). The Races of Mankind was enormously successful – by 1945 it had been distributed in 750,000 copies to schools, churches, synagogues and other civic organizations – and became the basis of first a major exhibition, then a short film, The Brotherhood of Man (1947), then a 50-page commercial book In Henry’s Backyard (1948) (Teslow, 2014: 251).…”

“…strongly emphasized the perils of commonplace views (‘Race can be a dangerous word’), and the capacity of science to correct the untutored prejudices held by the public (‘If we can use in our own actions and thinking what may be called the scientific method, we shall have taken a short step towards clarifying the confused ideas in current circulation’) (UNESCO, 1952c: 6 and 71). The identification of Nazi racial doctrine as the principal target of the campaign allowed UNESCO to side-step the contentious issue of civil rights in the USA, the UN’s most powerful member (Hazard, 2012: 61; Teslow, 2014). 28…”

“…Brattain, 2007; Gil-Riano, 2014; Gormley, 2009). One path, articulated in the 1950 statement on race and supported especially by sociologists and cultural anthropologists, was to shift attention away from the term ‘race’, and to focus on an exclusively ‘social’ realm of culturally determined ‘ethnic groups’ (UNESCO, 1952b; Teslow, 2014). Another, in a formulation by biologists and physical anthropologists, was to limit the scope of the term ‘race’ and claim that it was a biological concept that should not be confounded with national, religious, or cultural groupings (UNESCO, 1952b: 11).…”

“… 25. All of my information about the Benedict–Weltfish collaborations derives from Teslow (2014: ch. 6), who offers a detailed account of the reception of Races of Mankind and its derivatives.…”