2007/12/01 by M. Brattain, Michelle Brattain · 14 citations
Social Sciences · #Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy
paper · pdf · doi:10.1086/ahr.112.5.1386
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. 3 Accordingly, the first project assembled experts in Paris to "define the concept of race" itself. 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. 4 But 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. 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 scientific racism, I am not in any way suggesting that racism was somehow removed from science. Indeed, I argue precisely the opposite below. However, there was a qualitative change in the way that anthropologists, sociologists, biologists, and geneticists looked at human variation after World War I, which became the dominant view in the interwar period. In the social sciences, there was a greater emphasis on environment as a cause of human variation, intergroup relations, and prejudice. In the biological sciences, scholarship shifted toward a more complex understanding of human inheritance rooted in population genetics. Although some scholars continued to promote a biologically determinist, hierarchical understanding of race, they moved from the center to the margins of academic communities. On these intellectual shifts, see