In the years following World War II, a group of prominent social scientists sought to discredit the profoundly destructive idea that race is an immutable biological fact. The Nazi genocide had notoriously relied on rigid “race thinking,” and this cohort of scholars—among them Jewish anthropologists Ashley Montagu and Claude Lévi-Strauss (British American and French, respectively), and Black American sociologist E. Franklin Frazier—hoped to seal that brutality firmly in the past by offering the world an authoritative alternative understanding of race. The group came together in 1949 in Paris at the request of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which had been founded three years earlier as the educational and cultural arm of the newly established United Nations. The group’s work on the so-called “race question” culminated in the 1950 UNESCO Statement on Race.
Central to this document were two concepts: plasticity and educability. Drawing on the turn-of-the-century anti-racist work of German American anthropologist Franz Boas, the UNESCO statement theorized characteristics associated with race—including physical form—as subject to change, according to environmental factors, social influences, and genetic fluctuation. Relatedly, these scholars emphasized, humans have the capacity to learn and develop, such that misguided ideas about race can themselves be overcome. To many contemporary readers, these guiding concepts may feel familiar. Indeed, they form the basis today’s liberal anti-racism, which continues to bestow a progressive sheen on the idea that race is not fixed, as well as to promote education as a solution to the persistence of racism.
In her recent book, The Reeducation of Race: Jewishness and the Politics of Antiracism in Postcolonial Thought (Stanford University Press, 2023), literary scholar Sonali Thakkar explores this pivotal mid-century moment of racial formation to consider the implications of its enduring afterlife. Reading UNESCO’s 1950 Statement on Race alongside oft-quoted texts by anti-colonial writers like poet Aimé Césaire and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, Thakkar considers how racial plasticity and reeducation became core tenets of a new racial world order that, for all its insistence on closing the door on history, was not wholly discontinuous with the past. Indeed, although the authors of the UNESCO statement sought to enact what she calls an “antiracist pedagogical imperative”—producing a definition of race that would put “science in the service of human rights”—their orientation was nonetheless shaped by a commitment to the colonial order in which UN member states remained invested. What they ultimately put forward, Thakkar shows, was a blueprint for talking about anti-racism while bypassing questions of power.
Central to Thakkar’s work is an exploration of how mid-century thinkers theorized the convergences and divergences of racism, antisemitism, and colonialism. By generating new pathways for interrogating the relationships between Jewishness and Blackness in the context of postwar anti-racism, she equips us to better understand what’s at stake in the ways that racism and antisemitism are opposed in mainstream political discourse today. I spoke with Thakkar about contemporary campaigns to institutionalize definitions of identity-based oppression, the limits of scientific critiques of racism, and her ambivalence about education as an anti-racist tool. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Ben Ratskoff: There’s a wealth of work theorizing race and racism, but there is much less scholarly consideration of anti-racism—how it’s conceptualized and how it functions politically. What led you to start thinking critically about anti-racism?
Sonali Thakkar: I originally set out to write a book about migrants to Europe in the postwar period encountering the emerging Holocaust memory culture. I was interested in how Holocaust memory was deployed to assimilate certain migrants according to liberal visions of belonging, even as it was simultaneously called upon to insist on the unassimilable nature of others. For instance, Turkish Germans have long had to demonstrate their willingness to participate in German memory culture as a mark of their fitness for citizenship and cultural recognition. But that’s not so easy: Muslim Germans are often treated as impediments to German memory culture, stereotyped as antisemites and required to endure various kinds of remedial education, as the scholar Esra Özyürek shows in her book Subcontractors of Guilt. At the same time, there are people like the British Caribbean writer Caryl Phillips, who strongly identify with the Jewish experience of persecution because it resembles aspects of their own experience of racial stigma and suffering. I wanted to understand these splits and differences.
I started to look more closely at the early postwar period. I was struck that, in the wake of a world historical rupture for which race science was broadly understood as responsible, UNESCO undertook a global project to promote anti-racism. The reason for doing so was, of course, to try and root out the kind of racial thinking that had led to the Nazi Holocaust. But it was also an attempt to stabilize the terms of racial discourse. They wanted to clarify: This is what we think race is. This is what we think culture is. Here is this other language of “ethnic group” that we would like you to use. Yet the more they tried to fix racial terminologies, the more contradictions they introduced—and the more the incoherence of the entire project was revealed.
BR: I can’t help but think about the kind of definitional frenzy we’re in right now around antisemitism. There’s the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, the Nexus Document . . . Many people seem to feel that institutional definitions are a necessary tool in the struggle against antisemitism—that if we can pin down some essential meaning of antisemitism, we can effectively manage and regulate it. How can looking at UNESCO’s mid-century work help us evaluate the role of institutional definitions today?
ST: After World War II, new institutions of liberal governance, like the United Nations, sought to intervene in a question that was very live: How was the international order going to be remade? These institutions forcefully rejected the idea of race-as-essence that underpinned colonial ideologies—but, importantly, they still promoted an imperial world order. As W. E. B. Du Bois pointed out: The UN was a “plan for world government designed especially to curb aggression, but also to preserve imperial power and even extend and fortify it.” Rather than contend with questions of power and exploitation, UNESCO’s 1950 Statement on Race basically said, This too shall pass—that because of genetic fluctuation and hybridization, as well as other biological and social processes including migration, assimilation, and intermarriage, racial characteristics and categories will change with time. It was easier for the authors to imagine an end to race as they knew it than it was to interrogate the kinds of transformed political arrangements that an end to racism would entail.
This should sound a cautionary note for us today: Definitions—which stabilize terms and powerfully delimit what is sayable, and even what is thinkable—can function as alibis for certain forms of injustice. For instance, the IHRA definition is accompanied by examples that equate certain expressions of anti-Zionism with antisemitism and, in so doing, dangerously limit criticism of Zionism as a political ideology; we know that various bodies—including numerous states within the US, some European nations, and many universities and civil society organizations—are adopting or endorsing this definition specifically to restrict what can be said and studied, often owing to intense lobbying and political pressure.
BR: The idea that racism exists because of scientific misunderstandings about the nature of race is central to liberal common sense. As long as you don’t believe in “biological race,” the reasoning goes, you’re not racist. This logic derives significantly from the mid-century attempt to reject the kind of race thinking associated with Nazi eugenics and genocide. Can you say more about the role of Jewish social science in the project?
ST: The UNESCO statement is a document of Jewish politics in several ways. Most obviously, responding to Nazi antisemitism is the main rhetorical frame for the whole project. Several of the scientists who wrote the 1950 statement were Jewish, and their own experiences of antisemitism shaped their involvement in the project. This is borne out in material ways: For example, Claude Lévi-Strauss escaped Vichy France and his work with UNESCO was occasioned by his exile in the United States, which brought him into contact with a cohort of scientists who were thinking about race, including, notably, the anthropologist Franz Boas, himself a German Jew, who had immigrated to the United States amid growing antisemitism in his native country. What I find more important than the biographical facts of particular scientists’ lives, though, is the ways in which these scholars were drawing on concepts from Jewish social science—which the historian Mitchell Hart defines in his book Social Science and the Politics of Modern Jewish Identity, as “Jewish knowledge about contemporary [Jewish] social conditions.”
In fact, the very concept of racial plasticity that so influenced the 1950 statement is drawn from debates in early 20th century Jewish social science, particularly from Boas’s writing. In the early 1900s, Boas was working for the US Immigration Commission, assessing how to determine the assimilability—or lack thereof—of migrants arriving in the US from, among other places, eastern and southern Europe. Working against the grain of prevalent anthropological ideas about the invariability of certain kinds of racial traits, he claimed that within as short a span as a generation, people’s physical forms changed under the influence of this new environment (presumably owing to changes in climate and air, nutrition and hygiene, housing arrangements, and so on); and so, he argued, we should think about race as plastic rather than fixed. His methods were not so far off from those we associate with scientific racism: He was basically measuring heads, but with an anti-racist agenda. For Boas, who began his project working with Jewish immigrants, Jewishness was paradigmatically plastic. Wherever Jews have been, he contended, they have assimilated. This became an important prong of his later anti-Nazi activism. The more we can use these plastic capacities for assimilation, he maintained, the better we can contest racism.
UNESCO’s race project carried Boas’s thinking forward. So, while it’s true that UNESCO wanted to do the important work of saying that the era of scientific racism was over, they did, in fact, retain many characteristic assumptions of that era. Their statement does not quite say that there is no science of race, but rather that the science of race has been practiced by the wrong people: You lay people should understand that those things often described as racial differences are better understood as cultural or ethnic differences. We scientists are the ones who are actually able to understand what race really is. These scientists really did believe that all people are plastic—and that this is the paramount human capacity that will allow racial differences to change and so facilitate the overcoming of racial prejudice—but, crucially, for them, some people are more plastic than others.
BR: How did these scientists explain this uneven capacity for plasticity?
ST: The United Nations Human Rights Division asked the authors of the statement to stress equality as a value. When you trace the drafts, however, you can see that the authors are not quite willing to commit to a claim about the equality of all people: An early draft states that “all human beings of whatever race have always and everywhere shown themselves to be equally able to share in a common life,” but the amended final published statement says, “All normal human beings are capable of learning to share in a common life.” The authors replace equality with educability. This is a hedge: Rather than make a statement about equality in the present, foregrounding educability is a way of saying, With some transformation, we can perhaps get to equality. Plasticity is important; it is the capacity for change. But plasticity isn’t on its own sufficient. It has to be directed, managed, cultivated—and educability offers that.
BR: How were these ideas of plasticity and educability received?
ST: The 1950 statement was so controversial among scientists that UNESCO published a revised 1951 statement, which asserted that there is, after all, a certain undeniable, common sense understanding of race—that we know race when we see it. So the promise of plasticity is then withdrawn, even as it’s proffered. It is precisely this bait-and-switch that I think we can see Frantz Fanon engaging with in Black Skin, White Masks when he writes, in Richard Philcox’s translation, “The Jewishness of the Jew, however, can go unnoticed . . . He is a white man, and apart from some debatable features, he can pass undetected . . . Of course the Jews have been tormented—what am I saying?—They have been hunted, exterminated, and cremated, but these are just minor episodes in the family history.” To my mind, we have to situate this claim in light of his sense of how the promise of plasticity is differentially distributed. We might read him alongside Boas, who, in an earlier 20th-century moment, wrote about a Jewish capacity for changeability and assimilation, as well as about a “line of cleavage” between Black and white racial forms that makes Blackness more difficult to change or to assimilate. So, Boas’s account of Blackness as something that resists transformation, in contrast to the plasticity of Jewishness, actually exemplifies what Fanon would polemically critique in 1952: that Jewish people could assimilate into the white “family” in ways Black people could not.
BR: A lot of people think of Nazism as being structured around the idea of superior and inferior races. To a large extent, that’s true. But the notion of Jewish plasticity—which prewar Jewish social scientists held to be evidence that Jews could transcend their racial subordination—was, in fact, a part of Nazism. In a lot of Nazi racial ideology, the idea was actually that Jews were almost this anti-race—they were mixed-ness incarnate—and that’s precisely why targeting them through domination and exploitation was ineffective. They could not be reduced to a slave labor force; they had to be exterminated.
ST: Absolutely. The intellectual historian Amos Morris-Reich traces this in his work: how the prewar arguments about assimilability that people hoped would help rescue Jewishness from antisemitism were quickly turned on their head. If racists and antisemites can claim that Jews are a people apart—incorrigibly unassimilable, fixed in those taxonomic ways that we’re familiar with from racist discourses—they can also say, “How sinister that this group can mix and meld and camouflage itself and become anything.” There is nothing intrinsically liberatory about the capacity for malleability.
BR: How did people associated with UNESCO think about the political horizon of global racial re-education?
ST: This is part of what became clear to me over the course of my research: They fundamentally understood their work as a contribution to healing Europe’s spiritual and moral damage and, in so doing, facilitating new kinds of relationships between the colony and the metropole. But decolonization was not their horizon. The Brazilian anthropologist Arthur Ramos, who was the first director of UNESCO’s Social Sciences Division and brought the authors of the statement together, advocated after the war for colonial indirect rule as a more humane form of colonial governance. Anti-colonial writers like Aimé Césaire were deeply skeptical about such claims: Without cultural and political self-determination these fantasies of repair are only fantasies. They’re just colonialism speaking a humanitarian language.
BR: This reminds me of your engagement with Our Sister Killjoy, the 1977 novel by Ghanaian writer Ama Ata Aidoo, in which you identify the postwar German culture of repair as a project of rehabilitating the German soul, rather than providing resources to Germany’s victims. Could you say more about how you understand postwar German culture with respect to UNESCO—as well as with respect to the politics of memory and memorialization more broadly?
ST: Our Sister Killjoy is about a young Ghanaian woman, Sissie, who is given the opportunity to travel to Germany. We’re told at the beginning of the book that this has something to do with the German people’s desire “to make good again”—a translation of “Wiedergutmachung,” the German policy of postwar reparation, understood both in the material sense of monetary payments, but also as a more amorphous moral and spiritual project of repair. This work included, in no small part, these now-famous educative memorial projects—as well as student exchange programs that UNESCO was very involved with—by way of which Germany could supposedly come to terms with its past. This is what the book brilliantly satirizes. Aidoo identifies the way that people in Sissie’s position are brought to Germany to allow Germans to redeem themselves—and she shows us the ways that that goes terribly wrong. The protagonist is fetishized, she meets people with appallingly crude understandings of race. Indeed, the whole encounter is underwritten by this assertion of cultural superiority: What could be better for a young Ghanaian woman than the opportunity to benefit from European culture?
I thought of Aidoo this year when I read the Namibian government’s statement in response to Germany’s decision to intervene on behalf of Israel at the International Court of Justice against the charges of genocide brought by South Africa. The Namibian government essentially says, Here is a country that has not sufficiently dealt with its own genocidal past now authorizing genocide in a different context. They have not learned from history—referring, of course, to Germany’s long-delayed and insufficient reckoning with the genocide in what is now known as Namibia. So, especially since October 7th—as Germany has doubled down on criminalizing solidarity with Palestine as Israel moves forward with its genocidal war—how do we think about the perception of Germany as having responsibly addressed its history?
BR: People love to quote Nelson Mandela: “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world,” to invoke this idea that education is the key to everything. Not only does your book raise questions that I imagine will be troubling for a lot of people—Is anti-racist education really the way that we get ourselves out of these racist structures?—it also disrupts the persistent liberal idea that education is inherently a net good. In your reading of Our Sister Killjoy, you consider a kind of negative education: how the colonizer’s educative effort actually conscripts the colonized into a kind of race thinking rather than liberating them from it.
ST: When Sissie first arrives in Germany, she’s in the train station in Frankfurt and she hears a young child say to her mother, “das schwartze Mädchen” [sic], meaning, “the Black girl.” It’s a reference to the famous moment in Black Skin, White Masks, when Fanon recalls a French child saying to his mother: “Look! A Negro!”—an exclamation that forces Fanon back into his body, underscoring a sense of his visibility and his fixity. But in Aidoo’s book, something very different happens. Rather than turning Sissie back in on herself, the child’s utterance prompts Sissie to suddenly realize that everyone around her is white, and she is disgusted by their bodies. It’s a reversal of the Fanonian narrative: Instead of I became aware of my body as appalling to others, here we have, I became aware of other people’s differences as appalling to me.
But even as Aidoo’s text rejects the Fanonian experience of racial interpolation into the European hierarchy of racial value, there is also a grimmer dimension to the scene. This is the moment, Sissie later reflects, when she becomes attuned to racial difference—and she feels shame at her own reaction. If her journey to Europe is presented as the path toward becoming a more enlightened subject, then this induction into race thinking is her first big European enlightenment. To be a truly astute student, Aidoo is telling us, Sissie will have to become an autodidact; she’s going to have to learn a set of lessons other than the ones on offer.
BR: Where Aidoo’s text plays on the ways that superficially anti-racist engagement with nonwhite culture offers cover for white supremacy, it resonates with a critique we might make of contemporary liberal anti-racism. We have an entire industry of anti-racist publishing focused on modifying white psychology, with extremely popular books like How to Be an Antiracist that are more or less focused on remaking white souls.
ST: Look, I’m an academic. I believe that education has crucial work to do. But what we see coming out of the mid-century moment is an instructive indication of the limits of conceptualizing anti-racism as, at its heart, an educative project. The people involved in the UNESCO project were committed to coming up with an anti-racist framework that they could mobilize for pedagogical ends. But they couldn’t bring themselves to consider the political contradictions that made their work urgent—that some people like them wanted the imperial world to more or less persist but in a more palatable form, while others, such as the anti-colonial thinkers I examine, wanted a decolonization process that would result in a different kind of world order. Education alone cannot square that circle.
Education as we know it is structurally entrenched in projects that reiterate imperial world orders. What do we do, for example, when we have a commitment to Holocaust education—and yet some of the major institutions dedicated to Holocaust education enact a repressive silence about the genocidal violence in Palestine? They cannot adequately make links between the genocides of the past and the present in which we find ourselves. We have to resist official silences and repressive definitions by offering a fuller account of the genocidal history of colonial modernity.
