But it was not the Christian churches alone that deplored attempts to divide the world into superior and inferior races; their resistance was reinforced by academics on both sides of the Atlantic. Some French scholars, unimpressed by a century of taxonomical confusions and inconsistencies, contended that there were no “pure” races, and in the United States the anthropologist Franz Boas urged that the whole notion of an anatomically unchanging racial hierarchy, established on the allegedly “scientific” measurement of different skulls, was inaccurate and misleading.105 In the aftermath of Germany’s aggression and defeat during the First World War, many writers sought to disprove the earlier claims concerning “volkish” preeminence and Teutonic superiority. In 1922, the Belgian Théophile Simar argued that the concept of race had been devised for political purposes and lacked all scientific validity, and that the claims of German superiority over other European races was utterly wrong. Four years later, the American sociologist Frank H. Hankins mounted another attack on the theory of Nordic supremacy and the doctrines of “race purity and superiority” that supported it. And in a book published posthumously as Racism in 1938, the German-Jewish sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld set out to provide a history and a refutation of the racial doctrines of the Nazis. “If it were practicable,” he wrote, “we should certainly do well to eradicate the term ‘race’ as far as subdivisions of the human species are concerned.”106
The rise of Hitler and the application of Nazi racial policies created widespread consternation in academic circles, and work denouncing “scientific racism” gained increasing scholarly traction.107 In 1936, at a joint meeting of the Anthropology and Zoology sections of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the distinguished geneticist H. J. Fleurie declared that pure races did not exist; in the same year, E. A. Ross, who had deplored the arrival of immigrants to America from central and eastern Europe before the First World War, now admitted that “difference of race means far less to me now than it once did.”108 Franz Boas remained an influential figure among an older generation of American anthropologists, and in 1937 the young cultural critic Jacques Barzun published a book entitled Race: A Study in Modern Superstition, in which he insisted that “a satisfactory definition of race is not to be had,” that it lumped people together “on the most superficial, unverified grounds of similarity,” that it was “a superstition on a par with the belief in witchcraft and horoscopes,” and that “a prudent man” would suspend judgment on the whole subject “until genetics can offer a more complete body of knowledge.”109 (It was a prescient prediction.) Four years later, at the annual gathering of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, similar views were expressed by the anthropologist Ashley Montagu, who declared that the accepted view of race was artificial and did not agree with the facts.110
There were also political activists who defied racialist regimes. Booker T. Washington, although devoted to the advancement of blacks in the postbellum American South, did not believe they should mobilize against white supremacists, but rather that they should talk, cooperate, and come to terms with them, on the grounds of political prudence as well as in the name of common humanity. In fact, he urged that his fellow blacks eschew politics; cultivate the habits of thrift, honesty, and sobriety; and concentrate on the acquisition of a Christian character and a good education, in the hope that they might make a modest living and achieve some degree of economic security. Washington opposed inciting conflict between the two races, seeking instead to “cement the races and bring about a hearty co-operation between them,” and he offered whites “the patient, sympathetic help of my race.”111 This doctrine of accommodationism proposed one version of how blacks and whites might get along with each other; Mahatma Gandhi offered another. Unlike Washington, Gandhi did believe in protest and mobilization (albeit of a nonviolent kind), but although he is best remembered as the figure who decried the racism he had encountered in South Africa, and as the nationalist leader who harassed the British and humbled their empire, Gandhi saw these specific South African and South Asian issues in terms of humanity as a whole.112 In 1906, he took a vow of celibacy to free himself to care for all humanity as his own family; his teachings and politics drew on Christianity as well as Hinduism; and while seeing them as opponents, Gandhi was eager to engage in conversations with representatives of the British Raj across the boundaries of race. He believed in forgiving his enemies, in the underlying interconnectedness of life, and in a single, shared “authentic humanity.”113
But rather than denying the importance of race, attacks on the racialist status quo in other countries reaffirmed it. In 1893, Charles Pearson, a Liberal Australian politician, published a book entitled National Life and Character: A Forecast, predicting the overthrow of Anglo-Saxon racial hegemony, because white men would be “elbowed and hustled and perhaps even thrust aside” by their supposed inferiors in Africa and Asia. This was also the view of the American intellectual W. E. B. DuBois, who asserted at the Pan-African Congress in London in 1900 that the great issue of the twentieth century would be “the problem of the colour line,” by which he meant “the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea”—a relation that he too believed was soon bound to change.114 Pearson and DuBois shared the Anglo-Saxonist view that the world was divided between the monolithic identities of white and colored races, inevitably fated to struggle; but where they differed from it was in their conviction that the colored people, not the whites, would emerge victorious, thereby inverting the traditional racial hierarchy. Even before 1914, then, it was clear that the appeal to racial identities could be used as much against Europe’s hegemony as on its behalf.115
DuBois was a university-educated northerner, who believed his fellow college graduates should organize and agitate blacks, to radicalize their politics, and to secure manhood suffrage, the eradication of distinctions based on color, equal employment opportunities, and equal rights. He regarded racial pride and the assertion of a distinct racial consciousness as essential prerequisites for black advancement, and he thought Africans and African Americans shared a common culture and racial identity, becoming one of the founding fathers of Pan-Africanism. In 1915, he published The Negro, a sweeping account of the alleged racial unity of the African peoples and of the glories of the continent’s ancient kingdoms.116 DuBois believed in a black identity that transcended the boundaries of Africa and the American South, and these internationalist views were further developed during the 1920s by the Jamaican immigrant Marcus Garvey, who celebrated “race distinction” and urged the creation of an independent state in Africa to which American negroes should be free to return. His aims were “to make the negro race conscious” and “to champion negro nationhood by redemption in Africa,” and he too repeatedly called for international black solidarity. Indeed, on one occasion, Garvey compared the aims of the (spectacularly resurgent) Ku Klux Klan in America with his own aims in Africa: the Klan wanted to make America exclusively a white man’s country; he wanted to make Africa exclusively a black man’s country.117
There was another part of the world where the conventional racial hierarchies were attacked by those who nevertheless believed in the concept of race, namely Japan, a nation that had industrialized rapidly during the closing decades of the nineteenth century, defeated and shamed the Chinese, concluded an alliance with Britain, vanquished and humiliated Russia, and established its own Asiatic empire. Here was a country undergoing “astonishing development,” and that seemed increasingly Western in its attitudes, attainments, and ambitions; yet the people of Japan had “yellow” skins and did not fit on either side of the alleged white-black racial divide. In 1902, the French government wrote to the British Foreign Office to inquire whether the Japanese should be categorized as white or nonwhite. The British could not decide, but the Japanese were convinced they were so superior to such lesser races as “Kanakas, Negroes, Pacific Islanders, Indians or other Eastern peoples” that
“to refer to them in the same terms cannot but be regarded in the light of a reproach, which is hardly warranted by the fact of the shade of the national complexion.” During the 1890s and 1900s, Japan regularly protested that the restrictions on Asiatic immigration recently established in the United States, Canada, and Australia insulted their nation by placing it on the same level in the racial hierarchy as inferior peoples such as the Chinese and Koreans.118
One Japanese response to such humiliation, exemplified by the newspaper proprietor Tokutomi Soho, was to give up trying to obtain acceptance by the white nations and to urge all “coloured people” to “combine and crush Albinocracy. We must make the whites realize that there are others as strong as they.”119 But after the First World War, having joined the entente against Germany and its allies, the Japanese strategy at the Paris Peace Conference was again to try for such acceptance, by lobbying for a clause in the Covenant of the League of Nations proclaiming the equality of all the races of the world; but that effort was defeated by an alliance of the “white” dominions of the British Empire, the United States, and Britain itself. This “Anglo-Saxon dominance in defiance of racial equality,” along with the U.S. Immigration Act of 1924, which specifically excluded the Japanese, was a further rebuff that long rankled popular and official opinion in Japan, and it stiffened the resolve of those who advocated more aggressive nationalist policies. It also helps explain why, in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, the Japanese would present their imperialist conquest of the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Islands and Asia as something very different, namely as a war for liberation—indeed, as the first serious attempt to overthrow the white empires of America and Europe.120
Such were the varied arguments about racial identities and rankings advanced between the 1900s and the 1930s: some contended there were no races, some that there were two, and some that there were more. These inconsistencies had emerged early at the Universal Race Congress, held in London in 1911.121 Its aim was to “discuss, in the light of science and the modern conscience,” the relations between the “so-called white and so-called coloured peoples,” with a view “to encouraging between them a fuller understanding, the most friendly feelings, and a heartier co-operation.” This was scarcely a coherent manifesto, by turns proclaiming the existence of race, expressing doubts about the “so-called” binary categories of white and colored, but also hoping the races might get along better with each other. There was much resort to the rhetoric of Christian universalism, and insistence that the peoples of the world were “to all intents and purposes essentially equals in intellect, enterprise, morality and physique,” but some delegates took different views. As a social Darwinist, Felix von Luschan, professor of anthropology at Berlin, conceded that “the brotherhood of man” might be “a good thing,” but thought “the struggle for life is a far better one.” Races were different and antagonistic, and conflict between them was an essential precondition for human progress. From another perspective, Baron d’Estournelles de Constant regretted that “the white man” in Africa or Asia felt himself “to be more or less master, with power to act as he will” over all lesser peoples, while W. E. B. DuBois insisted that the key issue in America was “whether at last the Negro will gain full recognition as a man, or be utterly crushed by superior numbers.”
Thereafter, as attacks on the twentieth-century race regimes gathered force, their contradictions became more apparent. As an advocate of aggressive black mobilization against whites, W. E. B. DuBois deplored the accommodationism of Booker T. Washington, which he regarded as a narrow and pessimistic policy of betrayal and submission; yet DuBois’s belief in a unified, coherent, monolithic black consciousness ignored the increasing variety of the black experience in the United States, and made even less sense when extended to the Caribbean and Africa.122 Moreover, the idea that there was a single color line, with a “white” race on one side and a “black” race on the other, might have been shared by white supremacists who wanted to keep things as they were, and by black activists who wanted to change things radically, but both were at fault in claiming the existence of these two homogeneous, inevitably antagonistic identities, and in ignoring the many conversations, encounters, and interactions that took place across these allegedly impermeable racial boundaries. And what of those other races that did not fit this polarized, dichotomized, black-and-white world? What, for instance, of the Jews: were they absolutely and loathsomely non-Aryan, as Hitler insisted, or were they part of the white South African “volk,” as some champions of apartheid claimed? And where did the “yellow races” of China and Japan, or those who belonged to the “brown races” of North Africa and the Middle East, fit into this oversimplified, Manichean picture?
These inconsistencies were largely rendered moot during the Second World War, by a widespread repudiation of racialist thought and identities that was partly a matter of conviction and partly one of strategic necessity. President Franklin D. Roosevelt insisted that his “four freedoms” should be enjoyed by people of “every creed and every race, wherever they live”; the Allies claimed to be fighting for a liberty that was opposed to Aryan superiority and Japanese racial intolerance; and where politics and public opinion led, the academy followed. Horrified by the uses to which the Nazis and the Japanese had put the idea of inborn racial difference, physical and social scientists now retreated headlong from the claims that racial categories, identities, and hierarchies were the best way to understand the peoples of the world. The writings of Franz Boas, his student Ruth Benedict, and anthropologists critical of the link between race, culture, and ability now began to reach a mass audience.123 Benedict’s Races and Racism, published in 1942, dismissed race thought as “a travesty of scientific knowledge”; in the same year, Ashley Montagu’s Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race became a best seller; and in 1944 the Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal published An American Dilemma, which concluded that Jim Crow segregation in the South was unjustified and un-American. By the end of the Second World War, the notion that race was the most significant form of collective human identity, consciousness, and ranking had been stripped of any serious claim to intellectual respectability. It was no longer the “everything” that earlier authorities from Knox to Hitler had claimed.124
Yet even as the idea of race, and the binary divisions built around it, were being intellectually undermined, evidentially discredited, and politically invalidated, the politics of racial identities and antagonisms were being given fresh impetus from a variety of developments. There was the Atlantic Charter, agreed by Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt in 1941, which recognized “the rights of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live,” a provision with serious implications for the European empires, where millions of dark-skinned people lived under authorities they had not chosen.125 There was also the Japanese success in conquering vast swaths of the British, French, and Dutch empires, thus destroying the notion of the white man’s innate superiority and ushering in a new world where Asiatic peoples had to be taken seriously and treated as equals rather than inferiors. And there was the critical reaction to the high-minded claims made in the United States that it had gone to war in 1941 to fight racial prejudice, discrimination, and genocide, all of which sounded distinctly implausible given the persistence of Jim Crow and the crude American racial stereotyping of the Japanese as rats, dogs, gorillas, and snakes. How could the Roosevelt administration condemn other regimes constructed on the basis of racial identities, inequality, and discrimination, given white America’s own prejudices against blacks?126 Was the Second World War a conflict of racial liberation—or merely of one racist dominion against another?
It was in this atmosphere of contradictions that the United Nations established its Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), one of whose aims was to counter the “ignorance and prejudice” that had underpinned the belief in the “doctrine of [the] inequality of men and of races.” It convened a panel of scientist
s, chaired by Ashley Montagu, to produce a definitive verdict on race.127 Their first statement was issued in 1950. “Scientists,” it began, “have reached general agreement in recognizing that mankind is one: that all men belong to the same species, Homo Sapiens.” Genes responsible for the “hereditary differences between men” were “always few when compared to the whole genetic constitution of man and the vast number of genes common to all human beings regardless of the population to which they belong.” It followed that “the likenesses among men are far greater than their differences,” and that “national, religious, geographic, linguistic and cultural groups do not necessarily coincide with racial groups.” The panel urged it would be best “to drop the term ‘race’ altogether,” since “for all practical purposes, ‘race’ is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth.” It concluded with a ringing endorsement of the reality of common humanity: “Biological studies lend support to the ethic of universal brotherhood; for man is born with drives towards co-operation.… In this sense, every man is his brother’s keeper.” A year later, a second UNESCO group reaffirmed these findings, insisting that there were “no scientific grounds whatsoever for the belief that there were pure races or a hierarchy of superior and inferior human groups.”128
Underlying these words was the widespread revulsion at the Jewish Holocaust, but the defeat of Germany had vanquished that most terrifying of racist polities, and during the next half century the remaining regimes that had been constructed on the basis of racialist thought, identities, superiority, subordination, segregation, and exclusion also disappeared. The end of the British Raj in India, of Dutch rule in the East Indies, and of French dominion in Indochina portended the termination of all the European empires in Asia, Africa, and the West Indies, and decolonization was virtually complete by the 1980s. During the same period, the “white” dominions of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand abandoned their policies of racial discrimination, ended their restrictions on immigration, sought to atone for earlier acts of genocide and dispossession, and embraced multiculturalism. At the same time, the Jim Crow laws and customs of the American South were toppled: civil rights legislation ended discrimination and gave blacks the vote, while the Supreme Court nullified state laws banning marriage or sexual relations across the boundaries of race, and the 1924 immigration law was effectively repealed.129 Nor could the apartheid regime in South Africa endure indefinitely against what was becoming a global repudiation of racialist thinking. In 1990, President F. W. de Klerk announced that the discriminatory laws and state apparatus enforcing apartheid would be abandoned and that Nelson Mandela would be freed. Four years later Mandela was elected president, leading a government that was a “rainbow coalition” including blacks, Coloureds, Asians, and whites.130
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