This article traces the emergence of racial plasticity in the discourse of midcentury liberal internationalism and antiracism, focusing on the 1950 Statement on Race by the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The author argues that the statement is both an important precursor to contemporary celebrations of plasticity and an object lesson in the conceptual and political limitations of plasticity as a response to race and racism. Paying particular attention to the statement’s treatment of plasticity as synonymous with educability, the author argues that plasticity’s centrality to the race concept at midcentury was driven by a pedagogical aspiration to make not just racial ideologies but racial form itself subject to reeducation. In UNESCO’s discourse, plasticity, or the idea that race is changeable and malleable, represents both the promise of freedom from race and a biopolitical imperative. Even as UNESCO sought to dispel the scientific racism it associated most closely with Nazism, the statement’s privileging of plasticity accommodated and extended strategies of colonial racial management. While UNESCO’s antiracism found it easier to imagine an end to race than to imagine that racism could be contested in political terms, anticolonial politics challenged both the colonial ordering of the world and the biopolitical logic of racial plasticity.
Plasticity has become a contemporary keyword. It seems to signify not just the present but also the future’s cutting edge, as per its appearance and even celebration in recent work on neuroscience, epigenetics, and new materialism. And yet, a genealogy of the concept reveals plasticity’s prominence in discourses that are the precursors to today’s genetic and postgenomic developments without having been superseded by them, producing a contested field of scientific and political meaning.1 In this article, I take up texts and contexts of the immediate postwar period, theorizing the implications of plasticity’s central appearance in the first mainstream, global antiracist document: the 1950 Statement on Race by the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). This statement was crafted by leading figures in the social and biological sciences, including Claude Lévi-Strauss, Franklin Frazier, and Ashley Montagu. It sought definitively to establish the natural scientific facts of racial mattering, in the expectation that this would guide the public’s perception of race’s meaning.
The statement is no mere historical curiosity. Its story is a history of the present, for as scholars have long noted, the Statement on Race canon-ized a set of claims about race that produced if not a consensus then certainly a conjuncture whose force is still felt.2 As I emphasize throughout this article, the Statement on Race was conceived as an antiracist project saturated from the outset by a pedagogical imperative I characterize as the reeducation of race. In the wake of a global catastrophe attributable, in UNESCO’s view, to the uncontrolled spread of racial theories and ideologies, this project of reeducation entailed, first, correcting and stabilizing race as an object of knowledge production (i.e., the statement’s formulation of a position on race’s ontology) and, second, a broad and enduring commitment on UNESCO’s part to the production of an antiracist scientific humanism that would challenge race’s respectability as a technology for organizing the social. As such, the statement’s influence endures not only in accounts of race still very much indebted to its terms but also with respect to the versions of antiracism it has helped elevate to the status of the legible and even commonsensical.3 As I show here, its articulation of race, racism, and antiracism all depend on its remarkable and undertheorized assertion that “the one trait which above all others has been at a premium in the evolution of men’s mental characters has been educability, plasticity. This is a trait which all human beings possess. It is indeed, a species character of Homo sapiens.”4
Michelle Brattain has observed that the interest and provocation of UNESCO’s 1950 statement and its 1951 revision are that they “acknowledge implicitly that race had once been one thing and now it was another.”5 Indeed, most studies of the statement emphasize its periodization of racial regimes.6 However, the statement’s own project was not only to effect a historical shift in the definition of race but also to enshrine change and transformation as race’s very meaning. Scholars have noted the statement’s reliance on population genetics for this purpose. This field, which consolidated itself in the 1950s, was a product of the modern evolutionary synthesis that combined Darwinian evolutionary theory and Mendelian genetics. In brief, the category of genetic population, which the statement expressly suggested be substituted for the term race in scientific and popular discourse, afforded an explanation for diversity among groups that stressed the contingent, fluctuating, and changeable quality of these differences over time.7 The discourse of genetic populations continues to play a role in the design and interpretation of projects dedicated to tracing human genetic sameness and variation; it has helped give meaning both to the Human Genome Project and its assertion of the negligible genetic manifestation of perceived racial differences, as well as to the Human Genome Diversity Project, controversial precisely for its pursuit of the genetic differences among cultural, linguistic, and ethnic groups.8 At the same time, the imaginative salience of the genetic population as a category that theorizes the malleability of difference has been further complicated by so-called postgenomic developments that have laid privileged claim to the biosocial terrain of the plastic. Epigenetics, for instance, is now deemed the “science of plasticity.”9 While the making of biological meaning across these disciplinary and discursive formations entails contestation, displacement, and competition, what persists is the investment in a biological body whose expressions of difference are historically contingent rather than determined, changeable rather than fixed; that is, they are plastic. It is the apparently ineluctable plasticity of their objects that affords these discourses their imaginative purchase and demonstrable political traction as sciences that affirm flux over fixity and contingency over determinism.
However, what I intend to tease out from UNESCO’s Statement on Race is a demonstration that the statement’s avowal of plasticity as the principle of racial formation and transformation is driven by an ethicopo-litical aspiration. It is this ethicopolitical or, more properly, pedagogical purpose — and not any paradigmatic shift in the natural sciences — that brings about plasticity’s installation as the organizing concept of UNES-CO’s scientific antiracism.10 This, in turn, has implications for the current romance with plasticity. Often, when plasticity is invoked, it is as the sine qua non of a phenomenon or material object. Catherine Malabou’s reflections on neuroplasticity are representative here. In the opening pages of What Should We Do with Our Brain?, she explains that she turns to plasticity as a concept because with it she can capture and describe — that is, theorize — the brain’s simultaneously dynamic, structural, and organizational dimensions. But even as she situates plasticity as a concept that both emerges from and offers something compelling to contemporary neuroscientific discourse, she also finds it to be a material quality of the brain itself. In her account of the brain’s “developmental,” “modulational,” and “reparative” plasticities, it becomes clear that she is asserting its plastic ontology. Correspondingly, her argument about the political horizon of the neuroplastic and its freedoms — “resistance to neuronal ideology is what our brain wants” — depends on this prior assertion of the brain’s inherent plasticity.11 I am arguing that the politics of plasticity cannot be read off of or derived directly from the materiality of any of the plastic bodies, objects, and substances that we now appear to find everywhere around us. Rather, the power ascribed to the plastic for the undoing or remaking of social arrangements is itself a political configuration that demands our scrutiny.
In what follows, I attempt to do exactly this by excavating two dimensions of UNESCO’s discourse of racial plasticity. First, I focus on UNESCO’s founding moment in order to establish the matrix out of which plasticity would emerge both as an ethicopolitical horizon and as the very definition of race — a definition whose central purpose was to mediate the tensions between likeness and difference and between the given and the changeable. The preoccupation of UNESCO’s first years, I show, was the necessity and the problem of not just reestablishing but making over, in the aftermath of the human catastrophe of the war, what this time was to be an enduring political and moral constituency, “mankind” or “humanity.” This was no mere attempt to revive a pallid figure of the Enlightenment human, or even an effort to tightly suture the new human to the language of human rights that other branches of the UN family were busy formulating then. Rather, UNESCO’s project was a decidedly biopolitical one. It sought to ground the meaning of humanity in the fact of species life and to elevate the fact of biological commonness to a governmental principle that would determine the political shape of the postwar world. We see this at work in the recurring appearance of the figure of the child in UNESCO’s early discussions about the potential for reeducation in the aftermath of racial violence. I argue that this exemplarily plastic creature, the child, stages the problem that attends UNESCO’s antiracist pedagogy; namely, how do the given and the inherited limit the promise of the new? Or, in other words, how plastic is the human? Among those limiting inheritances, of course, is race, and I argue that the Statement on Race seeks to solve this problem not only by issuing a claim about the changeability of racial form but also by installing plasticity and its twinned quality, educability, as the defining characteristic of species life.
Second, the implications of this entanglement of plasticity and educability become apparent when we consider the wider political context of the postwar world in which UNESCO formulated its Statement on Race. Even as UNESCO sought to dispel the scientific racism it associated most closely with Nazism, the statement’s privileging of plasticity not only accommodated but extended the logics of biopolitical management that had long been integral to colonial racism. UNESCO’s Statement on Race thus contends with race in two ways, both troubling. It tries to interrupt racism with the promise that race itself can be transformed and that changes to racial form are not only possible but inevitable. Moreover, it turns away from alternative versions of antiracism that, at the same historical moment, were being offered by anticolonial discourse; in some instances, these confrontations over the colonial ordering of the world transpired within the very institutions of the United Nations. It is this double edge of racial plasticity that should make us suspicious of its invocations in the present.
The Natal and the Plastic
In a 1942 article for Harper’s Magazine, Julian Huxley — biologist, eugenicist, antiracist activist, colonial apologist, and statesman, who three years later would become UNESCO’s first director-general — posited that “the world’s most important fact is not that we are in a war, but that we are in a revolution.”12 He was not speaking of an insurrection against authority, he explained, but about revolution as a radical rupture in mentalities and socialities, or what he termed “a drastic and major change in the ideas and institutions which constitute the framework of human existence.”13 Its chief characteristic was the ascendance of the social as the preeminent matter of political life. In Huxley’s view, this shift toward the social as the very means and ends of politics had left no polity untouched, installing the “common good” as the motor and measure of a polity’s well-being and vitality. Huxley’s diagnosis of the rise of the social, while fleeting, bears a resemblance to another midcentury thinker’s appraisal, though she would afford the social and its insatiable assimilation of politics a central place in her political critique, particularly in her work of the 1950s.14 I am speaking, of course, of Hannah Arendt’s account of the social as “a scaled-up form of household, a deeply problematic hybrid of public and private, polis and oikos,”15 that threatened a properly political order by elevating labor, work, and with them, the management of mere biological life to the focus of collective and institutional activity.16
While Huxley’s notes on the social are passing observations in comparison, they are of interest here for several reasons. First, Huxley implicitly understands that what is at stake in this transformation (characterized by the subordination of economic calculations to social ones, an emphasis on social planning, and a preoccupation with the “social unity or self-consciousness” of politics) is the making of “populations,” in Michel Foucault’s sense of that term.17 Huxley also recognizes that the organization of polities according to these calculations would not be reversed and, indeed, would only be increasingly generalized as the logic of the modern world. As such, the second point of interest is his embrace of this development and his conviction that, while this revolution was inescapable, “its form and character are not.”18 The task at hand, then, was to develop a new political order for the postwar world, for there would be no going back after the war to “the old social and international system.”19
UNESCO, established in 1946 as the first specialized agency of the United Nations, was one of the institutions of this new order. Its role was the creation of a political and moral constituency, variously termed mankind and humanity, whose ethical and political unity was premised on its biological species life. As an organization dedicated to education, science, and culture, it sought to put the production and dissemination of knowledge to work for the creation of a particular kind of humanist subjectivity: per UNESCO’s constitution, “since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed.”20 It is against this backdrop that we can understand the opening line of the Statement on Race, which reads, “Scientists have reached general agreement in recognizing that mankind is one: that all men belong to the same species, homo sapiens.”21 Donna Haraway has observed that, by beginning with “scientists” and ending with a Latin taxonomical term, this sentence establishes the statement’s scientific authority.22 But this sentence also oscillates between the Latin nomenclature of science, which asserts the species sameness of Homo sapiens, and the ethicopolitical idiom activated by the term mankind — also the very last word of the entire statement. If science invokes a particular epistemological authority, here it is leveraged for a political claim that “mankind is one.”23
The central impediments to this recognition of species sameness and human solidarity, in UNESCO’s view, were theories of racial superiority and hierarchy epitomized by Nazism. When the Statement on Race was published in 1950, it was framed as a response to the Holocaust. In the preface to an annotated edition aimed at educators and students, anthropologist Ashley Montagu reflected on the experience of drafting the statement. Noting that UNESCO’s offices were housed in the same building that had served as the German military’s headquarters during the occupation of Paris, he observed gravely that “except only if our deliberations had taken place at Auschwitz or Dachau, there could have been no more fitting environment to impress upon the Committee members the immense significance of their work.”24 The Statement on Race was UNESCO’s attempt to modify such views through a scientific discourse that aimed to show the incoherence of Nazism’s scientific racism. While “more than six million human beings lost their lives because it was alleged they belonged to an inferior race,” Montagu wrote, “the horrible corollary to this barbarism is that it rested on a scientifically untenable premise.”25 Montagu’s peculiar phrasing, which seems to suggest that the murder of 6 million Jews was somehow more terrible because the theories justifying it were not scientifically sound, points to the limited way the statement understood the political and ideological dimensions of racism. It also indicates that, even as the statement sought to mark a decisive break in race’s legitimacy as a scientific term, it emphatically preserved race as a domain of scientific knowledge production.
The 1950 Statement on Race and its 1951 revision would be the centerpiece of UNESCO’s midcentury interventions into questions of racism and the primary vehicle of its antiracist pedagogy. But at UNESCO’s first general conference in Paris in November-December 1946, in the immediate aftermath of the war, the central preoccupation was with education in the broadest sense, and specifically the problem of education and reeducation in the wake of Nazism. The central question was how to ensure, in the words of one delegate, that “humanity [will] avoid in the future bloody catastrophes like the one whose depths we have still to plumb.”26 It was widely agreed that the “intellectual rehabilitation of the human race” was not enough.27 UNESCO needed to set its sights higher than a remedial education of those steeped in what they termed “race prejudice,” intervening not just in the mentalities of human beings but their souls. As one delegate put it, the task was nothing less than “the re-education of humanity.”28
The exemplary figure of this discourse was the child, who I argue represented both the promise of the new and the natal but also the challenge of reeducation and its limits. Specifically, delegates invoked the Jewish child: “In a concentration camp in Poland where wholesale cremation was practiced, a little Jewish girl danced, full of confidence and joy, in front of the door of her crematorium. She did not know her fate, but her torturer did. He was a civilised man of the twentieth century, disciplined and educated to burn innocent children to death in a crematorium.”29 The contrast here is not just between Jew and Nazi, victim and perpetrator, or even innocence and guilt. It is also a distinction between a childish unknowingness and adult depravity produced specifically through a corrupted and corrupting education. While the context of the Nazi genocide loomed large, the specificity of the Jewish child was also readily generalized, and dissolved into a generic figure. In the view of UNESCO’s delegates, the child was both victim (“the child is the most tragic victim of the last war,” said one) and savior, having not yet undergone “the gradual distortion of man from childhood to maturity through the process of his education.”30 The question, then, was how to recover the child as resource.
Rebekah Sheldon has identified this “slide from the child in need of saving to the child who saves” as the quintessential logic of post-catastrophic history as it grapples to imagine a future, and it was with such a sense of crisis that UNESCO urgently set about putting the child to work.31 This work was not just rhetorical and figural but biopolitical. Driven by an intense desire for newness, UNESCO saw the child as a resource with which to renew and revitalize the human. UNESCO, the Indian philosopher Sir Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan declared, had to stand “not merely for a new set of adjustments but for a new way of life, a new outlook, a new philosophy which will inspire humanity.”32 The child represented the promise of a newness that would secure the continuity of species life but also offered the consolation of rupture and discontinuity, or a new beginning. Some imagined nothing less than a generational break on the scale of the species: the task was to “form a new generation, instill in it from childhood the ideals that are its cornerstones.”33
The child thus bore a very specific relation to both plasticity and educability. As Claudia Castañeda has observed, the child’s paradigmatic quality is that its form by definition is not fixed or final; what “makes the child so apparently available,” she writes, is that it is “not only in the making, but is also malleable — and so can be made.”34 In UNESCO’s discourse, the child’s salvific function depended on the fact that it had not yet been educated and thus deformed. As such, if the project was to make the child a bulwark against the past and its repetition, the greatest challenge to this aspiration was the transmission of the given and the inherited, which threatened to circumscribe the possibility of newness. In other words, the problem of reeducation was bedeviled by the fact that the plasticity of the human and even of the child entails malleability of form within limits.35
In Arendt’s political philosophy, natality represents the possibility of a new beginning inaugurated with each new person who enters the world, each new birth.36 But the child in UNESCO’s configuration represented not natality per se but rather what Natasha Levinson, reading Arendt, has called “the paradox of natality . . . in the midst of belatedness.”37 While natality for Arendt designates the capacity of human beings to bring newness into the world, such newness is tempered by the world that precedes and forms us. We are “simultaneously heirs to a particular history and new to it,” Levinson notes.38 The problem is thus of preserving newness when it is always belated in relation to a past that has already occurred but whose force continues to form the present, not least because, in Arendt’s words, “the chances that tomorrow will be like yesterday are always overwhelming.”39 Natality risks collapsing into repetition, while its promise is not unmediated newness but “recreation, response, reconfiguration.”40 Education, which forms each person who enters the world, is thus the paradigmatic scene of this natal paradox. We might conceive of natality, I am arguing, as a figure for the possibilities and limits of reeducation’s mediation of the inherited, the given, and the already transmitted. The paradox of natality thus reveals itself to be the very problem of “educability, plasticity.”
What constituted this inheritance, in UNESCO’s view? The answer is both racism, which it was feared would be ineluctably transmitted to the child, and race itself, which was understood as inherited form. In the next section, I consider how UNESCO and the text of the statement took up the problem of these inheritances, and their relative malleability or intractability.
Antiracism and the Accommodation of Empire
At UNESCO in 1946, the most pressing question was about the transmission of racism, which threatened to corrupt the new almost from its first appearance. As one delegate observed, “There is so much distilled racial and political and communal poison in many of the textbooks in the world that it corrupts the minds and the emotions of the young children at the very beginning of their lives.”41 The problem was how to protect the child’s difference from what had come before when “race prejudices are implanted at a very tender age,” in the words of the South African delegate.42 But behind these questions lurked an anxiety that the phobic character of antagonisms between groups and the power of prejudice as a passion that overwhelms reason were simply a birthright, so pervasive that it was impossible to distinguish between the given and the learned. Racism as inheritance might inevitably mark the limits of the natal and the plastic.
Seen thus, the postwar child — to whom is owed an education that may yet separate it from a tainted inheritance, and who requires too an urgent intervention for the direction and retraining of its instincts — resembles nothing so much as the enduring figure of the “native” child and even the native as child, in light of the imperial utility of the nineteenth-century theory that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. This resonance suggests a line of continuity between the developmental hierarchies and evolutionary gradients of colonial race science and the antiracist pedagogy meant to supplant them. At stake here is what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has described as imperialism’s practice of “soul making,” which civilizes savages into subjects and engenders the very form of the human.43 Part of what makes UNESCO’s work on race in the 1940s and 1950s so interesting is that it understood soul making to be a global project, required most urgently in the heart of Europe itself, where questions about the extent of human educability, stunted development, and regression had come home to roost.44 And in fact, this development was indicative of a growing fissure in the utility of race as a justification for imperialism, as racism — “the dark side of imperialism understood as social mission”45 — became the object of organized international disavowal and mainstream liberal activism.46
But despite this opening, the question of racism’s relationship to colonialism did not make its way into UNESCO’s 1946 discussion of the problem of racial reeducation. In fact, UNESCO and the new international framework to which it belonged provided renewed imperial inspiration for some. At the first general conference, a British delegate observed that his delegation “includes representatives of the 63 millions of the Colonial Empire” but also “some of our most competent colonial experts.” Since “the task of my country is to administer vast expanses of the world,” he continued, the latter had been invited “with the idea that they would carry away with them a new spirit of objectivity with which to consider the scientific education of the masses and the culture of the peoples to whom they devote their activity.”47 The readiness with which the British delegate could harmonize imperialism and internationalism, and the consonance these remarks assume among colonial administration, mass education, and UNESCO’s spirit of scientific humanism, are telling. They underscore Mark Mazower’s argument that, rather than looking for the origins of the United Nations in Wilsonianism, we should instead consider the understudied significance of British imperial thought as a foundation for twentieth-century internationalism. “The UN’s later embrace of anticolonialism,” he observes, “has tended to obscure the awkward fact that like the League [of Nations] it was a product of empire and indeed, at least at the outset, regarded by those with colonies to keep as a more than adequate mechanism for [empire’s] defense.”48 And of course, there is no small irony in a delegate from South Africa — which would withdraw from UNESCO a few years later, on the grounds that a publication of UNESCO’s race project criticized apartheid and so interfered in its sovereign affairs — bemoaning the early age at which racism takes root.49 UNESCO could simultaneously centralize the problem of combating “race prejudice” and leave largely unchallenged the continued colonial ordering of the world and the global color line.
This is not to deny that even in the 1940s the United Nations was a site of contestation over racism and colonialism. In 1946, when South Africa introduced the Asiatic Land Tenure and Indian Representation Act, a piece of nakedly discriminatory legislation targeting its Indian population, India successfully maneuvered the UN General Assembly into considering its official complaint against South Africa.50 But such efforts, including the thousands of petitions directed at the UN Human Rights Commission (HRC), met with stubborn resistance and rejection.51 In an episode with resonances for our story, in 1947 W. E. B. Du Bois and the NAACP attempted to force the HRC to hear their petition on the plight of African Americans in the United States, only to be refused the public hearing they demanded. Much of the fierce debate over the petition took place in the HRC’s Sub-commission on the Prevention of Discrimination and the Protection of Minorities in late 1947.52 At the very same time, this subcommission determined to ask UNESCO to consider “the desirability of initiating and recommending the general adoption of a program of disseminating scientific facts with regard to race,” “designed to remove what is commonly known as racial prejudice” — the request that gave rise to UNESCO’s race project and the 1950 Statement on Race.53 How do we understand the United Nations’ and UNESCO’s desire to think about racism alongside their refusal to reckon with an antiracist politics from below? It would be too simple to conclude that the statement was merely an ideological alibi for their inaction and resistance. For UNESCO, in particular, the 1950 statement inaugurated a project on race and antiracism that it would pursue for decades. Rather, a scientific statement on race functioned as a strategy for managing and ameliorating such conflicts. The statement evaded the problem of racism as a political question produced by power and interests and instead proposed that racism could be overcome because race itself could be overcome thanks to its malleability and potential for change. In the next section, I look to the statement’s drafting and text to show how its authors mobilized the concepts of plasticity and educability in service of the statement’s strategy of evading racism and managing race.
Genetic Flux, Typological Fixity
The statement’s conception of race, I have been arguing, depends on treating human educability and biological malleability as so closely related as to be almost interchangeable. To recall, the statement declares that “the one trait which above all others has been at a premium in the evolution of men’s mental characters has been educability, plasticity. This is a trait which all human beings possess. It is indeed, a species character of Homo sapiens.”54 Although plasticity is invoked as a quality of mental character, it is in fact the organizing concept of the whole statement. Here, I track what was ideologically at stake in the crafting of the statement and in the rhetorical decision to offer “educability, plasticity” as “one trait” torn in two and promptly sutured back together.
When the scientists UNESCO had summoned to draft the statement met in Paris in December 1949, they quickly broached, and then seemed to set aside, the task of defining race. The African American sociologist Franklin Frazier reminded the group that “knowledge about race — and the fallacies concerning it — did not prevent the existence of prejudice.”55 There was thus an initial recognition that no definition of race, however conceptually precise and scientifically current, would on its own achieve the explicitly antiracist pedagogical function the statement was to fulfill. As I have noted, UNESCO drafted the statement and established its educational campaign at the request of the UN HRC, and the statement’s pedagogy was shaped by this ideological context. The task, the group agreed, was to affirm a principle rather than define an object. Human equality quickly emerged as a key term, and a representative from the UN Secretariat’s Human Rights Division proposed that “the committee might speak of human equality in a positive sense, i.e. issue a statement of fact about it saying that (1) all human beings were equal in the essential functions of life; (2) that all individual and group differences were superficial and had no scientific significance.”56
The British sociologist Morris Ginsberg drafted some language for the committee’s consideration, which took up the first of these two points:
All human beings of whatever race have always and everywhere shown themselves to be equally able to share in a common life, to understand the nature of mutual service and reciprocity and to respect social obligations and contracts. None of the differences that have been alleged to exist between members of different races, even if they prove well substantiated, have any relevance to problems of social and political organization, moral life and communication between human beings.57
In Ginsberg’s formulation, the operative principle is not species life or even human or biological likeness but the unassailable fact of “common life.”
Ginsberg’s language is markedly more receptive to the possibility that “alleged” racial differences might yet prove more meaningful than the text of the published statement allows, but this position only highlights the normative assertion that drives this paragraph, namely, that racial differences have no ethical relevance to sociality, or “problems of social and political organization.” Equality appears to interrupt the very question of racial difference by insisting on the permanent subordination of racial facts to ethical norms.
However, in the text of the published statement, the sentence “all human beings of whatever race have always and everywhere shown themselves to be equally able to share in a common life” has been modified to read: “All normal human beings are capable of learning to share in a common life.”58 Ginsberg’s original formulation proposed that what unites human beings is not the mere shared fact of their biological life but rather the existence, “always and everywhere,” of a world made in common through quintessentially human activities of sociality and political organization. The final text of the statement hedges on this commitment, casting it instead as an aspirational horizon that human beings can reach through their capacity for learning. The statement thus replaces equality with educability. Through this displacement, the statement makes the promise of a common life contingent on the formation and reformation, the education and reeducation, of some human beings. As I show below, this educative and transformative imperative entails the management not just of human sociality but also of the biological life of populations.
Despite the committee’s qualms about the wisdom of searching for a definition of race, the central scientific intervention of the published statement is its definition of race in the terms of population genetics. The statement makes several claims about the genetic character of race: first, that differences among groups are the result of “evolutionary factors of differentiation such as isolation, the drift and random fixation of . . . genes,” as well as hybridization and natural selection; second, that as a result, “the species of homo sapiens is made up of a number of populations, each one of which differs from the others in the frequency of one or more genes,” even as the vast majority of each person’s genetic constitution is “common to all human beings regardless of the population to which they belong”; and third, that the only meaningful definition and use of the word race is as a designation of “a group or population characterized by some concentration, relative as to frequency and distribution, of hereditary particles (genes) or physical characters, which appear, fluctuate, and often disappear in the course of time.”59 As such, the statement explains, this legitimate meaning of the term race is to be strictly distinguished from its casual and incorrect use to describe other kinds of differences that are better described as matters of culture or ethnicity. The question is why a genetic definition of race proves so hospitable to the statement’s pedagogical aims and its version of antiracism.
The genetic definition of race neatly dispensed with the second dimension of the question of human equality that the UN representative asked the committee to address: “That all individual and group differences were superficial and had no scientific significance.” The assertion of the genetic plasticity of race allowed the statement to reconcile the claim of human likeness with the fact of racial difference as a matter of embodied and perceptible differences in racial forms. Claude Lévi-Strauss’s interventions were central here. For him, “the necessity of separating the norm of equality from the fact of the non-identity of men” entailed the “need to explain to men why they are not identical,” or why visible differences (“physical non-identity”) existed between groups.60 A genetic definition, Lévi-Strauss concluded, was the only one that would explain racial difference as physical form in a way that would allow it to be “dissociated in men’s minds” from questions of character or culture, or what he called “the psychological and physiological elements of ‘temperament.’ ”61 In keeping with UNESCO’s liberal antiracism, the genetic definition of race as changeable, fluctuating, and plastic deindexed qualities of interiority and human worth from the perceptible, embodied differences so often taken to constitute the substance of race.
As such, the statement’s seminal intervention was to make the changeability and impermanence of race the explanation for its meaninglessness. But if this interpretation was novel and radical, it was and remains politically vacuous. In making the case that “all individual and group differences were superficial and had no scientific significance,” the statement sidestepped the question of whether these differences might nonetheless have political significance. The notion that races are plastic promises that all difference is subject to change over time and that the problem of grasping the meaning of any particular difference is tempered by the fact that it too shall pass. Or, as Lévi-Strauss would put it, race has “a purely historical, wholly relative and extremely fluid value, since the concentration of genes never reache[s] a point of density and permanence sufficient to make the resulting character unchangeable and non-reversible.”62 Finding the possibility of freedom in the plasticity of race depends on treating the mere fact of genetic change as itself liberatory.
The authors of the statement understood themselves to be making no specific claims about how changes among populations would come about or what they would produce. But while they emphasized such factors as natural selection and genetic drift, they also noted that genetic populations emerged from and shifted through changing patterns of what they called “geographic and/or cultural isolation.” That is, even as they observed that “national, religious, geographic, linguistic and cultural groups do not necessarily coincide with racial groups,” they acknowledged that genetic populations are in part made through cultural and social practices.63 This matters not just because it hints at the fault lines in their strenuous attempt to oppose race and culture but also because it raises questions about the ways in which population-level differences are identified and managed. How do such differences come to be understood as targets of intervention or preservation? How are particular populations or racial groups descriptively stabilized at any given moment, and what are the politics of such attempts to define and describe these differences? The statement did not offer adequate answers to these questions. The problem with the statement’s position was therefore not just its apolitical celebration of biological change for its own sake but its unwillingness to consider the political and biopolitical dimensions of the genetic population.64
Here, it is worth considering the statement’s position on what kinds of differences were not just scientifically legible but descriptively and perceptively meaningful at that historical juncture. Even as the statement stressed race’s plasticity and genetic flux, it also retained and decisively reinscribed the very taxonomic categories of physical anthropology whose authority it sought to dislodge:
Now what has the scientist to say about the groups of mankind which may be recognized at the present time? Human races can be and have been differently classified by different anthropologists, but at the present time most anthropologists agree on classifying the greater part of the present-day mankind into three major divisions as follows: (a) the Mongoloid division; (b) the Negroid division; and (c) the Caucasoid division. The biological processes which the classifier has here embalmed, as it were, are dynamic, not static. These divisions were not the same in the past as they are at present, and there is every reason to believe that they will change in the future.65
In arguing that the term race should be jettisoned in favor of genetic population, yet nonetheless retaining physical anthropology’s racial categories and their descriptive purchase, the statement’s authors paradoxically underscored the notion that physical differences were the expression of major differences among human groups. And in reaffirming these divisions based on color and physical difference, they deepened the sense that race was self-evidently recognizable.66 The statement suggested that, while nationality, religion, language, geography, and culture can and must be distinguished from race, the ontology of some differences could be understood only in racial terms. Even as the statement makes this concession to the typological categories that were meant to be supplanted by the concept of the population, it insists that such attempts to stabilize race are deadening, embalming something that has already expired and allowing it to outlive what should be its ongoing transformation. The statement wants to describe race as something in motion, dynamic and not static. But confronted with this triad of unequally marked and asymmetrically situated racial groups, amid postwar confrontations over the global color line, we must ask, To whom is this promise of racial transformation being extended? It is when we ask which differences are variously called upon to be or to make themselves plastic, or deemed insufficiently plastic, that the biopolitical dimensions of plasticity come into focus.
We need only look to anticolonial thought in this historical moment to see how readily this seemingly apolitical promise was mobilized by the racial logic of colonial management. That is, from the perspective of the racialized subject, the imperatives of racial plasticity look quite different. For instance, just two years after the Statement on Race was published, Frantz Fanon would take up precisely the questions of natality, educability, and plasticity that I have been tracking in UNESCO’s discourse. In Black Skin, White Masks, published in 1952, Fanon opens his chapter on “The Lived Experience of the Black Man” with his own hymn to natality: “I came into this world anxious to uncover the meaning of things, my soul desirous to be at the origin of the world.”67 But directly preceding this avowal, and thus his entrance into the world, are the phrases of racial (mis)recognition — “Dirty nigger!” or simply “Look! A Negro” — that make such a claim to newness or originality impossible for the Black subject. Instead, Fanon retells this narrative of arrival a second time, now as a story of fixity rather than newness:
I arrive slowly in the world; sudden emergences are no longer my habit. I crawl along. The white gaze, the only valid one, is already dissecting me. I am fixed. Once their microtomes are sharpened, the Whites objectively cut sections of my reality. I have been betrayed. I sense, I see in this white gaze that it’s the arrival not of a new man, but of a new type of man, a new species [genre]. A Negro, in fact!68
What Fanon describes here is precisely that quality of racial intractability that the statement both reinscribes and promises will eventually be dislodged through its mobilization of plasticity. Whereas UNESCO’s univer-salizing antiracism looks to create humanity as a constituency by insisting on species sameness, Fanon reminds us ironically that we are marking the arrival not of a new man or universal humanity but of a type. Moreover, even as Fanon emphasizes that Blackness cannot lay claim to the new and the natal and that the perception of its specific intractability belies and complicates easy invocations of plasticity, he emphasizes at every turn the extent to which Blackness is constantly subjected to the imperatives of educability. That is, though intractable, Blackness must be made plastic — whether through what he calls lactification (the whitening of the race via sexual reproduction and cultural assimilation) or through experiments with racial form, such as the so-called anti-negrification serum he caustically invokes.69 Plasticity is not just promise but imperative, entailing assimilation and amalgamation.70 At the same time, as I have shown, plasticity is always imagined as malleability within limits. These limits depend on the perception of the educability of social and biological forms. Educability, I have argued, is racialized, while racial plasticity is subject to the mandates of reeducation.
Resisting Plasticity
Why did UNESCO’s version of antiracism find it easier to imagine an end to race than to imagine that racism itself could be contested in political terms? It is notable that the same postwar moment saw other, more substantive versions of antiracist politics at work. In some cases, such as in the psychoanalytic investigations that Theodor Adorno and others carried out on the authoritarian personality, it meant looking for the roots of racism in the psyche of individuals and groups. But the most robust articulations of midcentury antiracist thought are to be found in the work of anticolonial thinkers, for whom examining racism was the necessary corollary of resisting the colonial ordering of the world. Despite differences in their accounts of how racism functioned as a cause, a consequence, and an alibi for colonialism, none of these thinkers ever advocated the idea that racism would be solved because race would solve itself. As Albert Memmi would write, “Biology is a metaphor for the destiny imposed on the other.”71 Colonialism justifies itself, he means to suggest, through the imposition of racial taxonomies and hierarchies. But his aphorism might also serve as a rejoinder to the framers of the statement, who sought to promulgate plasticity as part of an emancipatory project that nonetheless insisted on the educability of race. Indeed, as I have suggested, Fanon was deeply sensitive to the way that plasticity, educability, and their racialized imperatives and limits were already, and had long been, integral to discourses of colonial management and assimilation.
Amid what at times feels like an interdisciplinary romance with plasticity in the present, it is worth holding on to the recognition that plasticity is itself made plastic, put to work for political projects that draw recursively on its power. Plasticity has no inherent political meaning, but it can nonetheless be made to do political work. As the UNESCO statement and its context demonstrate, plasticity emerges historically as part of a biopolitical project articulated in the name of humanity. It is a managerial concept, framed as a promise of freedom. To count on plasticity as anti-racist discourse or practice is to confuse the changeability of racial form for the work of undoing racism.
Notes
Many thanks to the Chicago Junior Faculty Writing Group, especially to Nasser Mufti, Harris Feinsod, and Edgar Garcia, for their detailed and generous comments on an earlier version of the manuscript. Adrienne Brown and Zachary Samalin read the manuscript with extraordinary care, and their comments improved it immeasurably, as did their encouragement. An MLA panel on racial plasticity co-organized with Kyla Wazana Tompkins was a generative opportunity to think collaboratively on this topic. The special issue editors and the two anonymous reviewers offered perceptive feedback that helped me sharpen the argument.
For such a genealogy of the concept, see, e.g., Schuller, Biopolitics of Feeling.
Among the statement’s seminal interventions were its attempt to redefine race as genetic population, and so to divest race of any fixity, and the sharp distinction and even opposition it drew between race and culture. At the same time, the statement maintained the privileged role of scientists and scientific knowledge production for the arbitration of race while putting its pronouncements to work in the service of an argument about the biological and moral unity of “mankind.” On the status of the statement as “a key event in the consolidation of the postwar liberal orthodoxy” around race, see Selcer, “Beyond the Cephalic Index,” S174; Reardon, “Decoding Race and Human Difference”; and Proctor, “Three Roots of Human Recency.”
On this point, see Lentin, Racism and Anti-racism in Europe, 9–12.
UNESCO, “Statement on Race,” 32.
Scholarly appraisals of the statement and its 1951 revision regularly treat them as marking a break or historical discontinuity, describing them as “a palace coup . . . in the citadel of science” (Haraway, Modest_Witness, 239) and a “revolution in the concept of race” that marked the end of an era of scientific racism inaugurated in the eighteenth century (Barkan, Retreat of Scientific Racism, 341). For an assessment of continuities, discontinuities, and periodization, see Gil-Riano, “Historicizing Anti-Racism,” which examines UNESCO’s race statements as a study in the historical ontology of race; Haraway, Modest_Witness, 213–48; and Hazard, Postwar Anti-racism.
For a discussion of the emergence of population genetics at midcentury and of the field’s imbrication with the idea of race it supposedly supersedes, see Gannett, “Racism and Human Genome Diversity Research.” See also Haraway, “Remodeling the Human Way of Life.”
My reading thus resonates with Elazar Barkan’s Retreat of Scientific Racism, where he argues that when Anglo-American scientists began to challenge scientific racism in the 1920s and 1930s, scientific developments of the 1920s cleared the way but did not incite or produce a shift that was fundamentally political. Or, as Barkan puts it elsewhere, “Though the shift may seem almost irreversible, nothing in ‘science’ had determined such a development” (“Politics of the Science of Race,” 104). For a contrasting view, see Stepan, Idea of Race in Science.
See esp. Arendt, Human Condition, 38–49; and Pitkin, Attack of the Blob.
Numerous critics have observed Arendt’s status as a theorist of biopolitics avant la lettre, and as an (unacknowledged) source for Michel Foucault’s formulation and theorization of that concept. Some have argued that it is precisely Arendt’s identification of the increasingly totalizing character of the social as the means and ends of contemporary politics that describes, in her terms, the forms of power and its management of life that Foucault would call biopolitics and biopower. See Diprose and Ziarek, “Time for Beginners,” 113; and Owens, “Not Life but the World Is at Stake,” 305–6.
Huxley, “On Living in a Revolution,” 339. During his tenure as UNESCO director-general, Huxley explicitly imagined that UNESCO’s role entailed the strategic intervention in and management of not only mentalities and subjectivities but also the biosocial life, vitality, and well-being of populations. While his views were controversial, they also shaped the enduring ethos of UNESCO’s scientific humanism. See Huxley, UNESCO; Sluga, “UNESCO and the (One) World of Julian Huxley”; Brown, “Being Cellular”; and Pavone, From the Labyrinth of the World.
UNESCO, Constitution of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 5. At the first general conference, the Indian philosopher Sir Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan would elaborate on this line in the constitution, observing that while “the political organs of the United Nations are engaged in the negative task of preventing acts of aggression,” “we are assigned the positive function of building peace in the minds of men through science, education and culture” (UNESCO, “General Conference — First Session,” 27).
UNESCO, “Statement on Race,” 30.
This attempt to reconcile the terms mankind and Homo sapiens is particularly interesting in light of Foucault’s observation that “the dimension in which the population is immersed amongst the other living beings appears and is sanctioned when, for the first time, men are no longer called ‘mankind (le genre humaine)’ and begin to be called ‘the human species (l’espèce humaine)’ ” (Security, Territory, Population, 75). I am suggesting that the work here is to reanimate the category of mankind or humanity by grounding it in the status of biological population. Robert N. Proctor has excavated the remarkable political and epistemological consequences of these efforts. He suggests that scientific debates about the timing of the origins of the first humans were so fundamentally shaped by the political consensus that emerged from the 1950 race statement that the acknowledgment of the recency of human origins was effectively delayed one or two decades, because of the anxiety that making the case for recency would be tantamount to expelling certain forms of humanoid life from “the human” (“Three Roots of Human Recency”).
In a fascinating article that also considers the significance of the child’s plastic character, Iain Morland argues that UNESCO’s focus on racial plasticity and educability significantly influenced theories of gender plasticity in the 1960s and the treatment of intersex children, whose psychological and biological plasticity was thought to make them educable into either gender. Morland, “Gender, Genitals, and the Meaning of Being Human.” My thanks to Kyla Schuller for the reference.
On natality as birth, see Arendt, Human Condition, esp. 9, 178, 247. On natality’s inextricable relation to the event of biological birth, contra some accounts, see Vatter, “Natality and Biopolitics in Hannah Arendt”; and Diprose and Ziarek, “Time for Beginners.”
Arendt, “What Is Freedom?,” 169; see also Levinson, “Paradox of Natality,” 14. Or, as Arendt puts it in Human Condition, “The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability . . . the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle” (178).
We might say that this, too, is part of the boomerang effect, to borrow Arendt’s and Aimé Césaire’s description of the implacable return to Europe of the technologies of violence it had refined in its colonies (Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 123–267; Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 36).
On the changing fortunes of race in early postwar international (and especially British imperial) relations, see Füredi, Silent War.
For an account of this episode, see Mazower, No Enchanted Palace, 149–89.
These tensions were also felt at UNESCO. In 1951, Alva Myrdal, then director of UNESCO’s social sciences department, would report to Alfred Métraux, who ran the race project, the “sad news” that UNESCO’s director-general had nixed their attempts for a resolution related to race in UNESCO’s 1953–54 program, on the grounds that “we would not be able to steer a middle course between metropolitan interests and those of the freedom-seeking populations, and rather than have the resolution torn to pieces . . . he prefers to present one which has a greater chance of success, and set in a wider framework, namely, one on discrimination as a whole” (Letter from Alva Myrdal to Alfred Métraux, October 22, 1951, SS/262.215, Folder 323.12 A 102, Box 147, UNESCO Archives, Paris).
UN Economic and Social Council, “Report Submitted to the Commission on Human Rights,” 17; UN Economic and Social Council, “Resolution 116 (VI) B,” 17.
UNESCO, “Statement on Race,” 32.
UNESCO, “Summary Report,” 3/9. Here and in subsequent references, the first number indicates the meeting number (1–6) and the second the page number.
UNESCO, “Summary Report,” 1/11–12.
UNESCO, “Summary Report,” 3/8.
UNESCO, “Statement on Race,” 34.
UNESCO, “Statement on Race,” 30–31.
UNESCO, “Summary Report,” 2/7.
UNESCO, “Summary Report,” 2/7. That such a proposal should come from Lévi-Strauss may be surprising, since he would not seem to be an obvious candidate to fall back on a biological or genetic explanation for human difference. But as Staffan Müller-Wille has shown, “Cultural and genetic diversity appeared to Lévi-Strauss from very early on as analogous phenomena, exhibiting similar patterns and being subject to the same type of historical processes” (“Claude Lévi-Strauss on Race, History, and Genetics,” 332). This analogical relationship is not premised on the evolutionary paradigm of history that Lévi-Strauss wrote against, in which the primitive might achieve (or fail to achieve) the status of modernity through development. Rather, the correspondence here is between a nonteleological history and a definition of biological race — which Lévi-Strauss was casting after and found in the notion of genetic populations — that placed its emphasis on change, contingency, and flux, rather than on the fixity or even stability of racial form over time. On Lévi-Strauss’s conception of race, see also Visweswaran, Un/common Cultures, 74–102.
UNESCO, “Summary Report,” 2/8.
UNESCO, “Statement on Race,” 31. “Race was the result of culture and not vice-versa,” Lévi-Strauss observed (quoted in UNESCO, “Summary Report,” 3/9).
As Lisa Gannett has argued, genetic populations are not “mind-independent objects whose properties and relations scientists discover.” They are not found but made: “Genes become bounded in space and time in ways that fulfill aims, interests, and values associated with particular explanatory contexts” (“Making Populations,” 990).
UNESCO, “Statement on Race,” 31–32.
UNESCO’s 1951 “Statement on the Nature of Race and Race Differences,” which was authored by physical anthropologists and geneticists and issued as a revision and supplement to the 1950 statement, was more cautious about claims to racial plasticity and more forceful in its articulation of race’s self-evidence. In his preface to the new statement, the group’s rapporteur, the geneticist L. C. Dunn, noted that “the physical anthropologists and the man in the street both know that races exist; the former, from the scientifically recognizable and measurable congeries of traits which he uses in classifying the varieties of man; the latter from the immediate evidence of his senses when he sees an African, a European, an Asiatic and an American Indian together” (37). We see here how arguments about racial changeability, or what Dunn calls race’s “dynamic rather than . . . static” quality (37), nonetheless consistently collapse back into a kind of common sense about racial difference as a matter of self-evident sensory and especially visual perception.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 89. The problematization of natality in this chapter is striking. Indeed, Levinson, who describes the paradox of natality as a problem of belatedness in her reading of Arendt, turns to Fanon as illustrative of how this paradox is racialized and what it means for contemporary education. For her related reading of Fanon, see Levinson, “Paradox of Natality,” 15, 22–23.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 24–44, 91. This imperative that Blackness be amalgamated, or racially assimilated, combined with the perception that Blackness is intractable, is what critics such as Jared Sexton have described as the fundamental structure of anti-Blackness (see Sexton, Amalgamation Schemes). In her reading of (neo)slave narratives, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson has observed that slavery depended on plasticity, demanding of enslaved Blacks a “seemingly infinite malle ability” that precluded the “determinacy or resistance” of form and produced instead “coerced formlessness.” Jackson shows that plasticity, when read through the history of racial violence, represents not pure potential but, rather, the way that changeability of form “can be turned against itself by bonds of power” (“Losing Manhood,” 118–19). Fanon, writing at midcentury and in response to French colonialism’s promise of assimilation and its liberal humanism, describes the way plasticity in that context is not just imposed through overt violence but extended as seductive promise. In his account, Blackness is both the target of plasticity’s imperative and that which frustrates and resists it. Jayna Brown has found this association of Blackness with both “hypo-and hyper-plasticity” at work in Julian Huxley’s writing (“Being Cellular,” 337).
Fanon also recognized how plasticity moved across the supposedly separable realms of the biological and the cultural. In trying to strictly separate race (as meaning genetic population and nothing else) from culture, the authors of the Statement on Race imagined that they were precluding culture and those aspects of social life they roughly grouped under it (religion, language, nationality) from being assimilated to racial discourse. With that move, too, they imagined that a difference such as Jewishness, so central to the recent history that they were writing against, could be decisively distinguished from race. Of course, as we know, such a move only cleared the path for cultural racism. Fanon discerned this shift as early as 1956. In “Racism and Culture” he observed that “racism has not managed to harden. It has had to renew itself, to adapt itself, to change its appearance . . . The racism that aspires to be rational, individual, genotypically and phenotypically determined, becomes transformed into cultural racism. The object of racism is no longer the individual man but a certain form of existing” (32). Today this cultural racism, for instance when it is framed in terms of the assimilation of migrants, insists on the plasticity of culture through its emphasis on educability, even as it suggests that racial-cultural forms cannot be fully dissolved, converted, or assimilated.
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