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

Abstract

What Is Race? Evidence from Scientists (1952) is a picture book for schoolchildren published by UNESCO as part of its high-profile campaign on race. The 87-page, oblong, soft-cover booklet contains bold, semi-abstract, pared-down images accompanied by text, devised (so it declared) to make scientific concepts ‘more easily intelligible to the layman’. Produced by UNESCO’s Department of Mass Communication, the picture book represents the organization’s early-postwar confidence in the power of scientific knowledge as a social remedy and diplomatic tool. In keeping with a significant component of the race campaign, What Is Race? presented genetics as the route to an enlightened, scientific, non-prejudiced understanding of race. This article seeks to explain the book’s management, aesthetics and framing in the context of postwar disciplinary and international politics. Viewing UNESCO’s race campaign as a high point for an internationalist ideology of mass education, this article also analyses the visual and literary arguments of What Is Race? and proposes that the enduring image of genetics as technical and neutral knowledge was in part shaped by UNESCO’s efforts to communicate scientific authority to an apparently ‘popular’ audience.