Rejecting Race: The Intellectual Origins of Racial Deconstructivism, 1784-1950

ongoing

It is now a truism that race is a social and cultural construct, but when was this first realised, why, and by whom? Rejecting Race: The Intellectual Origins of Racial Deconstructivism, 1784-1950 investigates the process by which it became accepted that race is an intellectual fiction rather than a real reflection of the world and its peoples. While the existing literature has traditionally identified the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Statements on Race that began appearing in 1950 as the first sustained challenge to the concept of race, Rejecting Race examines a range of thinkers who undermined the epistemological foundations of race well before the middle of the twentieth century. This historical study will use genealogical and comparative methods of textual analysis to examine selected philosophical, linguistic, anthropological, sociological, and historical texts written in English, French, and German. It is hypothesised that these will show how initial reservations about the idea of race expressed at the end of the eighteenth century developed into full-blown rejections of race as an intellectually valid category by the end of the nineteenth century, providing the essential framework for the movement that culminated in the UNESCO Statement on Race of 1950 that declared it a ‘social myth’. In undertaking a historical examination of when, how, and why race began to be challenged and reconceived in constructivist terms, this project will substantially revise the prevailing state-of-the-art by showing that race was a contested idea from its inception, a fact raising the troubling question of why it retained its hold on Western minds for so long.