UNESCO has published several statements about issues of race. The statements include:
Statement on race (Paris, July 1950) Statement on the nature of race and race differences (Paris, June 1951) Proposals on the biological aspects of race (Moscow, August 1964) Statement on race and racial prejudice (Paris, September 1967) Other statements include the Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (1963), the "Declaration on Race and Racial Prejudice" (1978) and the "Declaration of Principles on Tolerance" (1995).
Statement on race (1950) Statement on race is the first statement on race issued by UNESCO. It was issued on 18 July 1950 following World War II and Nazi racism, to clarify what was scientifically known about race, and as a moral condemnation of racism. It was drafted by Ernest Beaglehole, psychologist and ethnologist; Juan Comas, anthropologist; Luiz de Aguiar Costa Pinto, sociologist; Franklin Frazier, sociologist specialised in race relations studies; Morris Ginsberg, founding chairperson of the British Sociological Association; Humayun Kabir, writer, philosopher, and twice Education Minister of India; Claude Lévi-Strauss, one of the founders of ethnology and leading theorist of structural anthropology; and Ashley Montagu, anthropologist and author of The Elephant Man: A Study in Human Dignity, who was the rapporteur. The statement was criticized on several grounds, in particular by natural scientists. Criticisms were submitted by Hadley Cantril; Edwin Conklin; Gunnar Dahlberg; Theodosius Dobzhansky, author of Genetics and the Origin of Species (1937); L. C. Dunn; Donald J. Hager, professor of anthropology and sociology at the University of Princeton; Julian Huxley, first director of UNESCO and one of the many key contributors to modern evolutionary synthesis; Otto Klineberg; Wilbert Moore; H. J. Muller; Gunnar Myrdal, author of An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944); Joseph Needham, a biochemist specialist of Chinese science; and geneticist Curt Stern. The text was then revised by Ashley Montagu and the revised statement was published in 1951, as well as a book detailing the criticisms in 1952. UNESCO would start a campaign to spread the results of the report to a "vast public" such as by publishing pamphlets. It described Brazil as having an "exemplary situation" regarding race relations and that research should be undertaken in order to understand the causes of this "harmony".
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The introduction states that it was inevitable that UNESCO should take a position in the controversy. The preamble to the UNESCO constitution states that it should combat racism. The constitution itself stated that "The great and terrible war that has now ended was a war made possible by the denial of the democratic principles of the dignity, equality and mutual respect of men, and by the propagation, in their place, through ignorance and prejudice, of the doctrine of the inequality of men and races." A 1948 UN Social and Economic Council resolution called upon UNESCO to consider the timeliness "of proposing and recommending the general adoption of a programme of dissemination of scientific facts designed to bring about the disappearance of that which is commonly called race prejudice." In 1949, the General Conference of UNESCO adopted three resolutions which committed it to "study and collect scientific materials concerning questions of race", "to give wide diffusion to the scientific material collected", and "to prepare an education campaign based on this information." Furthermore, in doing this
UNESCO took up again, after a lapse of fifteen years, a project which the International Institute for Intellectual Co-operation has wished to carry through but which it had to abandon in deference to the appeasement policy of the pre-war period. The race question had become one of the pivots of Nazi ideology and policy. Masaryk and Beneš took the initiative of calling for a conference to re-establish in the minds and consciences of men everywhere the truth about race... But they were not given such an opportunity. Nazi propaganda was able to continue its baleful work unopposed by the authority of an international organisation. The introduction stated "Knowledge of the truth does not always help change emotional attitudes that draw their real strength from the subconscious or from factors beside the real issue." But it could "however, prevent rationalizations of reprehensive acts or behaviour prompted by feelings that men will not easily avow openly." UNESCO made a moral statement:
Concern for human dignity demands that all citizens be equal before the law, and that they share equally in the advantages assured them by the law, no matter what their physical or intellectual differences may be. The law sees in each person only a human being who has the right to the same consideration and to equal respect. The conscience of all mankind demand that this be true for all the peoples of the earth. It matters little, therefore, whether the diversity of men's gift be the result of biological or cultural factors. The statement argued that there was no evidence for intellectual or personality differences. The statement did not reject the idea of a biological basis to racial categories. It defined the concept of race in terms of a population defined by certain anatomical and physiological characteristics diverging from other populations; it gives as examples the Caucasian, Mongoloid, and Negroid races. However, the statement argued that "National, religious, geographic, linguistic and cultural groups do not necessarily coincide with racial groups: and the cultural traits of such groups have no demonstrated genetic connection with racial traits. Because serious errors of this kind are habitually committed when the term 'race' is used in popular parlance, it would be better when speaking of human races to drop the term 'race' altogether and speak of ethnic groups."
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