Sonali Thakkar’s The Reeducation of Race: Jewishness and the Politics of Antiracism in Postcolonial Thought examines that fluid postwar moment when the ideological and intellectual assumptions of the Cold War had not quite curdled. The story as it’s generally told sees racism recognized in the 1940s as one of the key causes of Nazi atrocities—which meant that race understood as deep biological truth rather than contingent sociological construct seemed to be on its way out. Then the UN got involved—which is where Thakkar has an important new story to unfold.

A longer version of this conversation was broadcast on the podcast Recall This Book, a Public Books partner. You can listen here or subscribe to Recall This Book on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

John Plotz (JP): Sonali, would you begin by sharing the key claims of your book?

Sonali Thakkar (ST): The book is thinking through how attempts to redefine race at the United Nations and especially at UNESCO in the early post–World War II period helped make ideas about Jewishness and Jewish difference central to anti- and postcolonial discourse.

The heart of the story is a document, UNESCO’s 1950 Statement on Race. This statement was put together by leading figures at the time in the sciences and social sciences, including Claude Lévi-Strauss, Ashley Montagu, Morris Ginsberg, and E. Franklin Frazier. It was an epochal statement, insofar as it sought to end scientific racism and to try to redefine race in explicitly antiracist terms.

So what’s important about this statement is it emerges at the same moment that the UN is trying to think about what a new world order looks like, a remade international order. And this is a moment when race and racism become central to international politics really for the first time in a new way. At the UN, there’s an understanding that race and racism have shattered the old political order and threaten the new one that they’re trying to create in its wake.

On the one hand, there’s a new willingness to disavow and reject race and racism. On the other hand, this is still an international order constitutively structured—as the political theorist Adom Getachew has put it—by “unequal integration and racial hierarchy.” So this is still an imperial international order.

I’m interested in how the delegitimization of race in this early postwar period is running ahead of the delegitimization of imperialism. There are top-down efforts at the UN and UNESCO to produce an antiracist global pedagogy—and at the same time, top-down efforts to preserve the imperial status quo, which the UN is in no rush to dismantle. As W. E. B. Du Bois puts it in the early postwar moment, the UN was a “plan for world government designed especially to curb aggression, but also to preserve imperial power and even extend and fortify it.”

At the same time, there are anticolonial thinkers and activists who are eager to make use of these new institutions and of the opening that emerges at this time—to use that delegitimization of race to further their own aspirations, which are antiracist aspirations and especially anticolonial aspirations.

JP: In the book you have a marvelous discussion of exclusion, intervention, and entanglement: you are laying out a way of thinking about a knotted genealogy where even if people are not explicitly referenced (I’m sure you don’t see any footnotes to Du Bois in UNESCO writings), nonetheless, there’s evidence of a back-and-forth. That entanglement may be invisible in the overt language and yet signpost clearly who is arguing with whom.

ST: Often, people start the story of the UN and decolonization around 1960. That’s when you have many more formerly colonized nations achieving independence, joining the UN as member states, and when the UN General Assembly passes the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples. But even before some of that has been achieved, anticolonial thinkers were already looking to the UN and you can see these connections at the level of cultural influence and cultural engagement. I’m arguing that the UNESCO race project, which really has not been taken up in postcolonial literary studies, is significant as an intertext that helps show how these separate scenes are connected and actually constitute one story.

JP: Is there a smoking gun for you? Is it the 1950 UNESCO statement on race? Can you talk about how it came to be, the cast of characters?

ST: UNESCO is the first agency of the UN. It officially comes into existence in 1946, and they have their first general conference that year. And from the beginning, there’s a real preoccupation with how racism threatens humanity, and how there’s a need to constitute a new set of values, a new set of moral principles, on which a new world can be based. The horrors of Nazism and Nazi antisemitism are regularly invoked.

At the same time, there is a recognition that this is a global problem, that racism’s dimensions are global and that colonialism’s genocidal violence—the destruction of cultures in the name of racial superiority—has contributed to this and that its harms must be reassessed.

And yet, UNESCO is not an anticolonial project. So there is enormous tension between those two positions.

From the very beginning, they’re really trying to think, “How do we reeducate humanity? How do we reeducate the child? Can we? Is racism even something educable?” They’re haunted by the thought that racism is just something they’re not going to be able to get beyond.

Just a little later, the UN is putting together the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). And the drafting committee includes race, of course, as one of the grounds on which it’s impermissible to discriminate (in Article 2). But they don’t have a lot to say about what race is or isn’t. They’re not trying to define race. That’s the work that the UN’s human rights division outsources to UNESCO. They ask UNESCO to put together an antiracist pedagogical program, “designed to remove what is commonly known as racial prejudice” by “disseminating scientific facts with regard to race.”

This leads to the drafting of the 1950 statement, which is, for me, the beginning of the story. It’s this key moment when scientists and social scientists try to redefine race as malleable and changeable, not fixed. They want to mobilize shifts in the biological and genetic sciences, especially developments in population genetics, to debunk ideas of strict racial taxonomies, where race is this unchangeable thing that just gets passed down from generation to generation.

I’m making the case that the UNESCO statement’s key claim is about the plasticity of race. But the claim about plasticity is also coming out of this long tradition, by then pretty well established, that really begins with Franz Boas in the early 20th century. For Boas, plasticity is specifically about the malleability of racial form. The authors of the UNESCO statement enact a subtle shift, retaining this racial meaning while also recasting plasticity as the quintessential quality of human beings and connecting it to their capacity for learning, or what they call “educability.” So they connect the changeability of racial form to the very capacity for human reeducation.

JP: Forgive me if this short-circuits the incredible complexity of the word “plasticity,” but can we connect it directly to the way in which the characteristic stereotypes about Jewishness in Europe from the 19th century on have to do with this chimeric or shape-shifting or metamorphic quality of “the Jew”? It’s even there in Marx’s “On the Jewish Question”: somehow, the plasticity of Jewishness sometimes aligned with capitalism or the tendency of modernity to liquefy everything into the cash relationship. Does that notion of Jewishness that is plastic in its very modernity figure in there?

ST: It does, but in a complex way. Boas arrives at his theories about racial plasticity as part of the studies he’s doing in the first decade of the 20th century for the US Immigration Commission. He looks at immigrants from a number of different places. But he begins with Jewish immigrants to the US. And then he goes on in the teens and twenties and later, when he becomes an important activist against antisemitism and Nazism, to make these assertions about the paradigmatic plasticity of Jewishness. And for him, it’s a claim that promises liberation from racial taxonomy and from antisemitism to say, “Hey, people are changeable and we have to think about racial form as this malleable and plastic quality. We can see it changing within as little as a generation.” Of course, as you note, there is a great deal of antisemitic discourse that ascribes sinister protean or malleable qualities to Jews, and Boas’s valorization of plasticity does not address that. For him, plasticity suggests a fitness and capacity for assimilation. But an antisemite can flip it around and put it to a very different use. It’s a good illustration of the way that ascriptions of plasticity can be put to different and competing political purposes—it’s not somehow inherently liberatory.

What’s also important about this early moment and the purported “discovery” of plasticity among certain populations is that Boas, who is committed to various antiracist causes alongside the struggle against antisemitism, suggests that plasticity is universal but he nonetheless seems to see some groups as more plastic than others. I discuss how in his writings he treats plasticity as an imperative for Black Americans, necessary for their assimilation and amalgamation and liberation from racial prejudice, but also as less available to them, owing to what he perceives as the greater intransigence, the irreducible difference, of their racial form. So plasticity is no political panacea, and it is also distributed in racially differential ways that perpetuate inequalities rather than dissolving them.

I argue that we can extend that logic of the boomerang effect and describe UNESCO’s project of racial reeducation as the colonial educative project now rebounding on Europe.

JP: How do you understand that tension between an anticolonial and a colonial impulse toward antiracism? Do you see in the UNESCO discourse an attempt to justify or excuse the colonial project?

ST: It’s certainly an extension of that 19th-century imperative of colonial educability that we know so well, especially thanks to postcolonial theory. This is something that operates not just on the psyche or the intellect of the colonial subject, but also on their biology and flesh.

The literary critic Deepika Bahri, for instance, has observed that colonial discourse already knows that not only the minds of colonial subjects but also potentially their bodies, their fleshly being, bear these potentials for being remade, even if they’re intractable or intransigent in some ways.

The UNESCO statement certainly perpetuates this position, because it implies that the educability of the colonial subject requires submission to the imperatives to be plastic. For instance, the statement declares that there are “three major divisions” of “present-day mankind”—the Mongoloid, the Negroid, and the Caucasoid—but then assures the reader that these are not permanent types and that these groupings will inevitably change. We have to ask, to whom is this promise of change being extended? To whom is it being extended as an imperative?

But while these colonial dynamics persist and are renovated to meet changing historical circumstances, the UNESCO project also allows us to glimpse some important historical reversals and ironies. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak describes imperialism’s project of trying to create humanity from savagery among the colonized as “soul-making.” What is really interesting about the mid-century moment I examine is that, all of a sudden, there is a new preoccupation—at UNESCO and beyond—with the way that soul-making is required in Europe, since Europe under fascism has demonstrated its barbarism and racism in such a devastating way. And so as much as the imperative for the colonized to be educable persists and is extended via new understandings of plasticity, it is also the case that some of the thinkers affiliated with UNESCO recognize to some degree what Aimé Césaire and Hannah Arendt described as the boomerang effect, whereby Europe’s colonial violence rebounds on itself in the form of Nazism. I argue that we can extend that logic of the boomerang effect and describe UNESCO’s project of racial reeducation as the colonial educative project now rebounding on Europe.

So you have all of these thinkers, not just radicals or anticolonialists, who are saying, “Gosh, there’s been a trading of places. And what we thought of as the savagery out there is actually the savagery here.” And now the project of soul-making is required globally, but nowhere more urgently than in Europe itself.

JP: What do bureaucracies actually do in the world? I pulled out this quote from [Joseph] Conrad’s The Secret Agent: at one point somebody says to a terrorist, “Since bombs are your means of expression …” I tend to think of governments’ means of expression as spending money or deploying armies. Their speech acts are actually not speech at all. They’re the stuff that you do with cash or with weapons.

But you’re saying that the words here are the means of expression. Clearly people don’t focus too much on the UNESCO bureaucracy when they try to think about the evolution of postcolonial thinking, about anticolonialism, the project, but you’re arguing that we should attend to these words. Where does the rubber meet the road?

ST: The whole project is influential. It’s circulating widely and it has an enduring impact, not least on anticolonial thought, which is my broadest argument. But I am also making the case that this document represents the convergence of many intellectual and political currents. I show how the statement emerges out of concepts developed in Jewish social science and should be understood as a document of Jewish politics.

I also argue that this is a human rights document, and that its status as a declaration carries great significance, generically speaking. In the meetings where they’re drafting the statement and debating its form, they’re very consciously drawing on the form of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. There’s been a lot of work done in literary studies on the genre of declarations and on the UDHR, for instance, as a document that has broad cultural influence.

When it comes to the UNESCO statement’s impact, I argue Frantz Fanon has this critical dialogue going with the statement, with liberal antiracism. We’re used to thinking about people like Césaire and Fanon as these very trenchant critics of metropolitan racism. But if we consider the ways that the UNESCO project also interests them, then we can see that they’re also critics of liberal antiracism, and that there are different genres of antiracism. In fact, we could read aspects of Fanon’s argument in Black Skin, White Masks as engaging very critically with the idea of plasticity so central to the UNESCO statement.

In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon has these pretty famous statements that he makes about Jewishness. On the one hand, at various moments, he’s claiming a kinship between Jewishness and his own Blackness: that they’re united and that there’s a shared struggle and shared suffering; that violations of the rights of Jews are violations of his own rights. Yet there are also these places where he says that in contrast to his own Blackness, Jews essentially are or at least can pass as white, which makes occurrences such as the Holocaust “just minor episodes in the family history.”

But let’s think about what he’s saying not as enduring ahistorical claims about some essentialized notion of Jewish whiteness. Instead, we can read them in their historical context alongside these social scientific reworkings of race that are happening at that moment. If we read his comments on the Holocaust as a family quarrel alongside, say, Boas’s assertions about Jewishness and its paradigmatic plasticity and capacity for assimilation, do we arrive at a different reading? Fanon is writing in this moment where race is being redescribed as plastic. He recognizes this as part of a long colonial history that is still unfolding and is being reasserted in the present, even if rousing documents like the UNESCO statement and the UDHR are promising the arrival of a new humanity that this time will be properly universal. And Fanon is saying, “No, that’s not the case,” because he is very attuned to the way that plasticity is differentially distributed and prescribed in a racial sense. Fanon sees how Blackness is both subjected to the imperative that it be made plastic and deemed never plastic enough—a position that I noted we find earlier in Boas’s writing, for instance.

JP: I began by calling this a liquefied moment, and then things curdle. If we think about this as a space of possibility, when things curdle again, whether that’s with the second UNESCO statement or whenever it is, do they curdle back to just the old forms, because this is belatedness? Or is it more like, “This is a liquid moment,” and then these new formulations are offered and then they in their turn become old and ossified? Is it more like the return of the thing that momentarily seemed like it might be displaced, but it comes back? Or is it more like, “No, we just have a hardening of whatever new thing we did”?

ST: The new is tainted from the outset. That’s the important thing.

So, there was a real moment of opening after World War II. There was a real moment where these tectonic shifts were taking place. The opening is real. But what fills that opening is an already compromised set of concepts. The very notion of plasticity, like at the conceptual level, is trying to manage and ameliorate the tension of “Okay, we’re antiracist now, but actually we’d still like to hold onto our empires.”

So from the very beginning, the concepts that they’re using are the ones that they think will help them thread this needle. And of course they don’t. So they’re flawed from the outset.

JP: If I understand how Foucault uses the concept of genealogy, part of the problem with genealogy is not that there’s no such thing as novelty in the world, it’s that all of the novelty in the world arises on an antecedent residuum.

So you mobilize the pre-extant categories. That’s a given. You don’t have any other categories. But then once the tectonic plates have shifted, when you mobilize them, they then do something different. In other words, in every moment of tectonic shift, you’re building up new volcanoes, new layers of rock, but they are new and then they in turn go on to have their own results.

It’s not like we’re trapped in eternal return, it’s just that we only have the tools that we have from the past.

ST: These anticolonial thinkers—Fanon, Césaire, Ama Ata Aidoo—take up the concepts of plasticity, educability, reparation and reflect them back in a changed way. They do so in a way that either shows up their contradictions, or ironizes them, or puts them to new purposes. Think about what Césaire manages to accomplish: the way that he takes the pedagogical operations of UNESCO’s race project and finds in it something new and important for his own intellectual formation, which is to develop these tighter analytical connections between antisemitism and various colonial racisms. But even as he’s learning from UNESCO’s race project he’s also deeply critical of aspects of UNESCO’s development work in the Third World, which adopts a reparative ethos toward addressing the harms of racism and colonialism but, in Césaire’s view, retains a paternalistic and (neo)colonial character.

So that’s where the differences are. We need to look at this historical moment, this intellectual and political scene, in a contrapuntal perspective—which the cultural critic Edward W. Said theorized as a postcolonial interpretive method that draws out the “knotted,” “overlapping,” and “interconnected” elements of seemingly discrepant discourses and experiences. Then we begin to see how the categories and the concepts can be put to new uses or be turned against themselves and made to mean something a little bit different.

when we see MAGA Republicans and far-right figures becoming the arbiters of what antisemitism is and isn’t, then up is down and down is up. We’re in a really, really terrifying place if we capitulate to their characterizations and demands.

JP: How would you connect the thinking you’re doing in this book for the postwar period to currents in the present?

ST: The coda of the book is called “The Waning Consensus,” and it was written in fall 2022. And in the coda, I’m reflecting on how we today might regard this mid-century moment of possibility and openness and its lessons. Because from the perspective of the present, what they did in 1950 seems like a historical oddity. It’s an artifact from another time, where they really believed, however misguidedly, that they could sit down and formulate a new understanding of race that would have this globally transformative effect on people’s psyches, on their spiritual and moral formation.

That does not seem possible today. And their conviction that they could, in some way, decisively reeducate racism also feels like an artifact from another time.

The 1950 UNESCO statement really canonized the liberal antiracist consensus that has, in some form or another, prevailed for so many years as a certain common sense. Even as it’s been resisted in various ways. And certainly, that liberal antiracism is deeply, deeply problematic and flawed, and has been undermined precisely because it doesn’t answer the real questions that we care about: If race doesn’t exist, if race is meaningless, why does it still organize our social world and the possibilities for thriving and so on?

But what we see in our current moment is the rise of various kinds of global New Rights that have really undone even that imperfect consensus. And the wavering center has nothing with which to answer it. I don’t think liberal antiracism has good rejoinders to those challenges and attacks.

Also, an important lesson of that era, as we see in Fanon and Césaire, is that the struggle against antisemitism was linked to the struggle against other kinds of racisms. I trace how they thought through and grappled with these connections in their work, with the UNESCO statement as a kind of conceptual touchstone.

Today, though, we see that connection coming undone, and we see resistance across the political spectrum to situating antisemitism as one form of racism among others, which needs to be analyzed in comparative perspective rather than isolated or exceptionalized. I wrote the coda before October 7 and the start of Israel’s ongoing genocidal assault on Palestinians in Gaza, so I was not yet thinking about the accelerated version of this uncoupling and exceptionalizing that we are seeing today, and the unprecedented extent to which accusations of antisemitism have been weaponized.

However, I do write in the coda of the book about the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which was issued in 2016 and has been adopted by educational institutions, governments, and various civil society organizations. After October 7 and the Gaza solidarity encampments of spring 2024, the widening adoption of the IHRA definition has increasingly become a key tactic in efforts to repress speech critical of Israel and Zionism on college campuses and in civil society. The definition is hugely problematic for the way that it suggests that certain criticisms of Israel or Zionism are inherently antisemitic. And there has been organized pressure on that definition precisely for the ways that it shuts down those kinds of questions, including alternative definitions of antisemitism, such as the Jerusalem Declaration on Anti-Semitism. Another lesson of UNESCO’s race project, though, is about the limits of official definitions, however well-intentioned, to solve by a kind of conceptual fiat political and ideological conflicts.

As I say in the book, antisemitism has to be combatted as part of a broader struggle against racism. When you delink these questions—when you make leftists and Palestinian liberation movements and student protesters the figures for antisemitism in our moment—something very dangerous has happened. And that is that we actually lose sight of what antisemitism is, and where it tends to come from, which is the political right. We also lose sight of how to fight it effectively, which is in a coalitional way and in solidarity with these other principled movements. So when we see MAGA Republicans and far-right figures becoming the arbiters of what antisemitism is and isn’t, then up is down and down is up. We’re in a really, really terrifying place if we capitulate to their characterizations and demands. 

Featured image: Sonali Thakkar