Even the anti-Nazi UNESCO race statements remained assimilationist and racist.

Evidence

UNESCO officials had assembled in 1950 an international dream team of scholars in Paris to draw up the final rebuttal to Nazism and eugenicists worldwide. Virtually all of the scholars, including Montagu, Dobzhansky, E. Franklin Frazier, and Gunnar Myrdal, had expressed assimilationist ideas—proof that even as the scientific establishment recognized segregationist ideas as racist, they still ensured that assimilationism endured and dominated the racial discourse. While claiming that no human populations had any biological evolutionary achievements, these assimilationists spoke of the “cultural achievements” of certain human populations in the 1950 UNESCO Race Statement. And then, in 1951, geneticists and physical anthropologists figured, in their revised statement: “It is possible, though not proved, that some types of innate capacity for intellectual and emotional responses are commoner in one human group than in another.” Segregationist scholars set out to prove these innate racial differences in intelligence. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 911

Categorization

• XREF: The key confirmatory case for the reader’s core discomfort: the well-meaning antiracist consensus of 1950 was itself assimilationist — exactly the position the reader lives in.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: did the 1950 statement’s ‘cultural achievements’ language escape criticism at the time, or was it contested from the start?