Scientific rejection of racial hierarchy did not change popular racist attitudes.

Evidence

A statement issued by UNESCO in the 1950s, after the racism of Nazi Germany, was meant to offer a decisive scientific view of “race”: “Racism falsely claims that there is a scientific basis for arranging groups hierarchically in terms of psychological and cultural characteristics that are immutable and innate.” UNESCO argued that the groups usually designated as races in political and social or even religious terms were better understood as social groupings. At the biological level, if the word “race” was used at all, it meant populations that shared common pools of genes (a definition which follows from Darwin - see Goldberg, 1993:66). This was very different from what people in the street understood by race. Apparently, people in the street did not pay much attention to the scientists, because ideologies, attitudes, and actions that were clearly racist, continued throughout the world, no less so than in the United States. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1863

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to debates about whether expert/scientific consensus can shift public belief — parallels Milgrom on institutions vs. informal reputation and Sharkey on COMPAS. — connects to: College education does not replace racism with ideology in racial policy preferences. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology: Key Readings, 3734