The Nazi regime has compelled us all to recognize the lethal potential of the concept of race and the horrendous consequences of its misuse. After World War II the painful recognition of what had been inflicted in the name of race led to the discrediting of racism in international politics and contributed to the decline and repudiation of scientific racism in intellectual discourse. In charting the rise and fall of racial thought and racism, the growing body of historical literature has tended to focus on racist ideologues from the early part of the twentieth century, ignoring the actual process of the repudiation of racism. Because racism nowadays is perceived as irrational and unscientific, its elimination from culture and science is deemed, at least implicitly, to have been inevitable: once Nazi atrocities had been revealed, racism was rejected. An extension of this view is the historical misconception that Nazi racism was renounced as early as the 1930s. In fact, the response in both the United States and Britain was neither immediate nor of sufficient strength to discredit theories of racial superiority. By 1938 only a small segment of the educated public had reformulated its attitude on the question of race in response to the Nazi menace.

This book examines the scientific repudiation of racism by reconstructing the discourse on race in Britain and the United States between the world wars.