The Reeducation of Race: Jewishness and the Politics of Antiracism in Postcolonial Thought by Sonali Thakkar (review)

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• The Reeducation of Race: Jewishness and the Politics of Antiracism in Postcolonial Thought by Sonali Thakkar
• Eleni Coundouriotis (bio)

Sonali Thakkar, The Reeducation of Race: Jewishness and the Politics of Antiracism in Postcolonial Thought (Stanford University Press 2024), ISBN 9781503637344 (ebook), 288 pages.

In her illuminating book on UNESCO’s antiracism project, Sonali Thakkar uses a classic of postcolonial literature (Ama Ata Aidoo’s 1977 novel Our Sister Killjoy¹) to demonstrate how disappointing the project to counter racism with “reeducation” as “affective reformation” was.² Aidoo’s protagonist, Sissie, is the beneficiary of a UNESCO-like educational initiative to build international understanding. She goes from Ghana to Germany and then England in the late 1960s and faces a series of unsettling experiences of bias that render her the killjoy of such idealism. She commits to return to Ghana and rejects Europe’s reparative efforts. Thakkar fully acknowledges Aidoo’s devastating critique, which she develops to complement her extensive discussions of Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and Caryl Phillips, influential anticolonial thinkers. In their writings, Thakkar sees reflected the historical currency of UNESCO’s project. She explicates their refusal of “liberal scientific antiracism” and their reformulation of its goals.³ Thakkar mostly succeeds in not presenting this standoff between liberal antiracism and anticolonial critique of universal humanism as a binary. She keeps the critique front and center while acknowledging that “UNESCO’s race project was an extraordinary intervention into the making of antiracism and . . . the single most important site for the canonization of the liberal antiracism that continues to profoundly shape our racial present.”⁴

Thakkar’s history begins with the efforts of anthropologists from both sides of the Atlantic to counter Nazi race science in the 1930s. The focus on antisemitism and the racist violence perpetrated by the Nazis did not translate, however, into an awareness of colonial violence until later. A racist colonial status quo continued until well after World War II when anticolonial efforts and an increasingly rapid decolonization forced the entanglement of these two antiracist efforts. UNESCO’s 1950 Statement on Race reflected the colonial blind spot by emphasizing the plasticity of race (which aimed to undermine race as a category) instead of explicitly tackling how to end racism.⁵ The malleability of race held the promise that racism could be overcome and confronting it could be avoided as a political question.⁶ The anthropologist Franz Boas developed the thinking around racial plasticity as a response to antisemitism, although as Thakkar notes, he stressed its applicability to all mankind. [End Page 549] UNESCO’s statement adopted the general direction of his thinking, shifting the emphasis on plasticity as “a characteristic of mental character” and elaborating the complementary idea of educability.⁷ In UNESCO’s race project, plasticity and educability together sought to change the ontology of race making it mutable. The long-term direction of this project shaped around educability conscripted it to a colonial mentality that found renewed life in development projects.

Thakkar’s account valiantly aims to synthesize frequently incompatible positions that originate in what she situates as analogous instantiations of racism: antisemitism and European colonialism. The arc of the story she constructs sees the response to antisemitism as giving rise to liberal antiracism that would have stressed “human equality” but in the end substituted equality for plasticity and educability.⁸ “Commonness,” a humanity shared by all, became an “aspirational horizon” in the drafting of the statement.⁹ This shift away from the language of equality reflected how colonial violence was invisibilized around 1950. When the attention turned internationally to decolonization, the formulas of plasticity and educability constrained the effort to address the complex effects of colonial racism and yielded an unsatisfactory developmental discourse of cultural relativism that did little to repair historical wrongs.

Thakkar examines UNESCO’s archive to understand the history of anticolonial thought. She reads the 1950 Statement as a human rights document even though by pivoting away from a forceful statement on human equality, the significance of this document for human rights was muted. Her book though is useful for understanding the role of UNESCO and its educational projects in relation to the other work of the United...