United Steelworkers of America
The Civil Rights Committee of the United Steelworkers of America (USW) was established in 1948 to address racial and ethnic discrimination in employment. In its early years, under the leadership of brothers Thomas and Francis Shane, the core activities of the Committee included organizing a series of seminars where leaders in organized labor, formal and informal education, religion, and professors of Anthropology, Psychology and related subjects gathered to debate and strategize about how to mitigate prejudice in both the workplace and in society, more broadly.
Carnegie Museum Curator of Anthropology James Swauger was invited to a USW “Seminar on Human Relations” in 1951 at The Pennsylvania State College to speak about how museums and Anthropology collections could help in the Committee’s efforts. In a move he later repeated in “We Humans,” he brought materials from the Museum’s Anthropology collections to the seminar that had been made by diverse cultural groups. Presenting them to the seminar participants without any identifying information, he challenged people to racially label or judge the materials. Swauger’s participation in this seminar led to further collaborations between United Steelworkers and the Museum that eventually created the opportunity for “We Humans.”
UNESCO Statements on Race
In December 1949, a group of mostly anthropologists gathered in Paris to discuss and draft what became the first UNESCO Statement on Race of 1950. Similar to the work being done in the same years by United Steelworkers on a more local scale, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization brought these scholars together toward the aim of creating an official scientific statement on race with the aim of eliminating racial prejudice through knowledge.
The status of racial categorization in Anthropology at this moment was shifting. Franz Boas and his students, for example, were challenging race science and Anthropology’s role in supporting it by attempting to disprove notions of racial superiority or inferiority. However, many of these same anthropologists still believed in biological, racial categorization based on morphological comparison, skull measuring and other practices of physical anthropology that are now broadly dismissed by the discipline as part of a scientifically inaccurate and socially harmful history.
Some of the core messages of the UNESCO Statement, and later of “We Humans,” were that humans were one species, that races were identifiable groups of humans, and that race did not correspond to intelligence or to national, religious, or cultural categories. In turn, racism was cast as a dangerous social myth that could be given less power through scientific knowledge. Thus, the 1950 UNESCO statement, and later “We Humans,” combined messages about human equality that were progressive and controversial in their own time alongside ideas about the biological basis of racial categories that today are out of date and offensive.
