So there's always these photos that show what 'scientific racism' looked like, and there are even more photos of what looks to be scientists measuring skulls and nose bridges, it almost feels as though the idea of scientific racism was prevalent and normal at the time, and that it was the intellectual position to hold.
I'm pretty sure that at the time there were people who argued against the methods used and the conclusions, and wrote papers about it and such. But who are these people and what happened when they did publish anti scientific racism papers or whatnot
Did it even happen? I found it hard searching on Google, just finding that the UNESCO after WW2 wrote this book called "The Race Question" But apparently even then the first edition didn't entirely reject the idea of race biology, which further adds to my question, when exactly was race biology/scientific racism debunked by the scientific community anyways?
In the early 20th century, there emerged a number of critics of racist anthropology and racial theories. The most well-known and successful of these was the physical anthropologist Franz Boas, who not only went to great lengths to disprove things like the hereditary basis of the cephalic index (Boas showed that the cephalic index varied according to the conditions in which children were raised and was not immutable), but raised a generation of anthropologists (both physical but also, newly, cultural) who would take over the American anthropological community and effectively displace the scientific racists over time. Among his students were Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Alfred Kroeber, Edward Sapir, and Zora Neal Hurston, to name a few of the better-known names.
By the 1930s there was a distinct community of anti-racist anthropologists in the US and UK (and probably elsewhere, but I know mostly about the Anglophone world), joined also by geneticists and biologists who had, for a variety of reasons, rejected scientific racism (L.C. Dunn, Julian Huxley, and Ashley Montgu stick out as some of the big names in this period through the 1950s). It is worth noting that the lines of "scientific racism" can be quite tricky to draw in retrospect: many of these geneticists were eugenicists of some sort, which today we would categorize generally as a form of scientific racism (or classism), but at the time they saw as being quite separate from the people trying to prove racist tropes (they saw it as a way to reduce disease). Many of them turned on the more vocal scientific racists because they thought they were propagandists who were besmirching the integrity of science.
They were given a great boon when the Nazis took power, because anti-German sentiment was high and they could associate the scientific racism with the Germans. This gave them the impetus to really popularize many of their theories to a much larger audience as part of anti-Nazi efforts, and would eventually lead to the kinds of things like the UNESCO statement. UNESCO itself, as an organization meant to deploy science and culture towards the ending of war and conflict, became an important vehicle for anti-racist efforts (esp. under Ashley Montagu), under the argument that racism was one of the ideologies that had led to World War II in the first place, and that it was perfectly acceptable for a UN organization to spend its time attacking it.
This did not, it is worth noting, gain unilateral acceptance from other scientists: some anthropologists, geneticists, and biologists resisted this vehemently, either because they were still in the scientific racism camp (though generally moderated from its earlier 20th century approach, many aspects persisted for decades), or because they thought this was its own inappropriately "propagandistic" use of science that necessarily involved generalizations that the science did not support. All of this is just to emphasize that while the anti-racists did, in the 1930s through the 1950s, gain powerful institutional positions that amplified their voices, it would go too far to say that they effectively "converted" the entire scientific community to this, or effectively "expunged" the more racist characters from it. The history of the UNESCO "Race Question" statement is a complex one for this reason.
It is worth emphasizing that while it is easy to fall into a sort of dramatic narrative in which the anti-racists prevail over racists, the reality is far more complex. Blatant racism became unfashionable in scientific literature by the 1970s, but more subtle forms of arguably scientific racism do persist to this day, and the line between "scientific racism" and "uncomfortable truths" is one that practicing scientists still argue about. I do not want the above to sound like any kind of simple "expunging" activity, and I hope to indicate that even some of the "expungers" held views that today we might be inclined to consider as problematic. This is an area of historical scientific study that it is difficult to remain methodologically neutral about, given the stakes associated with pronouncing victors and losers, and I can say that even as recently as two weeks ago I was at a panel at the annual conference of the History of Science Society where these issues were being hotly discussed.
For further reading:
On Boas' institutional efforts, see esp. Jonathan P. Spiro, "Nordic vs. anti-Nordic: the Galton Society and the American Anthropological Association," Patterns of Prejudice 36, no. 1 (2002).
On the UNESCO statement: Michelle Brattain, "Race, racism, and antiracism: UNESCO and the politics of presenting science to the postwar public," American Historical Review 112, no. 5 (2007).
On the rise and fall of eugenics and early-20th century scientific racism, see Stefan Kühl, For the Betterment of the Race: The Rise and Fall of the International Movement for Eugenics and Racial Hygiene (Palgrave MacMillan, 2013).
Not to discourage any further answrs, but you might enjoy this older post from /u/restricteddata What are some notable (scientific) critiques of "scientific racism" - especially in the 19th Century?
