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Theory of Racial Superiority Attacked by Nation’s Leading Anthropologists

November 16, 1942
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Racial theories that hold that one group is superior to another were attacked as false and contrary to scientific teaching in a resolution adopted yesterday by 100 scientists from leading universities at the centenary meeting of the American Ethnological Society here. “Racial persecution and discrimination cannot be scientifically justified,” the resolution emphasized.

The text of the resolution read: “Be It Resolved: That the American Ethnological Society, for 100 years dedicated to the study of peoples not belonging to Western civilization, express upon the occasion of its centenary celebration its profound conviction that racial persecution and discrimination cannot be scientifically justified.

“We protest the distortion of anthropology which falsely assigns inborn superiority to some one ‘race’ and assigns others to inborn inferiority. Ethnological studies rouse enthusiasm for the inventions and social life of many peoples of all races and make it impossible to assent to the dogma that civilization depends upon the enslavement of one race by another.”

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