“No Scientific Basis for Race Bias Found by World Panel of Experts” announced the New York Times on July 18, 1950. The story described a report issued by UNESCO which “provided evidence that there was no scientific justification for race discrimination.” The headline implied that scientists had finally reached an egalitarian consensus on the concept of race. While this was not to be, the anti-racist campaign had come to fruition and the public message was that science repudiated conventional bigotry. The UNESCO's statement, however, rekindled the controversy over the definition of race. The Statement presented four premises, three of which were generally accepted: that mental capacities of all races are similar; that no evidence for biological deterioration as a result of hybridization existed; that there was no correlation between national or religious groups and any race. But it was the fourth claim, that “race was less a biological fact than a social myth,” which had old opponents up in arms.

The 1950 declaration was the first in an on going series of UNESCO's statements on the concept of race, and it displayed the environmental determinism at its peak. The reversal in the scientific credo on race since the early 1920s had been completed. The study heralded its conclusions as representing the “most modern views of biologists, geneticists, psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists,” not an easy task even in the emotional anti-racism of the postwar period. The scientific community's responses were mixed.