Montagu, Ashley

But if we have yet to discover what a coalition politics on the McWilliams model might look like, still less do we know about the possibilities of another of the common intellectual threads of the era—what today is called the deconstruction of race itself. It is a somewhat perplexing fact of American intellectual history that notions of the cultural construction of race that have begun to receive a hearing in recent years were in fact quite commonplace five decades ago. Writers like Ashley Montagu, Brewton Barry, and George Schuyler, as we have seen, argued that race was but a modern superstition. One routinely encounters the... 

Ashley Montagu, Race Man s Most Dangerous Myth (New York Columbia University Press, 1942), pp. 4-5, 180-191. 

Ashley Montagu, What Every Child and Adult Should Know about Race, Education, Jan. 1946, pp. 262, 263, 264. 

My account of the exhibit is based on a panel-by-panel description in the Monthly Summary of Events and Trends in Race Relations, Oct. 1944, pp. 87-88. A slightly different version is summarized as an appendix to Ashley Montagu s Race Man s Most Dangerous Myth. Benedict s Races of Mankind was also rendered as an eleven-minute cartoon, The Brotherhood of Man, by a group of Popular Front animators affiliated with the United Auto Workers. See Denning, Cultural Front, pp. 419-420. 

---