Statement on "Race"

The Statement on "Race" is a 1998 race denialist statement by the American Anthropological Association. It was adopted by the Executive Board without any membership voting. It can be seen as a response to The Bell Curve and race and intelligence debate.

The statement opens with Lewontin's Fallacy, continues to the argued clinal nature of skin color, and takes this as a refutation of biological race. The race concept is then attributed as a "fabrication" of European colonialists in order to justify "hierarchies". The "logical end" of racial classification is defined as "the Holocaust". Finally, the authors state that "all normal human beings have the capacity to learn any cultural behavior", a patent falsehood, and conclude that "present-day inequalities between so-called "racial" groups are not consequences of their biological inheritance but products of historical and contemporary social, economic, educational, and political circumstances", with no evidence or reasoning.

The statement was preceeded by the 1994 "Statement on "Race" and Intelligence". Neither of these brief, politically correct statements cited any sources for the claims made.