In this article, we develop a genealogy of international education studies' tenets of culture shock and skills deficit. To trace their emergence, we map the discursive shifts which underpinned cultural anthropology's involvement in the administration of US colonial, domestic, and international affairs respectively in the early 1900s and 1950s. These shifts are concomitantly linked to the formation of the field of intercultural communication, of which popularisation in the form of Hofstede model of "cultural distance" has structured international education when turning from a Cold War tool of total diplomacy to an export industry. Taking the development of international education in Australia as a case study, we demonstrate how the shifts in the disciplinary fields aforementioned are best understood as an anti-racist strategy, which mobilisation of the concept of culture has led to the paradoxical evacuation of the heuristic of race from the lexicon of intercultural contact between "Asian" international students and presumably white host institutions.