Caring about race differences is not a fetish

Critics accuse race realists of obsessing over race. But refuting widespread lies about race is not an intellectual failure or a fetish. It is a duty.

Written by Bo Winegard.

Those who talk openly and honestly about race differences in intelligence and crime (among other traits) are often castigated for having a bizarre or even sinister obsession with race. Critics even accuse them of fetishizing race, suggesting that their interest is like a degenerate paraphilia, a cognitive perversion that requires treatment not engagement.

I confess that I have been the target of such an accusation more than once, and the charge has always puzzled me. People study and discuss many things, from the popular to the obscure, from the normal to the bizarre, from the elevated to the mundane, and they are seldom accused of fetishizing their topic of inquiry. In social psychology, to take one example, scholars spend many years and resources studying multifarious forms of bias, many of which likely do not exist outside of a carefully controlled lab (or even in it).

Nevertheless, however much one may protest or lament this situation, the peculiar skepticism directed at those who discuss race differences is not limited to progressive ideologues or polemicists. It is widespread and sincere. Therefore, one must provide a satisfactory answer to the question, “Why obsess over race?”