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Notes -
There’s an important distinction here between the fantasies of “if people realized” and “if people believed”. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a leftist who espoused the former.
Regardless, beliefs about race can and will be used to justify racial animus. Historically, this has happened with phrenology, linguistics, sociology, geography, comparative religion, and especially intelligence. Why would this time be different?
It probably wouldn't. But justifying racial animus isn't the same thing as causing acts of racial animus to happen but for that justification being as available as it is, or the same thing as causing acts of racial animus to be, on net or in sum, greater than if that justification were not as available. And when a claim is that this idea is so dangerous as to justify censorship, I see it as necessitating at least the former, if not the latter in order to support. Notably, I don't think I've seen any historical examples that look similar to where entire generations of people were force-fed egalitarianism since a young age and then were told that the weight of the data has forced scientists to acknowledge that the distributions of certain traits, including intelligence, are different between various groups of people that we already group together in the class of "race" (as well as "sex"). They always appear to be some variation of where people were already living in what is basically the historical default, i.e. under the belief that different races of people are fundamentally different in a way that makes egalitarianism more of a punchline to a joke than an idea worth serious consideration, and justifying that pre-existing supremacist view by finding convenient pieces of information in science.
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