A few weeks ago, a writer named John Derbyshire wrote a piece that appeared on the conservative libertarian site Taki's Mag, giving his version of "the talk," which African-American parents give their children to warn them how to navigate through majority-white society as black people. John's version was meant to be provocative---it was advice as if given by white parents to their children. Unfortunately, his version stated directly that blacks are less intelligent than whites (that the average white is more intelligent than five-sixths of all blacks) and that blacks are less moral and more violent than whites. The ensuing uproar caught Derbyshire by surprise and quickly led to his dismissal as a columnist for the National Review. Recently, Derbyshire has written a post that appeared on vdare.com (an anti-immigration website listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate site); in this post, he muses as to what he and like-minded people should call themselves. In spite of the unpleasant associations, he considers "white supremacist," before settling on "white dissident." (Andrew Sullivan offers the tart comment that this "isn't in the Onion.")
What makes this episode so distressing is that Derbyshire is (or was) a respected writer, author of a number of well-regarded books. These include a book for lay readers on the Riemann Hypothesis (regarded as the most important unsolved problem in mathematics). But Derbyshire is not the only mainstream writer who has published provocative articles on race issues. The journalist William Saletan wrote a lengthy three-part piece on race, intelligence and genetics for Slate magazine five years ago, in which he declared that the belief in the equality of races is "creationism for liberals." (See the detailed rebuttal by Stephen Metcalf, which pulls apart the dubious science behind Saletan's claims.)
What strikes me in each of these episodes is not the racism per se (especially since we have no reason to believe that Saletan or Derbyshire actually hate blacks). Instead, what struck me is how they handle science. We have a claim---the genetic, intellectual superiority of Europeans---which is presented as if it is certainly true, even though it goes against what has long been regarded as settled science. In each case, the writers do not have a detailed scientific background in the relevant fields, and they rely upon researchers regarded as fringe by mainstream scientists. What is interesting is that these same characteristics describe other well-known attacks on mainstream science. The best-known of these is anti-evolutionism; anti-evolutionists refer to evolution as a "theory in crisis" and rely upon authors writing outside their fields of expertise, or whose fields of expertise are not directly relevant to evolution. Another example are the anti-gay activists who claim against mainstream science that homosexuality is a mental illness or that gay people are a threat to children, etc.
I've been discussing an intellectual sort of racism. But one imagines that racism is still widespread in society (but seldom expressed in public). We might ask how this may affect the presidential campaign this year. I don't believe that Romney and his team are using racism in their campaign. But there are two things that make it clear to me that racism will be a factor in the election. The first is the extraordinary vehemence of the anti-Obama sentiment on the right, and the hyperbolic language they use against him to portray him as alien or other (labeling him as socialist, Marxist, anti-American, etc). It's hard to believe that the people who think this way and use this language would do so against a white Democratic candidate (Obama is in fact quite mainstream, to the disappointment of many on the left). The second thing is the dismissive attitudes about Obama I see among certain acquaintances of mine; many people seem to think of Obama as an airhead, reliant on his teleprompter, and (usually not stated aloud) an undeserving creature of affirmative action. (Obama was a star student at the Harvard law school.) Whether this underlying racism, if this is what it is, affects the election, remains to be seen. (If the economy falters, and Romney succeeds in coming across as presidential, he of course could easily beat Obama regardless of race.)
[Edited 2012-07-31: Removed references to global warming skepticism and "peak oil" as examples of misuse of science.]