I’m not a racist, I just play one in a book

Nicholas Wade, a former NYT science writer, has written A Troublesome Inheritance, a book explaining that the reason some nations thrive in the 21st century and some are a mess is genetic. The European nations are simply better adapted to a capitalist world than Bangladesh or Nigeria—otherwise, why couldn’t the third world nations adopt the same principles? However, he assures us, he isn’t racist and “It is not automatically racist to consider racial categories as a possible explanatory factor.”
I can’t review the book (plenty of material at the link from people who have, though) as I haven’t read it, but statements like Wade’s press a few buttons. True, in theory simply analyzing the relative abilities of different races could be a dispassionate, scientific process, but in practice that’s not the way to bet. The Southern Poverty Law Center says Wade cites Stephen Jay Gould (whose Mismeasure of Man criticized the efforts to “prove” nonwhite racial inferiority) as an example of a scientist whose biases distorted his work. However the long list of researchers who’ve “proved” racial inferiority are, apparently perfectly acceptable scholars in Wade’s eyes. You can’t let political correctness keep you from facing harsh truth!
All of which sounds perfectly reasonable. Much the same way that Holocaust deniers sound reasonable (note, this is not an accusation Wade is a Nazi or denies the Holocaust). The standard denial defense is that we should be open to the evidence, that the “facts” of history are often wrong and that it’s only logical to review claims about millions of dead Jews along with everything else.
Yet in practice, Holocaust denial is never abstract. Pretty much every advocate is pro-Nazi, anti-Jew or both.
In a less venomous way, a lot of creationists argue they’re driven by fact, not faith, but the die-hard creationists are almost invariably Christian conservatives (less venomous because it’s much more likely someone can embrace creationism without being a horrible human being than those who insist the Holocaust is all a Jewish lie).
Likewise, it’s theoretically possible to argue for biological white or male superiority without being racist, but it tends not to be that way. And these ideas don’t exist in a vacuum: the assumption blacks (or women) are inferior has shaped public policy in many eras of America. Wade may sincerely believe that’s not his problem, but insisting his work as an abstract idea that won’t affect us in our real lives—and therefore shouldn’t be treated as a political position—is naive (there’s a reason a lot of white supremacists embrace his book). More here.