Unfortunately, many institutions we would expect to embrace the telos of truth are now under pressure to instead adopt the telos of social justice. One of the unfortunate undercurrents of this rebellion against old-fashioned objectivity and truth-seeking is the misperception that these concepts are the lone purview of European-Americans, who have imposed them on all institutions. Farrell seems to be under the impression that objective research is all generated by, as she describes them, “white cisgender people” at the expense of, well, everybody else.

Farrell is not alone in this view. Last summer, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture published a graphic on its website that depicted “objective, rational linear thinking” as a facet of “whiteness & white culture.” Facing criticism, the museum later removed the graphic, but the fact that one of America’s pre-eminent cultural and historical institutions allowed this to happen is a sign of how far the attack on the scientific method has gone.

Yet objectivity and rigor, far from promoting racism, have often provided the data that serve as the antidote to racism. Look at the example of W. Montague Cobb, an African-American physician and professor of anatomy who used the scientific method to help debunk racial aspects of biodeterminism, which claims that different “races” of people had fundamentally distinct bodies that made some inferior or superior to others.