There's no doubt that there are daunting complications associated with the study of race, which is, after all, more social construction than biological fact. But methodological complications aren't the only reasons scientists shy away from investigating race. It irritates people on all sides. No matter what you say, someone gets unhappy. More than one researcher interviewed for this article said they'd been warned by colleagues not to invite trouble.
People are afraid of being called racist.
Especially in an academic environment, people are very, very sensitive about that, and they're afraid that their whole career is going to be put in jeopardy. The silence on racial differences may also be self-imposed. Because it's so difficult to say anything about race without provoking a controversy, many scientists figure it's safer to say nothing at all. There's good reason for caution, given the horrific uses to which racial comparisons have been put in the past. Mental illness was grounds for sterilization and euthanasia in the Nazi racial hygiene movement of the 1930s, as Andrew Winston, Ph.D., points out.