> Reich didn't remotely say things racist wanted to hear.

I don't care much who those racists are, or what they wanted to hear, but at least Reich's positions shocked Saini herself, by being clearly and explicitly against the crap she was pushing in her book:

> At the same time he thinks some categories may have more biological meaning to them. Black Americans are mostly West African in ancestry and white Americans tend to be European, both correlating to genuine population groups that were once separated at least partially for seventy thousand years in human history. “There’s a long time separating these two groups,” Reich says. “Enough time for evolution to accumulate differences. We don’t know very much about what those differences are because we’re still at the beginning of collectively trying to identify biologically what differences do.”

> He suggests that there may be more than superficial average differences between black and white Americans, possibly even cognitive and psychological ones, because before they arrived in the United States, these population groups had this seventy thousand years apart during which they adapted to their own different environments. Reich implies that natural selection may have acted on them differently within this timescale to produce changes that go further than skin deep. He adds, judiciously, that he doesn’t think these differences will be large—only a fraction as big as the variation between individuals, just as biologist Richard Lewontin estimated in 1972. But he doesn’t expect them to be nonexistent either: as individuals we are so very different from one another that even a fraction of a difference between groups is something.

> They are words I never expected to hear from a respected mainstream geneticist. I know that Reich is not a racist. Indeed, like Cavalli-Sforza, he believes that if race research is done, it will only further demolish old prejudices. (...)

> Though Reich sees the racists as factually wrong, he also sees some antiracists—those who insist that we are all exactly the same underneath—as not having the full facts either. “It’s a little bit painful to see very well-meaning people saying things that are contradicted by the science, because we want well-meaning people to say things that are correct,” he says. “The way I see what’s going on in this world right now, there are racist people that are just perpetrating falsehoods, and just representing the science in incorrect ways, tendentious ways in order to achieve certain goals. And then there’s people whose perspective on the world I agree with who are actually saying things that are technically incorrect.”

Reich means here people like Saini herself.

> Reich is technically correct that there could be more profound genetic differences between population groups than we are aware of at the moment. But to date, no scientific research has been able to show any average genetic differences between population groups that go further than the superficial, such as skin color, or that are linked to hard survival, such as those that prevent a geographically linked disease.

This is, of course, utterly false, and Reich in his book brings up multiple examples of exactly that. This argument is literally God-of-the-gaps: sure, there might be average genetic differences in skin color, or height, or athletic ability (oh wait, sorry, I forgot that Saini denies that too, even as she watches Olympic finals in 100 metre dash), or disease resistance, or low oxygen environment adaptation, or this, or that, but overall, there are no non-superficial differences in the non-superficial things we actually care about. Yeah, right.

> There is no variant of any gene that has been found to exist in everyone of one “race” and not in another.

This is rhetorical trick of saying something true, and yet completely irrelevant, par for the course for agenda pushing activists. This is also true, for example, for domestic dogs and wild wolves -- are there no significant differences in average traits between the two as well? Will chihuahua overcome the social construction of its "race", and fit right in a wild wolf tribe? Is the greyhound's speed just a matter of the family environment it grew up in?

These arguments as applied to humans are just as absurd as applied to dogs, and the only reason they aren't laughed out of serious discussion is that we want them to be true. David Reich of course recognizes reality for what it is, and is not going to obfuscate the truth just to achieve the social goals he desires: unlike Saini, he understands that the public trust in science is a result of precisely such brutal honesty and courage of taking reality for what it is, and not for what we wish it was. As such, he is repulsed by Saini's approach to kill it, gut the carcass and wear its skin to fool people for the real thing. People might be fooled at the distance, but when you come closer to investigate, you immediately see that it's not science, but only a simulacrum thereof. Butchering your dairy cow might feel good for a while, but sooner than you think you have neither meat nor milk. Saini of course doesn't care, because she's not a scientists, she's a journalist and a writer, and she has no skin in the game.