Slobodian 127: "Indexing intellectual capacity onto supposedly commonsense categories of race validated folk understandings of the race concept and encased them in the carapace of incontestable fact."
However, "[t]he conclusion of actual geneticists (reaffirmed now by genomics) [is] that there is more variation within so-called racial populations than between them"
for works like The Bell Curve, this is "glossed over for the sake of the polemical point"
Slobodian also notes that in The Bell Curve, "racial status was not based on genetic analysis but by self-identification"