Richard Dawkins got into trouble recently for sending out a tweet about the paucity of Nobel Prizes won by Muslims. Part of the defense of his statement was sort of ridiculous–that facts can’t be bigoted. But, of course, they can.

They certainly are when white supremacists (even the ones in academia) try to prove that African-Americans students are inferior because they’ve score lower overall on standardized testing, without mentioning the racial bias embedded in the exams or that preparation for such tests among different groups of students is heavily influenced by history, economics, etc. Facts can be prejudiced when they’re delivered free of such important context. From David Edmonds at Practical Ethics:

“Here is the sequence of events.  1. Richard Dawkins tweets that all the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College Cambridge.  2. Cue a twitter onslaught – accusing Professor Dawkins of racism.  3. Richard Dawkins writes that a fact can’t be racist.

It seems to me pretty silly to call Dawkins a racist, for some of the reasons he spells out here.

But I want to focus on his claim that a fact can’t be racist.  That seems to me a bit silly too.”