Your ability to contrive bullshit and keep buying that bullshit, your willingness to terminate thoughts, your curiosity, and your ability to see why things matter and do shit like extend the scale of the self or take differing perspectives are all directly functions of various cognitive and psychological factors often called ‘intelligence’.

But all of that can still end in a racist worldview, depending on what directions you take your train of thought and what conclusions you find most plausible. That's the old "FBI Crime Statistics" and "Social Darwinism" / "Bell Curve" gambit. And it works on a large number of proven intellectuals. FFS, James Watson - one of the pioneers of modern genetics - is a frothing racist. Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger is a Christian Nationalist. Being "smart" isn't a panacea for being gullible.

At some point, "intelligent" people are more vulnerable to misinformation than their "dumb" peers, because they have more experience absorbing and applying advanced theories and philosophies without fully grasping how they work. The more advanced you get in any scientific field, the more you're forced to accept on faith because you recognize you simply don't have the time or the energy to delve down every academic rabbit hole. The end result is a certain scholastic dogma that people cling to because they simply accept prior generations have done the leg-work.

Present information in the pastiche of academia and you can reliably delude academics and scholars up front. Argue convincingly with the right jargon, present walls of data with citations and graphics, and follow the superficial mannerisms of trustworthy peers. You'll catch lots of people who have trained themselves to correlate the structure of the presentation as inherently trustworthy.

By contrast, folks who aren't familiar or experienced with a certain scholarly formulation won't be fooled simply because they don't know how to absorb the information or recognize the display as a trustworthy format.