"Her work is obsessed with race!" "Her research focuses almost exclusively on race and racism."

It does. And?

Is that supposed to be an indictment rather than a description of intellectual seriousness in a country built on slavery, genocide, dispossession, lynching, segregation, racial capitalism, and ongoing structural inequality?

Can you imagine people saying that a cancer researcher focuses too much on cancer? Or how about a climate scientist is suspiciously obsessed with climate? How about somebody saying a theologian keeps bringing up god?

They wouldn't. But when Black scholars study race, suddenly our expertise is some kind of pathology.

FOH.