Harpending denied being a racist. During a talk on race and intelligence at the H.L. Mencken Club, a white nationalist conference founded by Paul Gottfried and Richard Spencer, he said that "somebody'll call you a racist, but that's the way the world is". In a 2012 blog post, he wrote "if in witchcraft is nearly pan-African then perhaps some of it came to the New World", with the result being that "talkers from the American Black population come out with similar theories of vague and invisible forces that are oppressing people, like 'institutional racism' and 'white privilege'".