While i understand your point, im not sure that an entire field of study and its outcomes can be simply dismissed so out of hand.
As for consensus (and your strange examples), was it empirically valid and tested that dark people are animals or was it fear based propaganda from a group that wielded extreme social power? What kind of data analysis was done to support the theory that germs were little demons. I would literally love to read that paper!
You don't remember
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life by Charles Darwin?
"Since the dawn of history the Negro has owned the continent of Africa – rich beyond the dream of poet’s fancy, crunching acres of diamonds beneath his bare black feet and yet he never picked one up from the dust until a white man showed to him its glittering light.
His land swarmed with powerful and docile animals, yet he never dreamed a harness, cart, or sled.
A hunter by necessity, he never made an axe, spear, or arrowhead worth preserving beyond the moment of its use. He lived as an ox, content to graze for an hour.
In a land of stone and timber he never sawed a foot of lumber, carved a block, or built a house save of broken sticks and mud.
With league on league of ocean strand and miles of inland seas, for four thousand years he watched their surface ripple under the wind, heard the thunder of the surf on his beach, the howl of the storm over his head, gazed on the dim blue horizon calling him to worlds that lie beyond, and yet he never dreamed a sail.”
The Church, and Academia adopted his theory on the "races" for a very long time, and depending on where you are it is still the case. The Church was especially staunch on Darwinism and races to justify their imperialism, or "spreading the truth." Academia prefers more subtle conflagration - buried in biology, for example.
Those example I gave weren't weird; they were examples of the hauteur and myopia of academics.
Barry Marshall had to drink an entire petri dish of H. Pylori because academia refused to believe ulcers were caused by bacterial infection.
The concensus was that ulcers were caused by spices, and stress.
Barry Marshall was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology in 2005 - 2005! He and his partner were studying and publishing their findings since the early 1980s.
We have not come very far, and this is why I said concensus is the absolutely wrong parameter to judge academic paradigms. Too much progress has been ignored because of the consensual immobility of minds.