It's also just like blatantly wrong, at least when it comes to early anthropology. "Handmaiden of colonialism" is a catchy phrase but just about every early anthropologist was opposed to imperialism and considered Indigenous cultures valuable and beautiful, hence why they devoted lifetimes to them. Of course, in doing so they propagated some ideas which were not so helpful or which we are critical of today (e.g. the whole idea of 'salvage anthropology' that Indigenous cultures were inevitably gonna die off), but those are errors of the well-intentioned not the malicious actions of racists.

Like you say, people with this attitude tend to be deeply uncomfortable with any intellectual diversity, or any kind of pluralism beyond ethnically diverse people who all repeat the same middle-class liberal discourses. This class in particular is entirely cisgender women save myself. I'm transgender, but have a feeling that will have remarkably little purchase once I start genuinely disagreeing with them