Suppose you find out that the green people from East Arbitria are less productive. The immediate effect is that an innocent objective employer who being tried for discrimination or hated by a community no longer has to suffer- the cruelty of the universe is no longer being made anyone's fault. The secondary effect is that we now have grounds to investigate why Arbitrarians have that disadvantage. Maybe green people have a harder time metabolizing a nutrient; a non-issue with the diet/climate/lifestyle of Arbitria. An update to health recommendations later and millions of people's lives are improved.
The point is, there is a history of race-based discrimination in the world and researchers can't just pretend that it doesn't still exist when constructing these kinds of studies and how their outcomes could be used negatively by both benevolent and malevolent actors. It isn't just 'truth or not truth', also because lots of sociological studies aren't repeatable and many others suffer all sorts of issues with methods, populations, etc. Measuring people is crazy hard to do reliably. Anyway, my hot take is that its not a simple question and does not have a simple answer.
2. rarely is a piece of research only used for 1 thing, and even if someone uses it wrongly, maybe someone else uses it for good purpose or builds on it for an important discovery.
3. the correct answer is to address the person attempting to abuse the data when that person does it not to attempt to suppress that information by preventing the research or limiting how it's done.
4. are you saying we shouldn't do research on e.g. whether certain groups are better at lifting because it could be abused?
What I do see is a long history of race-based 'science' being used to justify some pretty terrible policies and laws.