Maybe because economics doesn't care about taboo, but rather understanding and seing the payoff. Yes some ideas and concepts are overly simplified - but one has to make shortcuts to reason. Mainstream economics provides reasoning, and the means to test if it works against real life data (econometrics) - that's much more than most social sciences.

I am saying that as someone who is deeply interested in the "logical" underpinnings for racism and sexism. I love complex things - mainly to understand how they works.

Here, if these behaviours were illogical and had a negative payoff in all cases, they may not have existed in the first place- or persisted. But they do. Why?

To the best of my current understanding, they are related to tribalism (as in parochialism). If you prefer, there is a nash equilibrium with cooperative and non cooperative behaviour.

The external characteristics of the agent are used by the other agents to guess whichever is more likely - being cooperative or not - and to play accordingly.

Basically, in both cases the external characteristic of an agent are used in a "best guess" function, which becomes self reinforcing, yet there seems to be more than self reinforcement, or these ideas would not be so prevalent. (So the interesting theories about say how agriculture helped the development of modern sexism are then developed, and tested in regressions)

I find that very cool - at a "theory of knowledge" coolness level. Different paradigm coexist (because there are more than one explanation) so you can pick up your "school" (Chicago, Austrian) and see how well it works, ie test it against new concepts in an experimental way - like bitcoin and check its predictive power. That's challenging, especially when it is counterintuitive in your personal biais (ex: I'm so surprised Keynesian theory works well)

Anyway, should you care about avoiding taboo (omg the n word! run!) or should you understand why and how it works?

EDIT: They are not mutually exclusive, but when you study a concept, the taboo associated with it quickly goes away. Yet it remains in other persons, which makes it funny and interesting