Do you have a link to the study?

Not only does the idea that different races would have different genetic distances from the common ancestor of apes not strike me as repugnant, it seems fairly obvious on examination. The further a population is from its ancestral environment (in terms of selection pressures of course, not geographically speaking,) the faster its genes are going to drift, so to the extent that not all environments that human populations developed in equally resemble that of our common ancestor, we should expect different genetic distances from that common ancestor.

But as for the magnitude of genetic difference between races, I can't help but think "seriously half the human-chimpanzee difference?" That's way more than I would have predicted.