I think this comes down to there being different definitions of racism, that are sometimes flat out contradictory.
I don't think anyone is saying that the universities or the software companies have some kind of secret agenda to keep black people out. As far as I can tell there's good evidence they're mostly trying to get more black people in (and in some cases to keep Asians out, but that's another story). I also don't think anyone here was acting out of fear or hatred of black people.
What I am claiming is that the universities in question ended up with a proctoring product that was more likely to produce false positives for students with darker skin colors, and did not apply sufficient human review and/or giving people the benefit of the doubt to cancel out those effects. It is quite likely that whatever model-training and testing the software companies did, was mostly on fair-skinned people in well-lit environments, otherwise they would have picked up this problem earlier on. This is not super-woke Ibram X Kendi applied antiracism, this is doing your job properly to make sure your product works for all students, especially as the students don't have any choice to opt out of using the proctoring software beyond quitting their college.
To me it's on the same level as having a SQL injection vulnerability: maybe you didn't intend to get your users' data exposed - about 100% of the time when this happens, the company involved very much did not intend to have a data breach - but it happened anyway, you were incompetent at the job and your users are now dealing with the consequences.
And to the extent that those consequences here fall disproportionately on skin colors (and so, by correlation, on ethnicities) that have historically been disadvantaged, calling this a type of racism seems appropriate. It's very much not the KKK type of racism, but it could very well still meet legal standards for discrimination.
>What I am claiming is that the universities in question ended up with a proctoring product that was more likely to produce false positives for students with darker skin colors, and did not apply sufficient human review and/or giving people the benefit of the doubt to cancel out those effects.
The issue is that, for most people, the term "racism" connotes a moral failing comparable to the secret agendas, fear and hatred, etc. Specifically, an immoral act motivated by a deliberately applied, irrational prejudice.
Using it to refer to this sort of "disparate impact" is at best needlessly vague, and at worst a deliberate conflation known to be useful to (and used by) the "super-woke Ibram X Kendi" types - equivocating (per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy) in order to attach the spectre of moral outrage to a problem not caused by any kind of malice.
If you're interested in whether someone might have a legal case, you should be discussing that in an appropriate forum - not with lay language among laypeople.
I agree with your point that we should have two different words for two different concepts (even though they can lead to the same effects), especially as one is motivated by malice and one is not.
But from the point of view of a black person who has not got a job / college place / tenancy that a comparable white person would have got, I guess it makes sense to say "whatever the cause, I want this problem fixed" and give the symptom rather than the cause the name "racism".
I don't think anyone is saying that the universities or the software companies have some kind of secret agenda to keep black people out. As far as I can tell there's good evidence they're mostly trying to get more black people in (and in some cases to keep Asians out, but that's another story). I also don't think anyone here was acting out of fear or hatred of black people.
What I am claiming is that the universities in question ended up with a proctoring product that was more likely to produce false positives for students with darker skin colors, and did not apply sufficient human review and/or giving people the benefit of the doubt to cancel out those effects. It is quite likely that whatever model-training and testing the software companies did, was mostly on fair-skinned people in well-lit environments, otherwise they would have picked up this problem earlier on. This is not super-woke Ibram X Kendi applied antiracism, this is doing your job properly to make sure your product works for all students, especially as the students don't have any choice to opt out of using the proctoring software beyond quitting their college.
To me it's on the same level as having a SQL injection vulnerability: maybe you didn't intend to get your users' data exposed - about 100% of the time when this happens, the company involved very much did not intend to have a data breach - but it happened anyway, you were incompetent at the job and your users are now dealing with the consequences.
And to the extent that those consequences here fall disproportionately on skin colors (and so, by correlation, on ethnicities) that have historically been disadvantaged, calling this a type of racism seems appropriate. It's very much not the KKK type of racism, but it could very well still meet legal standards for discrimination.