It's idiotic to call it "racist", it's a shitty classifier
This is sort of like telling residents of a historically black neighborhood which just so happens to have been exposed to drinking water with dangerously high levels of lead since time immemorial (despite decades of complaints) that it's just "shitty pipes", and that it's "idiotic" for anyone to think this state of affairs could possibly have something to do with racism.
I agree that the matter is quite nuanced, and there was no racist intent. However it's far from "idiotic" to address these issues directly. If anything it seems a bit obtuse not to address them.
Where there's smoke, after all, there's usually some form of fire.
I think the lead pipes example is different because both the neighborhood structure and the lead are results of the same intentional racism.
The classifier is not the result of any racist action on behalf of the programmer.
It’s more like blaming a hospital administrator when people of a discriminated race have bad outcomes at their hospital, when the outcome is the systemic rate of all the other hospitals. The hospital outcome isn’t racist, because the systemic issues that affect the outcomes of the hospital patients have nothing to do with the decisions of the hospital.
Not necessarily -- recall that lead service lines were extremely widely used in the U.S. in all neighborhoods, black and white. So in fact it's more likely that he pipes being first put into the ground without any racist intent at all.
It's the fact of this problem not being remediated in certain neighborhoods that cause people to ask, very legitimately -- how this came to pass.
This is sort of like telling residents of a historically black neighborhood which just so happens to have been exposed to drinking water with dangerously high levels of lead since time immemorial (despite decades of complaints) that it's just "shitty pipes", and that it's "idiotic" for anyone to think this state of affairs could possibly have something to do with racism.
I agree that the matter is quite nuanced, and there was no racist intent. However it's far from "idiotic" to address these issues directly. If anything it seems a bit obtuse not to address them.
Where there's smoke, after all, there's usually some form of fire.