[Tycho]

You seem to have contradicted yourself. You admit that people wielding institutional power (who would surely include judges) can make decisions affected by conscious or unconscious biases, and it's not racist to point this out. Case closed.

Here's one discussion of biased algorithms https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9211436

[foldr]

It is not racist to point out institutional racial biases when there is evidence for their existence. It is racist to make baseless speculations about an individual person's biases simply because of their ethnicity. It's the difference between pointing out that black Americans are more likely to be involved in violent crime than white Americans (not racist) vs. assuming that a particular individual is going to commit a violent crime simply because they are black (racist).

The algorithm discussion is too vague to really engage with, but it's presumably possible that a person's biases could influence their choice of algorithm in certain instances. If we're talking about, say, an algorithm for matching profiles on okcupid, then certain biases of the programmer might "leak" into the design of the algorithm. You could argue semantics over whether the algorithm itself is really "biased", but there's nothing fundamentally wrong with the discussion you linked to.