[qntty]

These sort of discussions always bother me, for a few reasons

1. There's no such thing as a single reason for doing anything. Humans are too complex for that. So to frame this as a question of "she did it because of race" vs "race has nothing to do with it" is naive at best.

2. It's more or less impossible for anyone to be unaffected by race. Sociology professors are no exception. When you meet someone you've never met before, you can't (no matter how hard your try) encounter a "blank slate" of a person. Your brain would be dangerously inefficient if you didn't jump to conclusions for superficial reasons literally all the time.

Taken together, this means:

3. Clearly race had something to do with it. This shouldn't be a question. The question is exactly how much did it have to do with it.