[zahlman]

>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.

[red_admiral]

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".