10 ways white people are more racist than they realize

[mythology]

81. Several of these aren't actually evidence that specifically white people are racist

Mostly they fail because they assume that either all of the people involved are white or that the cause is because of skin color.

Take the first example where professors are less likely to respond to perceived minorities. There are reasons that people would be less likely to respond to Asian emailers who are blind emailing that is utterly unrelated to skin color. Working in IT we have had multiple incidents where somebody will send us a resume that is in perfectly understandable English but once you actually talk to them on the phone or via a video conference, it's clear that the emailer wasn't the same person as we were talking to. As a result, we generally go by personal referrals rather than resumes because so much time has been lost on people who were clearly trying to scam us.

The second example, the study on which patients get pain meds points out that the research shows that black patients were less likely to describe pain or to describe the pain's intensity. Shocking that if you don't tell a doctor that something hurts or how much it hurts you don't get drugs. As for the length of time a patient is in the emergency room, that is also influenced by how much pain you're in, and frankly I'd be dumbfounded if it didn't correlate with who has insurance and who doesn't as well as the disparity in the hospitals closest to people. A major metropolitan hospital is going to have longer waits than a suburban hospital. I tried to follow the link on the ABC website to see if the study accounted for that, but the link goes to a completely different article.

Also in the second example the study purporting to show that whites are less empathic to blacks experiencing pain points out that the scholarly evidence is based on the premise that ingroup pain is more closely felt than outgroup pain. But the study is only focused on whites looking at pain felt by various ethnic groups. It specifically doesn't look if the same problem occurs when the situation is reversed.

For the examples dealing with the criminal justice system, I agree that it's institutional racism, but again it doesn't present any evidence that it matters if the judge/prosecuting attorney/police were white as opposed to a minority race makes any difference. So it really can't be used to present an argument that white people are racist unless you can prove that the problem is the race of the person doing the arresting/prosecuting/sentencing. All you can prove is that the system as a whole is racist.

The examples that people remembered lighter skinned blacks as more intelligent is utterly undermined by the fact that the study itself found that the problem exists across races of viewers. So not just whites, but blacks and latinos also had the same problem. It's again not a case of individuals being racist because they are white, but that we have an cultural/institutional racism problem.

It seems like the headline was written before the article as the example really don't support the thesis. Cherry-picking or flat out misrepresenting evidence isn't good work.