I'm curious how they isolated the effect of race (but I can't read the paper, so, I dunno) among other signs. If they even did—the abstract doesn't make it clear to me that they're claiming race is the causal factor, but may just be observing that distance correlates with the race of the subjects (for whatever reason).

[EDIT] cpitman's link elsewhere in the thread helped: they placed the person the avoidance of whom they were measuring, so they could at least partially control for affect and clothing and such.

It's easy to picture all sorts of specific bad things that might really be represented somewhere among a broader group we disagree with on some kind of ideological grounds, or, in your case, something they might do in the future! It's not useful, though, to describe these pictures every time a topic arises that just happens to be about that group (the group in this case being academics studying something that has to do with racism).