Racism, like other isms, means a belief that a person’s characteristics define their identity. It doesn’t matter if confounding factors mean that you can show that people of their race are associated with bad behaviors or low scores or whatever.
I used GPT3.5 to generate 100 short descriptions of families for a project. Every single one, without exception, was a straight couple with two to four kids. Ok, statistically unlikely, but not wildly so, right?
Well, every single one of those 100 also had a husband in a stereotypical breadwinner role (doctor, lawyer, executive, architect). Not one stay at home dad or unemployed looking for work. About 75 of the wives had jobs, all of them in stereotypical female-coded roles like nurse (almost half of them!), teacher, etc.
Now, you can look at any given example and say it looks reasonable. But you can’t say the same thing about the aggregate.
And that matters. No amount of “bias = pattern recognition” nonsense can justify a system that has (had? this was a while ago and I have not retested) such extreme biases. This bias does not match real world patterns. There are single parents, childless couples, female lawyers, unemployed men.