Racists

Who are the real racists--people like me, who believe in Dr. King's and Thurgood Marshall's colorblind society, or those who cry "racism!" at the drop of a hat?

THERE IS NO RACIST LIKE AN ANTIRACIST, writes Theodore Dalrymple. “That is because he is obsessed by race, whose actual existence as often as not he denies. He looks at the world through race-tinted spectacles, interprets every event or social phenomenon as a manifestation of racism either implicit or explicit, and in general has the soul of a born inquisitor.”

And then I saw this article:

In a statistical analysis that controlled for a host of other influences, we found this: Negative racial views about blacks were the single most important predictor of white opposition to paying college athletes.

The more negatively a white respondent felt about blacks, the more they opposed paying college athletes.

To check our findings’ validity, we also conducted an experiment. Before we asked white respondents whether college athletes should be paid, we showed one group pictures of young black men with stereotypical African American first and last names. We showed another group no pictures at all.

As you can see in the figure below, whites who were primed by seeing pictures of young black men were significantly more likely to say they opposed paying college athletes. Support dropped most dramatically among whites who expressed the most resent towards blacks as a group.

Is there no other explanation for this?  Does correlation imply causation?  If you're trying to show racism by whites, wouldn't you show black pictures to some and white pictures to others?

I'm for getting rid of "big athletics" at colleges and having them return to what should be their actual focus, which is education.  Would that disproportionately affect blacks?  Does that make me a racist?  Does it bother me that if our public universities had admissions standards based mostly on academic merit, then even more Asians would attend top-tier universities?  The answers to those questions are "Certainly, at least in high-dollar sports", "no", and "no".