Sometimes data might be 'racist' (i.e. human written corpus text)... but sometimes data is just data.
Are facts racist?
I would seem the world is rather diverse, i.e. 'people are different' and as we are different, AI is going to pick up on that. That's the whole point.
Now ... some bad examples like in this example taking positive/negative inferences the wrong way. OR actual systematic racisms showing up in bad ways i.e. maybe some groups are more likely to be monitored than others, thereby showing up more frequently in mad terms etc..
If we nobly insist that the models describe the world as we wish it were and ought to be, then we won't be describing the data accurately. Maybe that trade-off is worthwhile if it somehow reforms human attitudes along lines we find more agreeable?
Then again, my personal social bubble leans heavily liberal and hard left. And I think that has a lot more to do with it than with how much people understand ML. When you explain this sort of thing to people who have no idea about ML, in very simple terms ("we give the robot the text that humans wrote, so that it can pick up the patterns" etc), they see why it does that very quickly, as well - if their politics makes them aware of bias in general.
It seems to me like the people writing about how AI is bad because it picks up biases from data are wishing the ML would learn the world as it ought to be. But that's wrong, and that would make such algorithms not useful. ML is meant to learn the world as it is. Which is, as you wrote, neither fair nor a controlled experiment.
Stuff like this puts the lie to that, though.
Disclaimer: I don't know enough about the data or the algorithm to determine this mathematically but I think worth pointing out. Would have been nice to see some statistical analysis instead of just assuming the charts speak for themselves.