The article seems to be saying that excessive sunscreen usage and sun avoidance is bad for everyone and especially for people with darker skin. The leap of logic from that to racism seems like a bit of a stretch.
Maybe the world needs a variant of Hanlon’s razor: never attribute to racism that which is adequate explained by stupidity (or incompetence or the desire to promote one’s product or profession, etc.).
The US tried /extremely/ hard to take 'color-blindness' as the solution to centuries of explicit racism. And it failed rather completely. There's two effects at play: a) the 'true' racists learned how to keep being horrible without ever explicitly talking about race, and b) we wound up with lots of 'data gaps' around race by ignoring real differences. This data gap is arguably at the root of what's called structural racism.
(Incidentally, an incredibly similar dynamic has played out with the rights of women. I'm currently reading Caroline Criado-Perez's 'Invisible Women' which is about a huge range of areas where the 'default' is male, and the resulting gaps in data about women lead to poor outcomes.)
So I'd say the article points to a particular kind of structural racism: That the medical advice for white people is assumed to also be good for people of color.
> So I'd say the article points to a particular kind of structural racism: That the medical advice for white people is assumed to also be good for people of color.
Maybe? The article is trying pretty hard to say that the medical advice is wrong for white people too. Of course, it’s plausible that the article is wrong, white people should use sunscreen, and black people (at least in Northern climates?) should not.
Here’s a more clear-cut example of structural racism in medicine:
Maybe the world needs a variant of Hanlon’s razor: never attribute to racism that which is adequate explained by stupidity (or incompetence or the desire to promote one’s product or profession, etc.).