> This complaint relies on a racist argument "black people in general have less money, therefore the black software engineers doing the referrals will have less money."
The racist part is taking a generalization and applying it to a specific subset. Black software engineers and managers probably have enough money to play this game if they wanted. The "software engineers" is the specific subset that the generalization is being applied to.
Based on https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Software_Engineer/S..., while the average income for a software engineer is pretty good, the low end of their reported scale is 63k/yr. Personally, my first salaried job as a software engineer paid 40k. I can attest that I was not able to save much money on that income after expenses like rent, food, and gas. I think it is unreasonable to assume that racial disparities in wealth will vanish just because someone writes code.
It's not a racist argument, it's factually true.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=average...
https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/disp...