As someone with an extensive background in facial recognition and feature identification, yes, this absolutely is the case. You need more training data and more

As someone with an extensive background in facial recognition and feature identification, yes, this absolutely is the case. You need more training data and more preprocessing, and often you just fundamentally can't get the same accuracy you can on pale faces because the information isn't there in the pixels. Same reason why it's harder for self driving cars to see black pedestrians at night. Fundamental information content. Not "racial bias". Of course, the word racism has that peculiar property of short circuiting our critical thinking because the outrage is so tantalizing...