Coonskin a.k.a. Harlem Nights (1975) Accused of being racist and was withdrawn by its distributor within a week of its release. Just watch the first minutes to figure out why

Ooo. Great question. Warning: this comment contains a fair amount of generalization in order to make a larger point about how economics intersect with cultural forces and create a cumulative impact on some subset of the population. I tried to reference things that are generally accepted or common knowledge, but if you want references, give me some time. Subsequently, I'm going from memory and might have gotten a few details wrong, and am willing to edit and amend if corrected.

The neoliberal deregulation wave that started in the late 70s and still persists today created a spiderweb of negative consequences for black people in America.

Case in point: deregulation and union busting led to massive layoffs in the manufacturing industry in cities like Detroit, which still has a huge working class black population as a result of mass migration that started after the Civil War. All of a sudden, the unions were powerless, the good jobs went overseas, and this combined with growing organized crime (and subsequently, the introduction of the violent, illicit drug trade), white flight to the suburbs (where redlining, zoning, and discriminatory lending by banks made it impossible or illegal for non-whites to relocate), and unchecked police corruption (this was the era of Serpico) created the ghettos that NWA rapped about. This slang term originated as an intentional reference to the ghettos of the holocaust meant to invoke the hopelessness of an open air prison. Things might have been very different without the Neoliberal policies that sold away the decent blue-collar jobs in urban areas. This same basic confluence of events occurred at some point in every major city in America in the last decades of the 20th century.

This is actually a perfect example of the difference between regular old racism and "institutional" racism. This racist discrimination didn't happen because one specific white person said, "I hate black people." It happened as a result of white people holding the majority of positions of economic decision-making authority, and that majority-white population making decisions over decades without thinking or caring about how they might negatively affect black people.

However, in some cases, those decisions were explicitly racist (ie, recently released audio confirming gerrymandered districts in NC were specifically drawn to divide the black community's voting power. One district includes the campus of a historically black college but ends across the street from the dormitories, so none of the students can vote in the district their school resides in).

But it doesn't matter if it was explicit or not, because the end result is the same: Decades later, when the people who made those rules are long dead, the unbalance remains. Institutional racism doesn't need to be on purpose--the idea is that it's leftover racism built into the rules of the game that have always (intentionally or otherwise) given white people some advantage over black people.

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