I think maybe he was fishing for more of a nuanced “how prevalent is it?/how overt is it?” sort of discussion, rather than a “it’s bad/it’s a myth” stupid discussion.
I dunno. It’s all over the place AFAICT, but it’s often so subtle the people perpetuating it don’t realize it’s a problem until someone alerts them to it. The “that’s just the way we’ve always done things around here” force is a strong one.
Example: Back when record stores existed, shoppers may not have realized this, but the layout of the genres within the store was frequently organized according to perceived shoplifting risk, higher risk genres placed right up next to the sales counter, low-risk genres in far-off corners. And there damn well was a racial component in this. Now, the layout of a store can be set up one year, and just carried over for decades without conscious thought. The owners and employees can be oblivious. So can most of the shoppers. But the shoppers who are always followed by security in every store they enter? They notice. Is it a big deal? Well, the presumption of criminality everywhere you go certainly isn’t trivial, and this is part of that.
Having worked in a record store, I can also add that shoplifting-risk-by-genre is BS. If people want to steal something, they pick it up, THEN go to an unobserved corner to hide it, then walk out. So even if one genre is shoplifted more than others (and that’s a big “if”), the store’s genre layout isn’t going to do a thing about it.
Now, it’s a very particular example, but it illustrates some stuff–that institutional racism can be completely invisible to those who perpetuate it and also to most of the people who encounter it. And the only way it usually changes is for the targeted minority group to complain about it, sue, protest, boycott, legislate, whatever the appropriate avenue might be. And sometimes you just want to buy a damn record without having to go through all that.
