I find sources make for much better debate material than assertions, so let's look at some facts that are by now extremely well established:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jan/15/bame-offenders-most-likely-to-be-jailed-for-drug-offences-research-reveals
For equivalent (in this case drug related) crimes, black people are incarcerated 1.4x times more often than white people. (It's also notable that men are incarcerated 2.4x more than women - there is certainly more than one kind of institutional bias that exists!) This is despite the fact that white and black people use the relevant drugs at around the same rate.
https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/minorities-who-whiten-job-resumes-get-more-interviews
Resumes are more likely to result in a call if the name given on the resume sounds 'white' rather than 'black', even if the content is otherwise identical.
https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/race/reports/2018/02/21/447051/systematic-inequality/
Generational poverty still exists - black families are far more likely than white families to be poor, on the level of an order of magnitude, due to previously existing practices such as redlining. This means that bias against poor people often ends up being bias against black people too.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6080222/
When it comes to the police killing civilians, they don't MAJORITY kill black people, but they do DISPROPORTIONATELY kill black people (at a higher % than the number of black people in the overal population).
https://edition.cnn.com/2017/03/13/health/black-men-larger-study-trnd/index.html
A psychological biases causes us to see black people as bigger and more muscular than white people, even when the two people are of the same build.
https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/un-report-on-racial-disparities/
"African Americans are more likely than white Americans to be arrested; once arrested, they are more likely to be convicted; and once convicted, and they are more likely to experience lengthy prison sentences. African-American adults are 5.9 times as likely to be incarcerated than whites and Hispanics are 3.1 times as likely."
https://www.pewtrusts.org/~/media/legacy/uploadedfiles/pcs_assets/2012/pursuingamericandreampdf.pdf
"Blacks have a harder time exceeding
the family income and wealth of their
parents than do whites."
"Blacks are more likely to be stuck in
the bottom (of the economic ladder) and fall from the middle
than are whites"
-
Racism doesn't have to be a cultural practice of people calling black people racial slurs, or specific people in places of power who are racist, and it doesn't need 'no blacks' laws or signs to manifest - it can be the sum of institutional biases, unequal upbringings and unequal opportunities, where no one person is responsible or at fault but the system as a whole develops emergent behaviour of racial bias.
And to be 100% clear, there's more than one kind of bias that exists - there's biases against men, against women, against the poor, against hispanics and so on. All of these are certainly worth examining as well, but they should each be given their own space to breathe and fight their own battles, rather than suggesting one cause is more important than another cause.
Once we are aware of these biases and agree they are unfair, we can agree to implement policy and oversight to correct these biases to where they should be, and invest in stronger social nets for those in poverty stricken households and neighbourhoors. (Also, can we please decriminalize most drug usage? I can't believe we're still locking people up for marijuana in 2020.)
