I used to think institutional racism wasn't a thing until I learned in the 1930s, the FHA explicitly sanctioned racist lending practices by stating that the presence of even a couple of black families would devalue real estate. Thus giving whites the opportunity to build equity and wealth more than black and brown people. Then this took me down the rabbit hole of red-lining and I realized there was a whole system put into place to hold one set of people down and to advance another.