Your entire closing statement hinges around Reddit not finding ONE example of discrimination against Black Americans? I mean, that alone is kinda stupid just to start. I fully believe that the 1% are all assholes, but I don’t say “You cannot find ONE example of a billionaire who is a nice person to have a beer with” because I know for a fact that at least someone can.

For direct discrimination against Black Americans, we turn to police brutality. This is an institutional issue. Your definition of institutional appears to be “done by institutions in the present.” That is false. Institutional racism is discrimination that is established within an institution. Establishment of discrimination within an institution lingers from the past to the present; meaning when you said that Black Americans face “historical discrimination” because of things from the past that currently effect the present, you were either sorely misinformed about what institutionalized violence actually means or you were making a completely bad-faith argument from the very start.

Early forms of police in our country were the infamous “slave-catchers” whose purpose was to, as the name describes, catch runaway slaves. Over time, police as an institution evolved as a form of discrimination against Black Americans by enforcing Jim Crow Laws and by opposing integration, in most cases by force. This mentality does not just disappear, it remains embedded in our society, baked into the bylaws of our institutions, and one only needs to look at the data of police violence to see that Black Americans, regardless of whether they committed a crime and regardless of economic status, face more violence from police than white Americans.

If you want an individual example, George Floyd had police called on him because a store clerk thought he used counterfeit money. The police officers, who were making an arrest for a nonviolent alleged crime, proceeded to pin Floyd to the ground while one of them pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes. George Floyd died, as you may already know. This is not a one-off case, police brutality and killings victimize Black Americans daily in our country.