>institutional racism is a made-up issue.

I find that consistently, people who believe this don't really realize racism debate didn't racism debate didn't "stop and start up again" in politics. Black lives matter isn't a re-emergence, in the 90s there was the rodney king riots over a very similar issue, and protests/riots like that have been going on for a long time. To believe that we've solved racism in politics when we never stopped talking about it is pretty ridiculous.

One statistic that really stuck out to me was the death penalty in Alabama. 65% of the murders involve black victims, but somehow a whopping 80% of the death sentences are for white victims, and 60% of the black death row was for black people killing white people, even though it was only 6% of the crimes. I highly doubt that many black victims were in gangs and weren't just innocent like a lot of the white victims. And one of the most worrying things was that "In the past 10 years, 23 Alabama death penalty cases have been overturned because prosecutors had illegally struck black people from the juries"

Sportsballers have the right to disrespectfully protest over made-up issues. We have the right to call them out for it. It's not that difficult to understand.