I would disagree that it is nothing more than semantics. Your example is someone seeing a black person and applying negative stereotypes to them. That is easily recognized as racist. My example does not require anyone to even know the race of anyone involved. Explicit racism is obvious to anyone around it and is low hanging fruit. Institutional racism can often only be identified through actual study of complex interconnected systems and their history.

> This isn’t an example of institutional racism

> Never said it was

You responded to a comment saying “it's similar to something like institutional racism. There probably are very few people who are openly and unashamedly racist at the highest levels of power (although sadly not zero) - but all it takes is the current players acting in their own self interest to keep perpetuating an extremely unfair and totally rigged system”, clearly saying they are not talking about explicit racism, but people acting in self interest not related to race or racial stereotypes. Then you respond with an example of someone that is explicitly racist. That is not what was being talked about and is not a relevant example of what the commenter you are responding to was saying. Discriminating against others, racial or otherwise, for economic self interest is racist and bad. But the point of institutional racism is it can happen without any individual discriminating against anyone based on race.