It’s also safe and easy to say “no racism here no sir” when confronted with difficult problems and decisions about justice.

I’ve experienced a small example of this. In elementary school the majority minority school in the district sent basically no kids to the gifted magnet school. Like zero. For years, people just said what you said. My parents actually dug into it and found that grade distributions were similar and the problem was that administrators at the white schools knew how to write glowing recommendations and the admin at the other school didn’t exaggerate as much. A little bit of coordination and adjusting the recommendation letter form structure and bam suddenly way more kids from the majority minority school.

But for years people just said “well that’s a worse school, what do you expect”.

It sounds like you’re arguing that there was racism, whereas your example suggests there wasn’t racism, just differences in application process - it certainly doesn’t sound like there was any resistance to improving the process in a way that resulted in dramatically increased success of minority students. Or am I misinterpreting something?

Structural racism often means there is no one person to blame - there's not going to be a person we can hold up and say, "Here's the racist!" This was a racist outcome because the students, staff and parents in the minority school weren't in-the-know. Why weren't they in-the-know? Probably for racist reasons going back decades.

A system that structurally disadvantages minorities based on race is racism. Why do you think that this one school had more black students? Legacies of housing discrimination.

There was resistance. My mother was hated by other parents for this and two other pieces of local activism. People in church told her that she was hurting their children straight to her face.

it's the emphasis on the system. no one person is to be blamed in this example.