> Focus it on a dark spot, and the camera is inactive. It only knows how to calibrate itself against lightness to define the image.
I don't know much about photography, but AFAIK, modern cameras need contrast to calibrate themselves, not lightness (or darkness). Point the camera towards a dark corner, nothing. Point it towards the sun, nothing. Point it towards a sharp edge of a shadow, or any other high-contrast area, an voila, focus!
So to your mind it's more likely that the author is telling fish stories than it is the dominant financial caste ended up optimizing a given piece of tech to their best interest?
And you're such an angry bitter person that you automatically assume everything is racist? What are the qualifications of the article's author? You must have an exhausting life seeing racism behind every tree.
What about the guys at Fuji film? Is their film anti-white and Asian biased?
This whole discussion is absurd. Next thing we'll hear is that swimming pools are racist.
You might not like the way he says it, but go back and read the article:
Kathy Connor, an executive at Kodak, told Roth the
company didn’t develop a better film for rendering
different gradations of brown until economic pressure
came from a very different source: Kodak’s professional
accounts. Two of their biggest clients were chocolate
confectioners, who were dissatisfied with the film’s
ability to render the difference between chocolates of
different darknesses. “Also,” Connor says, “furniture
manufacturers were complaining that stains and wood
grains in their advertisement photos were not true to life.”
How is that not racist? The film wasn't an issue when it was just people of colour coming out poorly, but when it's chocolate and furniture being badly exposed, then they develop a new film.
It's called crying wolf. Some aspects of photography may be optimized for whites; that doesn't mean everything is designed to make life harder for blacks.
My camera apparently has the opposite problem. I can't autofocus on anything that's solid white. Did I accidentally buy the "black" model?
Besides, where's the "racism" in the dominant financial caste optimizing a given piece of tech to their best interests? It's a commercial product, so you optimize it for your main market, which, for most of photography's life has been white.
Only if you have never opened a dictionary or an actual textbook.
A textbook example of racism is: "These people are inferior/primitive/stupid/immoral because they are black" (from which the colloraries come, like: "Lets exploit these infrerior people for slave labor". Or "I don't want these inferior people in my restaurant.)
This case is, on the other hand: "Black people in the US don't have us much income (a fact), and are much fewer than white people (another fact). We should better optimize our film for the most common buyer, which would be white people".
This has nothing to do with racism, it's basic economics. In fact if blacks were the most affluent or populous group, the same companies would target THEM in a heartbeat.
Right, but a shadow on dark skin is much lower contrast than a shadow on light skin. The most contrast you are going to find on a dark skinned face is on the eyes. But even then, you can run into problems if, for example, they are wearing sunglasses or you're not close enough to get the focus to lock on the distinction between their eyes.
This might not be a problem in a brightly lit scene, as long as you are using manual white balance (or, well, shooting RAW so you can adjust all that shit after the fact), but as you go to darker locations, you can definitely have an issue.
A possible solution to this would be using infrared depth sensing rather than contrast or phase detection or a laser rangefinding system for autofocusing.
You're talking about auto focus and it's true that focus detectors in modern cameras need some contrast to work.
Cameras use lightness/color for auto exposure (and auto white-balance). If you shoot a picture of a white sheet of paper with auto exposure on, cameras will typically try to adjust exposure so that it comes out looking gray-ish.
You're not just going for focus, though. You're going for a finished product with dynamic range -- it's easy to perfectly focus onto a dark black blob, but that doesn't make it recognizable as a human being.
You might need to overexpose the rest of the frame, so that the skintone darks are bright enough to be interesting. That's doable, but it takes either a human touch or a digital camera with facial-recognition technology to figure out that's what's happening instead of just going for the bright zones. (And then you get a bright white blob if there's a white guy in the frame.)
Is there actually a primary source from someone at Kodak saying "Yeah, we intentionally limited the dynamic range because we didn't care about photographing people with dark skin"?
It would be very easy to believe that the limited dynamic range was for financial reasons (lower cost of manufacture) and not overt racism.
Everyone needs someone saying something like the N word in an official document before they can buy that racism exists. It's not possible that capital follows racial lines (spoiler: it does) and that therefore incentivized products to develop in a particular direction, to appeal to the folks with money? You don't need "overt racism." You don't need a guy twirling his mustache, spouting white supremacist rants.
Do you know anything about film? If you do, then please contribute; if you don't then I would encourage you to actually get educated about the topic involved rather than just knee-jerking your way to validating your own bias.
So is film racist or not? Do you have any science? Exposure tests? Test prints? Any proof at all? Or just a hatred of the 'man'?
With so much experience, you should have lots of evidence to prove the racism of film.
The simple fact is this, black Hollywood would have screamed about this long before now if there was even a remote chance that film was racist. There would have been academic debates, a long line of evidence and years of discussions among technical and critical circles. Not just some random internet article from a non-qualified source making a claim with no peer-review or any sort of intellectual authority.
We might be bankrupt as a community; yet here you are.
Using Photoshop as a "Mobile interaction designer + developer" does not an expert in photography technology makes. Doesn't even count actually -- the issues behind film dynamic range have nothing to do with Photoshop. As for the "darkroom experience", well it doesn't mean much. Plenty of photography enthusiasts don't know their chemistry and physics -- just barely enough to develop photographs.
If you have a specific technical comment about how they could easily optimize dynamic range in those crude early films and didn't (because of racism), then tell it.
If you also think that film companies shouldn't had optimize for the main market for a commercial product regardless. Would even a black film company owner optimize for the 20%, less afluent to buy cameras, US market?
Anyone have side-by-side versions of the same image with one version being "less racist"? I'm having trouble seeing it.
Although what the author says conceptually makes sense, the photo of the schoolchildren looks fine to me. And I believe many scenes of 12 Years a Slave were intentionally dark - I'm sure the outdoor scenes or the indoor scene at the end when Solomon Northup comes home had much more contrast on purpose.
This article is about a thousand assumption and biases, each of them small, that together accumulate to create a disadvantage for a group. This is what racism is. It doesn't mean someone wearing a pointy hood decided the film formula.
I disagree with this nonsense. I was a photojournalist for Reuters during the tail end of the film era; 1996-2002 and the issue with black subjects had nothing to do with color balance but of the latitude of the film; we used Fuji almost exclusively and since I did tons of sports and low light spot news, It was mostly 800 speed occasionally pushed hard.
Shooting NBA meant I had mostly black subjects. The film didn't discriminate: in most arenas if the time, we shot at 500/2.8; for a darker arena, we'd increase the processing time (or if we had an especially important shot, increase the chemical temperature, effectively overclocking the processing.) my point is that dark skin or light, the color balance made no difference; it was about exposure. Since we held shutter speed and aperture constant (2.8 was the fastest aperture for 400mm lenses and anything below 1/500th would get motion blur,) our exposures were relatively constant regardless of the subject's skin color. The problem is if you have a bunch of white guys and one black guy, auto-metering would expose in such a way as to render the scene equal to an 18% grey card. So the black guy would be under exposed. However, if you took a photo with 20 black guys and 1 white guy, the white guy would look like he was made out of white light: he'd be dramatically overexposed because autometering it exposed for 18% grey. If you had used an incident light meter, generally the scenes would be fine because the meter wouldn't be trying to 'grey card' the scene.
As far as Jean Luc and his 'racist' Kodachrome, I suspect that's apocryphal. Kodachrome is notoriously difficult to expose correctly; meaning you typically want to expose for highlights because it has a very narrow latitude and blasting out highlights is a real concern. There's nothing racist about it, it is just a very difficult film to light correctly, especially if he were shooting on location in Africa.
But what do I know, I am a white guy so I obviously don't quite understand the struggle to make everything into some kind of racist conspiracy.
The fact is that if film were racist, Spike Lee and others would have been screaming about it. This is the first I've ever heard of this theory and I was a film junkie for a long time as well as a fan of Ernest Dickerson and Bob Richardson; never once have those guys mentioned racist color balance. The argument is just absurd.
If we want to talk about racism in Hollywood, we have about a million potential topics, but film stock isn't one of them. What next, lenses are racist?
So you worked with film at the apex of its technological development and that makes you an expert on the beginning of the color era, when that technology was exceptionally expensive?
Do you have any facts or relevant anecdotes to add to the discussion? I am very interested in other points of view. I don't claim to be right, I am only attempting to add to the discussion, providing a counterpoint to the claims made by the article. If you have some evidence supporting the article's premise, let's have it! I'd love to see more evidence about racism in photography.
It seems like your main goal is to affirm your closely held core beliefs that everything and everyone is racist. The world isn't so black and white. Not everything is a conspiracy against the black man. You also might realize that there is certainly an incentive to fan the fires of sanctimony. There's an entire industry of people who have a vested interest in finding racism under every rock.
Let's just allow for a second that film is racist. So what? What are you going to do about it? Maintaining your rage or perhaps doing something positive to actually make the world a better place? Look forward; Don't let your own hatred stunt your potential to do something positive! Chips on shoulders can be exhausting!
Remember that time where you had no idea the racist history of public swimming pools, but still wanted to be treated as an expert on what made things racist?
First, he worked with film (as did I). Did you? And what exactly makes the author of TFA an expert on the subject?
Second, film wasn't a technology solidified in the "beginning of the color era", color reproduction and emulsions changed all the time, and new films with different color repro and dynamic range were appearing frequently.
Just to give people an idea of the numbers we're working with here:
According to The Internets and Google (who know everything and are NEVER WRONG), Kodachrome's dynamic range was about 7.3 stops (so your whitest white is 2^(7.3) ~= 157 times brighter than your blackest black). Kodachrome was a color positive film (i.e. slides). Slide film is notorious for being tricky to expose right.
For comparison, a nice modern black-and-white negative film like Kodak Tri-X 400 has a range of about 13.5 stops (white is 11,585x brighter than black). It's also 2-8 times as sensitive overall as Kodachrome (which came from ISO 25 to ISO 200) and probably has comparable or smaller grain size.
(Of course, black and white is easier, and a better comparison would be Kodak Portra, but I couldn't Google up the numbers readily enough to present here.)
Thanks for those numbers! I couldn't remember the exacts.. Another difficulty of Chrome films where that the color would shift badly if you pushed or pulled it. You could push and pull, but not as much as negative film.
The crazy thing is that Nat Geo shot almost entirely on Kodachrome and their photos remain some of the most amazing ever created. They'd often shoot with just available light as well. Incredible stuff.
That said - I think her chief complaint is misplaced. Ie - it is mostly a technological issue - shooting black subjects well (whether people or objects) is hard. Cameras have only so much "dynamic range" - meaning ability to capture light and dark matter. So if you expose for black skin, it will render rest of the image blown out (meaning you can't see anything else).
I found the paragraph describing how the Whoopi Goldberg show is shot illuminating - two separate cameras have to shoot Whoopi and her guests.
What's funny is how the two articles interpreted the same fact differently (the one about the 42% flash boost). Priceonomics and the Guardian note that the extra light feature was there so that black subjects wouldn't be underexposed. But buzzfeed says this:
> The ID2 has a flash boost button engineered to add 42% more light on its subjects. Its effect would result in a deliberate darkening of dark-skinned subjects.
That's the exact opposite of what would happen! The extra flash was there so they wouldn't be erased.
That said, I'm still trying to find where Broomberg got his numbers. Did none of the authors of these three articles question the claim that all black people have the same skin tone? I guess the buzzfeed author did as she didn't repeat that claim, only the one about the flash being 42% brighter, but if you think the guy's pulling one number out of his butt, why trust another number?
I haven't had much luck finding any other information about this special South African flash feature (or the magic 42% number).
Yeah even the paper cited notes that it's a technical challenge to make multiple races in the same shot look good using either film or video cameras, and so in the past things were just optimized for the predominant racial category in the largest markets they sold to. But at the same time, they were always improving their ability to capture more. Kodak created different emulsion properties for the Asian/Japanese market since they weren't white, consistently improved the ability of their films to capture contrast and detail, and created test cards that featured multiple racial groups in one image. Obviously Fuji was not "optimizing for whiteness," since they uh, weren't white. Well, not exactly true. The paper mentions that there are widespread cross-cultural beauty preferences for lightness. Kodak improved their film to capture multiple races, and created test cards for multiple races. Imagine you're making film and you can capture 85-90% of people within the existing scope of technology. You do that and you sell it, and you work on improving it.
There was a ton of interesting history and information in the paper, but I didn't even think it totally supported their own thesis, I kind of thought it worked against it. Film and video weren't "optimized for whiteness" they were optimized for markets and huge parts of those markets weren't even white, so they optimized for non-white in those markets. They wanted to sell more, so they improved their film by spending time and money on technical innovation. These things aren't free, early cameras made everybody look like shit. They got better and still are.
It's entirely possible that knock on effects of the standards used for designing and calibrating film, color or non, have caused most mass-produced color film for generations to be better at capturing pale skin tones than at capturing dark ones. This article has done a terrible job of making this argument. That alone is not enough reason to dismiss the argument completely, as I find myself itching to do and many of the commenters before me have already done.
It's a sad statement on our state of news, or perhaps it has always been that way. I'd love to do a comparison of news article comparing the plight of the negro from the '60s or the debates over slavery from the abolitionist era to the modern race debate. I'm afraid we've not changed at all; That the color of skin is fundamentally divisive, and we won't get past it. In fact, the final line of the article seems to confirm it: "that the tools used to make film [and] the science of it, are not racially neutral". She is blaming the physical laws of nature for being racist. I don't get how we get post-racial if we're expected to change the unchangeable to suit.
In the TV industry, it's well-known that the human eye is unusually sensitive to the color of skin. If a tree is the wrong color, no one will notice. If skin is even a little bit wrong, it looks horrifying.
I've always worried that, being of Northern European ancestry, perhaps my eyes are evolved to be more sensitive to white skin. I know I'm nowhere near as sensitive to color shifts in dark skin versus skin that is close to my own shade.
Does anyone know of any studies on this subject? I'd love to know whether or not my perception is universal or not.
I think I'd be interested in finding out whether, say, Gordon Parks had anything to say in regard to photographic film being subject to racist influence.
The dynamic range limitations that slide film has and early color negative film had during the last century is a technology limitation.
The progression of film development is toward more dynamic range, finer grain, greater speed (sensitivity to light), and to truer color and color fastness. If Kodak, or any other film maker were able to make a color film which could capture the wide dynamic range of skin tones, it's likely they would have. The benefits of a wider dynamic range have implications that even if the thesis of this article were true, would have driven the marketplace to adopt this better film. Greater dynamic range is a generally desirable feature.
Film, as a technology, is limited. What I would consider to be a more interesting discussion, would be to address the decisions made by photographers that resulted in the underexposure of non-white skin tones.
I'm fully willing to believe that a photographer took a photo of a group of people of mixed races, exposed the image such that the white people were properly exposed and called it a day, simply because in their estimation the proper exposure of the black faces was unimportant. I can also believe that this happened quite a lot. This can seem rather passive, on the part of the photographer, who can claim that film just can't capture the dynamic range, rather than taking the time and effort to light the people properly, or other measures necessary.
One could also argue that 18% gray, as the default for exposure metering, prioritized the white face over the black one.
The substance of the argument that film is racist, could be rooted in these sociological issues, in the choices that were made by individuals everywhere, their assumptions and their decisions about who mattered.
48 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 104 ms ] threadI don't know much about photography, but AFAIK, modern cameras need contrast to calibrate themselves, not lightness (or darkness). Point the camera towards a dark corner, nothing. Point it towards the sun, nothing. Point it towards a sharp edge of a shadow, or any other high-contrast area, an voila, focus!
Bokay.
What about the guys at Fuji film? Is their film anti-white and Asian biased?
This whole discussion is absurd. Next thing we'll hear is that swimming pools are racist.
Please don't express disagreement this way on Hacker News, regardless of how strongly you disagree.
Um. For a long time they were. Public pools were subject to racial segregation.
Glad we have an expert on racism like yourself to help set us all straight here!
My camera apparently has the opposite problem. I can't autofocus on anything that's solid white. Did I accidentally buy the "black" model?
Besides, where's the "racism" in the dominant financial caste optimizing a given piece of tech to their best interests? It's a commercial product, so you optimize it for your main market, which, for most of photography's life has been white.
A textbook example of racism is: "These people are inferior/primitive/stupid/immoral because they are black" (from which the colloraries come, like: "Lets exploit these infrerior people for slave labor". Or "I don't want these inferior people in my restaurant.)
This case is, on the other hand: "Black people in the US don't have us much income (a fact), and are much fewer than white people (another fact). We should better optimize our film for the most common buyer, which would be white people".
This has nothing to do with racism, it's basic economics. In fact if blacks were the most affluent or populous group, the same companies would target THEM in a heartbeat.
This might not be a problem in a brightly lit scene, as long as you are using manual white balance (or, well, shooting RAW so you can adjust all that shit after the fact), but as you go to darker locations, you can definitely have an issue.
A possible solution to this would be using infrared depth sensing rather than contrast or phase detection or a laser rangefinding system for autofocusing.
Cameras use lightness/color for auto exposure (and auto white-balance). If you shoot a picture of a white sheet of paper with auto exposure on, cameras will typically try to adjust exposure so that it comes out looking gray-ish.
You might need to overexpose the rest of the frame, so that the skintone darks are bright enough to be interesting. That's doable, but it takes either a human touch or a digital camera with facial-recognition technology to figure out that's what's happening instead of just going for the bright zones. (And then you get a bright white blob if there's a white guy in the frame.)
It would be very easy to believe that the limited dynamic range was for financial reasons (lower cost of manufacture) and not overt racism.
You just need wild, race-based income inequality.
Guess what?
That happened.
This community is so intellectually bankrupt.
See: http://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/27643/why-dont-came...
With so much experience, you should have lots of evidence to prove the racism of film.
The simple fact is this, black Hollywood would have screamed about this long before now if there was even a remote chance that film was racist. There would have been academic debates, a long line of evidence and years of discussions among technical and critical circles. Not just some random internet article from a non-qualified source making a claim with no peer-review or any sort of intellectual authority.
We might be bankrupt as a community; yet here you are.
If you have a specific technical comment about how they could easily optimize dynamic range in those crude early films and didn't (because of racism), then tell it.
If you also think that film companies shouldn't had optimize for the main market for a commercial product regardless. Would even a black film company owner optimize for the 20%, less afluent to buy cameras, US market?
Although what the author says conceptually makes sense, the photo of the schoolchildren looks fine to me. And I believe many scenes of 12 Years a Slave were intentionally dark - I'm sure the outdoor scenes or the indoor scene at the end when Solomon Northup comes home had much more contrast on purpose.
Shooting NBA meant I had mostly black subjects. The film didn't discriminate: in most arenas if the time, we shot at 500/2.8; for a darker arena, we'd increase the processing time (or if we had an especially important shot, increase the chemical temperature, effectively overclocking the processing.) my point is that dark skin or light, the color balance made no difference; it was about exposure. Since we held shutter speed and aperture constant (2.8 was the fastest aperture for 400mm lenses and anything below 1/500th would get motion blur,) our exposures were relatively constant regardless of the subject's skin color. The problem is if you have a bunch of white guys and one black guy, auto-metering would expose in such a way as to render the scene equal to an 18% grey card. So the black guy would be under exposed. However, if you took a photo with 20 black guys and 1 white guy, the white guy would look like he was made out of white light: he'd be dramatically overexposed because autometering it exposed for 18% grey. If you had used an incident light meter, generally the scenes would be fine because the meter wouldn't be trying to 'grey card' the scene.
As far as Jean Luc and his 'racist' Kodachrome, I suspect that's apocryphal. Kodachrome is notoriously difficult to expose correctly; meaning you typically want to expose for highlights because it has a very narrow latitude and blasting out highlights is a real concern. There's nothing racist about it, it is just a very difficult film to light correctly, especially if he were shooting on location in Africa.
But what do I know, I am a white guy so I obviously don't quite understand the struggle to make everything into some kind of racist conspiracy.
The fact is that if film were racist, Spike Lee and others would have been screaming about it. This is the first I've ever heard of this theory and I was a film junkie for a long time as well as a fan of Ernest Dickerson and Bob Richardson; never once have those guys mentioned racist color balance. The argument is just absurd.
If we want to talk about racism in Hollywood, we have about a million potential topics, but film stock isn't one of them. What next, lenses are racist?
Cool story, bro.
It seems like your main goal is to affirm your closely held core beliefs that everything and everyone is racist. The world isn't so black and white. Not everything is a conspiracy against the black man. You also might realize that there is certainly an incentive to fan the fires of sanctimony. There's an entire industry of people who have a vested interest in finding racism under every rock.
Let's just allow for a second that film is racist. So what? What are you going to do about it? Maintaining your rage or perhaps doing something positive to actually make the world a better place? Look forward; Don't let your own hatred stunt your potential to do something positive! Chips on shoulders can be exhausting!
Ah, good times.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9436623
Second, film wasn't a technology solidified in the "beginning of the color era", color reproduction and emulsions changed all the time, and new films with different color repro and dynamic range were appearing frequently.
According to The Internets and Google (who know everything and are NEVER WRONG), Kodachrome's dynamic range was about 7.3 stops (so your whitest white is 2^(7.3) ~= 157 times brighter than your blackest black). Kodachrome was a color positive film (i.e. slides). Slide film is notorious for being tricky to expose right.
For comparison, a nice modern black-and-white negative film like Kodak Tri-X 400 has a range of about 13.5 stops (white is 11,585x brighter than black). It's also 2-8 times as sensitive overall as Kodachrome (which came from ISO 25 to ISO 200) and probably has comparable or smaller grain size.
(Of course, black and white is easier, and a better comparison would be Kodak Portra, but I couldn't Google up the numbers readily enough to present here.)
The crazy thing is that Nat Geo shot almost entirely on Kodachrome and their photos remain some of the most amazing ever created. They'd often shoot with just available light as well. Incredible stuff.
That said - I think her chief complaint is misplaced. Ie - it is mostly a technological issue - shooting black subjects well (whether people or objects) is hard. Cameras have only so much "dynamic range" - meaning ability to capture light and dark matter. So if you expose for black skin, it will render rest of the image blown out (meaning you can't see anything else).
I found the paragraph describing how the Whoopi Goldberg show is shot illuminating - two separate cameras have to shoot Whoopi and her guests.
What's funny is how the two articles interpreted the same fact differently (the one about the 42% flash boost). Priceonomics and the Guardian note that the extra light feature was there so that black subjects wouldn't be underexposed. But buzzfeed says this:
> The ID2 has a flash boost button engineered to add 42% more light on its subjects. Its effect would result in a deliberate darkening of dark-skinned subjects.
That's the exact opposite of what would happen! The extra flash was there so they wouldn't be erased.
That said, I'm still trying to find where Broomberg got his numbers. Did none of the authors of these three articles question the claim that all black people have the same skin tone? I guess the buzzfeed author did as she didn't repeat that claim, only the one about the flash being 42% brighter, but if you think the guy's pulling one number out of his butt, why trust another number?
I haven't had much luck finding any other information about this special South African flash feature (or the magic 42% number).
There was a ton of interesting history and information in the paper, but I didn't even think it totally supported their own thesis, I kind of thought it worked against it. Film and video weren't "optimized for whiteness" they were optimized for markets and huge parts of those markets weren't even white, so they optimized for non-white in those markets. They wanted to sell more, so they improved their film by spending time and money on technical innovation. These things aren't free, early cameras made everybody look like shit. They got better and still are.
edit: here's the paper: http://www.cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/article/view/2196
And there was racism happening, I am not denying that, but it was overstated imo.
It's a sad statement on our state of news, or perhaps it has always been that way. I'd love to do a comparison of news article comparing the plight of the negro from the '60s or the debates over slavery from the abolitionist era to the modern race debate. I'm afraid we've not changed at all; That the color of skin is fundamentally divisive, and we won't get past it. In fact, the final line of the article seems to confirm it: "that the tools used to make film [and] the science of it, are not racially neutral". She is blaming the physical laws of nature for being racist. I don't get how we get post-racial if we're expected to change the unchangeable to suit.
I've always worried that, being of Northern European ancestry, perhaps my eyes are evolved to be more sensitive to white skin. I know I'm nowhere near as sensitive to color shifts in dark skin versus skin that is close to my own shade.
Does anyone know of any studies on this subject? I'd love to know whether or not my perception is universal or not.
The progression of film development is toward more dynamic range, finer grain, greater speed (sensitivity to light), and to truer color and color fastness. If Kodak, or any other film maker were able to make a color film which could capture the wide dynamic range of skin tones, it's likely they would have. The benefits of a wider dynamic range have implications that even if the thesis of this article were true, would have driven the marketplace to adopt this better film. Greater dynamic range is a generally desirable feature.
Film, as a technology, is limited. What I would consider to be a more interesting discussion, would be to address the decisions made by photographers that resulted in the underexposure of non-white skin tones.
I'm fully willing to believe that a photographer took a photo of a group of people of mixed races, exposed the image such that the white people were properly exposed and called it a day, simply because in their estimation the proper exposure of the black faces was unimportant. I can also believe that this happened quite a lot. This can seem rather passive, on the part of the photographer, who can claim that film just can't capture the dynamic range, rather than taking the time and effort to light the people properly, or other measures necessary.
One could also argue that 18% gray, as the default for exposure metering, prioritized the white face over the black one.
The substance of the argument that film is racist, could be rooted in these sociological issues, in the choices that were made by individuals everywhere, their assumptions and their decisions about who mattered.