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?