I think it is far more complicated than that. Yes, there are going to be some who attempt to personally gain from the situation, but that is not an argument that the problem is not real and important.
I will have to use what to some has become an unfortunate word: privilege. The people who need to know about racism are privileged to not experience it. So, they are largely unaware of it. They don't live with it day to day. They tend to discount or overlook reports, and when something notable does happen, they quickly forget, and take no useful action. When you ask such people how prevalent racism is, they will tend to vastly underestimate it, even though people have been telling them about it for years.
The obvious counter to this is to put more effort into making racism obvious to such people, in the hopes of making it clear to them that there is a problem, and their silence is not good. The result is that you may see some attempts to over-report or over-state the issues. This would not be necessary if the rest of us were not so darned thick-headed about it.
As a middle-aged white male it is definitely difficult for me to relate to racism on any real personal level. The closest that I can come is when I was subjected to a tirade by a gentleman of East Indian origins, while working at the airport, because I pointed out to him that as an able bodied person he was not permitted to park in the designated handicapped parking spaces. Dealing with his racist comments (some of which had to do with him accusing me of being racist, like every other white person, because I wouldn't let him break the law) is far from the same as dealing with systemic racism almost every day of your life.
There are some things that are, however obviously wrong to anyone. For example I had a rather long and heated debate with someone who spouted claims based on his "Scottish race." This was during a long, very racist tirade against immigrants to Canada from a certain region. He was so thick that I ultimately declared that a former girlfriend of mine, whose parents were from Pakistan but was herself born in Glasgow, was more "Scottish" than he was.
On the other hand you have the over reaching demands. In the Toronto area there have been two shootings by police, of black individuals. The group "Black Lives Matter" recently closed a major connecting highway with a couple of hundred protesters, for two hours, demanding the names of the involved officers and that they be charged.
Investigation in the first case, that occurred a few miles from my house, recently closed. It was found that the individual who was shot, while approaching police with a knife, was under the influence of a number of controlled substances (methamphetamine, Ecstacy, and marijuana). That he was waving a large kitchen knife and approaching police, who repeatedly warned him to drop it, was supported by a number of independent witnesses, including the driver of the car he in which he was riding. The driver indicated that he knew that his friend was going to get shot, so he slid down below window level in the car. The person in question was the subject of a warrant in another jurisdiction, had a previous criminal record, and notes remarked that he had attempted to disarm an officer during a previous interaction. The one negative finding by the SIU (Special Investigations Unit), who investigate officer-involved incidents, was that the knife should not have been treated like evidence in any other case (tagged, bagged, and secured), but should instead have been left on scene for SIU investigators.
The second case is currently being investigated, by the SIU, and there have as yet been no findings released.
