And yet some people will cry that minorities don't have equal opportunity for education.
Actually, a lot of people point that out...because it is a fact. It is empirically demonstrable that the level of institutional support, access to relevant professional role models, academic resources, internship and job opportunities, presumption of competence/incompetence, socioeconomic mobility, educational attainment of previous family generations, and a host of other substantive indices of educational opportunity...are consistently
lower for people of color vs. "white" people. That's not an anecdote or personal story about a specific person's children, but the overwhelming finding pulled from indicators across several major fields of study.
So it's perfectly reasonable for "some people" to "cry" that minorities don't have equal opportunity for education...because...IN FACT...minorities don't have equal opportunity for education.
This begs a rather serious question of whether or not you consider pointing to relevant FACTS to be "crying"/whining/some sort of underhanded persuasive tactic. Thankfully, that's not the topic.
Grossly unequal educational opportunities which DO show strong correlation with whether or not someone is perceived as a person of color...is a clear case of institutional racism. Present-day institutions need not be involved in actively discriminating against people of color. Superficially "color-blind" admissions processes may simply inherit major inequalities stemming from sources mostly outside schools and colleges...and then simply do nothing (or not work effectively enough) to counteract the inheritance of such inequalities as they relate to attending and successfully completing study in a given school.
For instance, in addition to common sense it has also been shown by social scientists that having one or more college graduates as parents is a strong predictor of one's likelihood to attend and graduate college. This advantage/disadvantage compounds over generations, and its relevance to racism (in particular, to the ongoing legacy of racist oppression) is as follows:
Many students of color applying to college today have parents who were discriminated against in college admissions. Thus, despite not facing direct discrimination themselves, the loss of helpful potential resources (the lower frequency of having college graduates as parents) affects their likelihood to be admitted to and successfully graduate from colleges today. If you go back another generation or so, the difference is even more obvious, as two generations ago, many people of color were explicitly barred from attending college. Are either of these practices (heavy de facto discrimination against people of color in college admissions, or outright exclusion of all people perceived to be persons of color) in regular use today? No. But do they still have an impact upon admissions (and thus also hiring) today? Absolutely.
This points to one of the most prevalent racist memes in current popular use. Many opponents of affirmative action policies (in addition to not being able to accurately identify affirmative action in the first place) object to it on the false premise that admissions and hiring processes have been or would be fair and meritocratic in the absence of affirmative action. This amounts to a willful ignorance of history and current events...and by extension, a de facto endorsement (by complicity) of white supremacist policy (after all...if hiring and admissions is (falsely) pretended to be meritocratic without affirmative action or other remedial measures in place, and the fact remains that "white" people -- usually "white" men -- occupy the majority of high positions...then the lurking implication is that "white" people are indeed superior and earned their privilege from such superiority). That's how the injection of just a few -- or even one -- false premise from racism can lead what would otherwise be a reasonable person to accept -- at least implicitly -- an absurd and heavily racist version of reality.
This is exactly the kind of nuance and context required to have a reasonable discussion of racism, and racist oppression, in the present tense. Unfortunately it's exactly what is rarely seen in many attempts at discussion, because it requires getting past the level of individual/anecdotal experience and beyond implicit or explicit blame/exoneration.