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?