Racism doesn't necessarily entail singling a group out explicitly, especially today where we have a trained smell for racism.

If your intent is to single out black people, there are many ways you can target them without spelling out "black people". Specific job categories, specific neighborhoods, specific types of crime (which are hugely lopsided racially), etc etc.

The same can be applied to any race. You can effectively create a law that only targets Asian immigrants without once mentioning the words "Asian immigrant".

In the US race and crime are inexorably linked, and highly politicized. Through a combination of factors and people (acting both maliciously and otherwise), blacks are without a doubt targeted.

Here in NYC we have a rather odious policy of stop, question, and frisk, where the police are empowered to stop anyone they deem suspicious or threatening and search them. It turns out that Blacks and Latinos are search disproportionately often, well beyond their proportional contribution to crime rate. There's nothing in the regulation that spells out that dark-skinned people should be searched more, but everyone in charge knows this is the consequence, and everyone in charge intends this to be the consequence.

Racism is complicated. The fact that you don't have a hooded guy on your lawn burning a cross, screaming "lynch him!", doesn't mean it's not in front of you.

Anecdata on disproportionate searching: I'm a middle-class white guy who's 40. I haven't been pulled over for a "random stop, sir" since I was about 25, and before that I would have been pulled over about a dozen times. The times when I was pulled over, I was a young guy with long hair in a beaten-up car. My mother has never been pulled over. And judging from the general dialogue with friends, this is not an unusual experience. These "random stops" are (almost!) certainly using a different definition of 'random' than the ones we used in statistics class.

I do not agree with the hyperbole of the OP, but there are a disproportionate amount of black people in prison, black people get on average longer sentences for the same crimes, and drugs forms more commonly used by blacks carry longer sentences than the same drug in other forms (crack vs. cocaine). Are black people singled out to be tortured? No. Is the US prison system racist? The evidence points in that direction.

Sorry about the hyperbole. As you probably guessed, I was lightly trolling in order to provoke a response. Whilst we do better than the long-term historic average, our societies are still deeply flawed, whilst we, as individuals (myself included) sit idly by slinging insults from the sidelines.

Were every violation of the law punished with a prison sentence, you would not see disproportionate numbers of black people in prison. The problem is that the law is not uniformly enforced, but it is so broad that eventually any normal person will have broken it.

When the police presence is higher in black neighborhoods, you are going to see more arrests. When the law is so broad that anyone can be arrested, the effect will be magnified. Eventually you get to the situation we are in today, where in some black communities one in four black men has been to prison. This is not merely a measurement error or some kind of mistake; our approach to law and law enforcement right now is disproportionately affecting black people, especially black men.