

Yeah, a lot of people didn’t make it to the point of dieing of old age, but it wasn’t rare to see 80yo or even 90yo people.
People seem to think that a life expectancy of e.g. 45 years means that most people died at age 45, and that’s just plain wrong.
The discrimination is real, no question about it.
The thing that’s not “real” is that this is solely about skin color.
In the USA race is defined quite closely along the lines of “continent of origin” (or of origin of the ancestors), because the USA Is a country with worldwide immigration. Thus the groups are larger.
Compare that to Europe, where world-wide immigration only started picking up in the last two decades. Here people can discriminate just as easily within what would be considered the same race in the USA. For example, many people in Austria really hate Serbians. Many Serbians really hate Croatians. Many Croatians really hate Albanians and so on.
This is also visible in the meaning of the words “race” and “racism”. Before WW2 “race” was commonly used in Europe as in the “German race”, the “English race” or the “French race”. And while the term “race” fell out of use after WW2 and was subsequently re-imported from the USA with the USA-meaning, the original meaning lives on in the meaning of “racism”.
For example, if a French man hates all the English, this wouldn’t be racism in the USA (since both are from the same “race” by US-definition), it would totally be racism in most European languages.
The “social construct” part of the discrimination is along which lines discrimination happens. There’s nothing “natural” about discriminating along the lines of US-race. Discrimination can happen just as viciously along any other line.
And that certainly doesn’t mean people don’t suffer from it. But it also means that making sure everyone is as equal as possible (e.g. by eliminating US-race) won’t stop discrimination.