The racism of this film is as mysteriously invisible as it is systematic and vicious. It is a mixture of old-fashioned racism that has a long history in U.S. movies with racism of a new style, a particularly 1970s shade.
Rocky scolds the bartender not for his racism, but for questioning the champ, and walks off.
that scene, which took place in the original 1976 film, might have simply been a poignant acknowledgment of a persistent wound in the ego of certain white sports fans: the absence of a white American heavyweight boxing champion. Instead that wound became the fuel for the Rocky series, which sees a black boxer humbled by a white challenger in every single movie.
