Racism can be seen as the main contrasting pole to diversity in public spaces. A special public space are arts and cultural organization. In a 2022/2023 survey of Hamburg’s arts organization, students of my master class in the discipline of “culture and society” and I, as the principle investigator, asked artists and arts managers about their experience with latent and manifest expressions of everyday and structural racism. We interviewed actors in seven art fields (theater, classical music, film, museums, advanced arts education, governmental agencies and foundations). Sociological theories of racism applied to the arts (e.g. Critical Race Theory, framing, diversity and white space concepts) provide the theoretical framework. The result is a comprehensive overview about different aspects of racism in Hamburg’s art worlds, including ways and means that the interviewed experts suggest to overcoming art world racism. Findings include the suppression of everyday racism, overt policies of diversity programs hiding the existence of everyday racism, the postcolonial discourse as a tool to reveal present racism, and the (lack of) a public awareness of racism as a prerequisite for institutionalizing anti-racist policies as a means for transforming public arts spaces to more diverse urban common places.