It played in some theaters when it was new , but it didn’t get real distribution. It was on TV in the U.S. before the 1991 release though. I was talking about it not getting released when it was new. 1991 was basically the “real” American Theatrical release. It was shown on TV, but there was no American home media release until the Criterion DVD.

Chien Blanc appears to have some sort of streaming distribution

https://tv.apple.com/ca/movie/chien-blanc/umc.cmc.2a5aflusd18y6oz7ct4oq5gyy

White Dog was completed in late 1981 and previewed in Seattle early the next year. Then the studio sat on it. A Variety critic saw the movie on the Paramount lot (on Juneteenth, no less) and, calling it “a ‘problem pic’ with punch,” wrote a generally positive review. The only release that followed was in France. In mid-November, Paramount “tested” White Dog by opening it for one week in five Detroit theaters. There was little response, and apart from a few, little-seen cable TV showings, the movie was shelved in the United States until New York’s Film Forum opened it during the summer of 1991.

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/847-white-dog-sam-fuller-unmuzzled?srsltid=AfmBOoo524ZPdUNEmkWrZyjxXSXassyIdb-Y-5IvG0bySNvrr-EixEm-

No movie is ahead of its time, just ahead of cultural gatekeepers. Sam Fuller knew this better than any other filmmaker after his 1982 White Dog waited almost ten years to get a theatrical release. Despite Fuller’s career-long penchant for giving controversial subjects a punchy, exploitation-movie spin, White Dog (his twenty-first feature) was the first to suffer outright suppression. Due to the film’s impudent premise, in which a Los Angeles actress, Julie Sawyer (Kristy McNichol), innocently discovers a guard dog trained to attack African Americans—a metaphor for socially indoctrinated racism—Fuller met with extraordinary industry and public resistance. His deliberate provocation, indicting social naïveté as well as film industry routine, worked too well. The film couldn’t slip under Paramount’s radar like earlier Fuller outrages, since B-movie exhibition no longer existed by the 1980s. Instead, White Dog was dumped in a television graveyard, before it was eventually released to theaters as a specialty art movie in 1991.

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/848-white-dog-fuller-vs-racism?srsltid=AfmBOoomyWDkp-ZJIAE2Do5IG5O3RJ-uyc1MnC0HkgfvJp2gKxiDsP2w

The best American movie released so far this year [1991], made by the greatest living American filmmaker, was actually made ten years ago, and so far its venues have been restricted to single theaters in New York and Chicago; but late is a lot better than never, and two cities are certainly better than none. Why it’s taken a decade for Samuel Fuller’s White Dog to reach us is not an easy question to answer; it was shown widely in Europe in the early 80s and well-received critically. For the past few years it has turned up sporadically on cable, principally the Lifetime channel, but it has never come out here on video. White Dog started out as an article by Romain Gary published in Life magazine, and was later expanded into a book. The accounts I’ve read describe the book as autobiographical, mainly about the author’s relationship with Jean Seberg. Gary and Seberg were living in Los Angeles when they found a “white” dog who had been trained to attack blacks; they tried without success to have the dog retrained, and eventually had to kill it. Gary’s book also deals with Seberg’s involvement with the Black Panthers and the FBI’s subsequent persecution of her, which eventually led to her suicide; Gary himself committed suicide some time afterward, and Fuller’s film is dedicated to him.

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/848-white-dog-fuller-vs-racism?srsltid=AfmBOoomyWDkp-ZJIAE2Do5IG5O3RJ-uyc1MnC0HkgfvJp2gKxiDsP2w

Interesting that this was suppressed when Pickup on South Street, which J. Edgar Hoover personally objected to, wasn’t. The Steel Helmet also drew government protest, but it was allowed to play. It resulted in them sending a military advisor to oversee Fixed Bayonets! and make sure that nothing objectionable ended up in it, but I think Fuller just wrote a script for that one that he was happy with but that he knew wouldn’t cause problems, so it wasn’t real censorship. Fuller befriended his chaperone, Medal of Honor recipient Raymond Harvey
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Harvey
and worked with him again on Verboten! Verboten! has a bunch of genuine and genuinely horrifying holocaust footage in it and it somehow played in theater in 1959.