You wrote:

It’s also the case that my race is so deeply woven into everything I do that I don’t actively think about it anymore.

This is the part of your piece that impacted me the most, even though it is something I think about frequently regarding the black experience.

As an person of Indian origin raised in Canada, and working in technology, I do not find this to be the case for myself. My race/ethnicity has very little to do with anything. There is not much really notable about it.

Yet that feeling seems to be very common among black people I’ve known or read about (like this essay and others like it).

For a long time I had questions: Do black people make too much of a big deal about being black? Or maybe the liberal media overly encourages it (and a critical-thinking-challenged public blindly consumes it)?

However since my consciousness of this topic was raised, the more I read about the 400-year black experience in America, the more fresh horrors I keep encountering. The barbarism seems bottomless. Many of the most deeply disturbing things don’t even involve slavery or lynching. For example, at a ceremony honouring Jesse Owens at the Waldorf Astoria, his mother being asked to use the service elevator. Little black girls not being allowed to take ballet lessons. Etc. I find that kind of racism by “civilized” people to be every bit as upsetting than say racial violence by some knuckle-dragging semi-literate gas station attendant down South. And it sounds like there were unlimited quantities of both in America.

After so many generations of such otherworldly treatment, I am now thinking it is in fact justified for black people to have this indelible feeling of “blackness”. I mean, how can they not?

Yet while it is understandable I just can’t process it in any way that makes sense to me. I desperately want you to be just a tech guy, not a “black tech guy”. It is such an unfair burden placed on a person, to have to represent an entire race. White people don’t have it, I don’t have it. I wonder what it will take for that day to come.