This sums it up perfectly. So many times I am asked what I think of all this as a black person in tech. I don't think anything of it. It simply is how things are. You can either live with that chip on your shoulder, or learn the skills to navigate life with the cards you were dealt and deal with it. There is no other option, and how you feel about it is irrelevant. Some people are born with physical disabilities or mental handicaps. It's no different. Should we live in a world without racism? Of course. But we should also live in a world without war, poverty, and disease as well. It's a part of the human condition.
I'm not black, but I always frame it this way when I think about the problem: if I had children, what message would I want to convey to them to maximize their chances of success in life?
Life is difficult, there are lots of injustices in the world, but there is zero sense obsessing over that which you cannot control. Focus on being the best human possible and the world will take notice.
If people can, good for them. If not, I don't feel in any position to tell people that obsessing over injustices that I'm not experiencing makes zero sense.
A Black person can't just crucify themselves over injustice in the world and thus fail to get all their own mission done and expect it to accomplish what was desired. Going back to mathematics, my own original world, I saw Black mathematicians being overloaded with mentorship responsibilities and education responsibilities and speaking responsibilities and recruitment responsibilities and and and, and oh yeah the research they're actually evaluated on! So this great mathematician spends all her time in the committees and recruitment and teaching classes and organizing outreach... and then fails to get tenure because her publication record isn't strong enough (only three papers! and with collaborators, so she probably didn't do the work, right, she's doing so much else how could she have had the time?), and then has to look for another job. While the white guy who didn't do any education or recruitment or outreach published five crappy papers (with collaborators) and got tenure.
That Black mathematician's responsibility is her own survival and success. Her own survival and success is more valuable to the world than teaching freshman calculus this year, because if she gets tenure, she can teach freshman calc another year. "I don't live in a world where fairness is an option," is a fair statement. If she tries to change it alone, she fails and burns out. What was the benefit of that? What was the gain?
So the rest of us (for any given value of 'us') ought to step up.
The strategy so far was to publicly and politically fight (which is good) but after each protest the individuals are back to their own struggles with little to no help or care from other black people (again as a community). If everyone cares only for it's own issues it won't work. Our role is to educate young black people. Tell them how the world is but also show them that they have a functional place in it and that they can start to build it from elementary school!