To the needy master: On Black public thought under White supremacy.

As long as the brutality exists in the shadows, and does not disrupt their day to day - they're fine with it. Because to exist in the world that these forms of oppression have built means to live in a world of comfort, and not having to have your identity disrupted, not having to have your material wealth disrupted. And so the appeal to sympathy is not going to work if you're not undercutting power.

Writer Mychal Denzel Smith explores the burden of presenting the Black experience to a White audience - from the demands of media gatekeepers to constantly explain and justify the basic humanity of Black people, to the active passivity of a White society uninterested in examining the historical or present consequences of their status atop American society.

Mychal wrote the article The Gatekeepers: On the Burden of the Black Public Intellectual for Harper's.