These are all comments I have had said to me from non-Black people when I wasn’t yelling, I felt pretty calm, and I wasn’t upset. When I was young, these questions came as a surprise. I didn’t understand how my own perception of myself could be so different from a person in the same space as me. It was alarming to think that I was unintentionally making people uncomfortable with my communication style. As I got older, that surprise turned to anger when I realized that it wasn’t my behavior, but their own assumptions about my Blackness, that were influencing their reactions to me. If you’ve been watching this season of The Bachelorette , you know that this bias is being heavily implied with Lee.