I am a Black male from the southeastern US, and I believe I may understand where you're coming from (if anyone is still looking at this thread. I know it's old AF).
I have a lot of views and mannerisms that have caused me to feel like an anomaly my whole life. It definitely contributes to the reason I want to "catch the bus."
I think that a lot of Black communities such as Black churches and social groups can be very insulative against feelings of isolation...unless you're an outsider within those communities, in which case being Black, in my opinion, begins to have the opposite effect and it becomes really easy to snowball into isolation if you can't find a place in the communities you're supposed to be able to fit into most.
I grew up most of my childhood to adolescence bussing from my predominantly Black neighborhood to magnet schools in my area, around mostly upper to upper-middle class White and Asian kids. The way I speak has very much been shaped by the people I spent those years around. That brings us to Strike One - the way I sound is constantly getting me comments of "so where are you from?" and all kinds of probing questions to try to uncover if the way I speak is real or just an impression.
It constantly makes me feel like a freak when people ask those kinds of questions and sometimes I want to change the way I speak to get comments like that less, but then I WOULD be doing an impression, and that just feels forced and insulting to both myself and anyone I'm doing that around.
Strike Two: I'm gay and fairly gender non-conforming, although I tend to do my best to not really be...clocked as effeminate in public. People who don't understand want to tell you "just be yourself" and shit like that, but that just doesn't really fly around here, where I live currently, unless you really have tough skin, which I don't.
I really...really don't. In fact, I have an anxiety disorder, which is actually the biggest reason I'm on this forum.
I can try to ignore the way people will, for example, talk about me within earshot like I can't even hear them, or make subtle comments about how different I seem from most other (Black) men, but my brain doesn't really work that way. I try to block things out and it usually just results in it getting even more trapped in a loop in my thoughts.
Strike Three: I'm personally not religious, and actually kind of averse to organized religion because of the psychological torment Christianity caused me growing up, so, personally, the one place at the center of the Black community where everyone is supposed to be able to go and feel a sense of belonging...doesn't really work for me.
I could go to churches just for the sake of social connection, I guess, but even that would require a lot of nodding and smiling and doublespeak to pretend like I belong.
I've been considering trying out a Unitarian church or some other progressive church near where I live, but I always just procrastinate every Sunday.
A lot of factors have set me up to be pretty out of place in the places that I'm supposed to belong most, but it's not like I can just ignore my race entirely, as much as maybe well-meaning non-Black people may want to suggest you should. I see my race (and physical gender), and everyone I meet sees my race (and gender), too, and it does change the ways people will potentially interact with me, beyond just the potential for negative discrimination. Especially since I live in the South, in a predominantly Black area.
No matter where I go, people will filter their experience of me first through my appearance, just like for anyone else. There are ways people project their expectations of who you are - what you're gonna think, how you're gonna act - on you based, on their learned perceptual biases, filtering into their first impressions, and then expanding from that.
Depending on how open-minded each individual person is, you might find people that will project less obnoxious shit on you than others, but I can always tell that people treat me differently than they would if I were a Black woman, or a White man, or something else, and I often feel pretty trapped in the norms that I constantly have projected onto me from other people I meet on a daily basis. They're not necessarily bad norms, but they're the norms most people have internalized and expect others around them to follow.
Doesn't help that I've recently moved from a fairly progressive, cosmopolitan, mid-size city...into a town in the middle of the country, to be with my current partner. So, I hate to say it, but people around here tend to be a few degrees more narrow-minded in general than where I come from.
So, yeah, very long post short, I can relate. I think it would be very interesting to see more data collected on the occurrence of suicidality in African-Americans as you go up the scale on factors like education level, demographic makeup of a person's place of origin, sexuality, gender identity, religion and so forth. I think there are a lot more people who are Black and feel pretty isolated than studies tend to focus on.
Even scientific research can be biased, based on what researchers, themselves, believe they've perceived in their own experiences and, thus, tend to look out for more in their studies. I think Black experiences like mine may be heavily overlooked currently.
