I'm not Black, but I don't think I need to be in order to answer your question. I do my best software engineering when I'm undistracted. If I've recently been

I'm not Black, but I don't think I need to be in order to answer your question. I do my best software engineering when I'm undistracted. If I've recently been treated unfairly, that's a distraction. Anything that reminds me of the unfair incident is a distraction. If I were Black and experienced a racial incident where the words "master" or "slave" were involved, I can imagine those words reminding me of the incident and making it hard for me to work. Maybe I'd be able to compartmentalize by context; maybe I wouldn't. I think this is analogous to bug chains leading to vulnerabilities. A bug by itself might not be a vulnerability, but it's worth fixing because it might be combined with other bugs in a way that's a vulnerability. Similarly, small issues can combine to become bigger issues.