Derix Dugan, 33, of Baton Rouge, La., who works at a warehouse painting cylinders, said he was leaning toward voting for Mr. Trump because he thought he was a good businessman. “I would definitely say he is a racist, but that wouldn’t stop my vote because I don’t see us black people going back to slavery or some ridiculousness,” Mr. Dugan said.

Symone D. Sanders, a former national press secretary for Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont who is trying to galvanize millennials to vote, said young black voters were not necessarily frightened by Mr. Trump’s talk.

“There are young people who will tell you we know people like Donald Trump, we go to work with people like Donald Trump, we go to school with people like Donald Trump every day, so we are not scared of Donald Trump,” Ms. Sanders said.

Indeed, regardless of whom they are supporting, black voters said they saw Mr. Trump’s comments as fitting on a spectrum with their own life experiences, and Mr. Trump as just one more unenlightened authority figure they might have to deal with.

“There were things I let people say to me. They’d say, ‘Dominique, you’re one of the good black folks.’” said Dominique Morgan, 34, of Omaha, who supports Mrs. Clinton and leads a gay rights group in Nebraska.

He would stay quiet, he said, when former colleagues would tease him, for fear of losing his position. “They would set out watermelon and say, ‘You know you want some of that watermelon,’” he said. “Just things that they would say that I would have to accept because I knew if I corrected them, pointed out the things that were said, I would be vilified.”