My first job in media was as a television producer. I was 28 years old, eager and brimming with ideas, some of which I’m sure were good and others of which I’m sure were not. Not long after starting the job, I asked to produce a segment with a well-known black actor whose work I had long followed. As the only black producer there, I knew from experience that when walking into an entirely white environment, it always felt good to be greeted by another brown face.

My white male coworker, who produced a lot of the entertainment segments and clearly wanted to meet this actor himself, said to me, in front of the entire staff: “Just because you’re black doesn’t mean you get to produce all the black guests.”

This producer had a point: He may have known just as much about film and this man's career as I did, and being black doesn't necessarily make me better qualified to do a segment about a black person. But his response was so hostile and pointed that there was no doubting his intentions: He was making clear that he wasn't afraid to mention my race aloud, lest I thought it was my personal ace in the hole. His assumption seemed to be that I’d use my race as a cudgel to get good assignments. His strategy, in turn, was to use it as a cudgel right back.

That incident over 15 years ago wasn’t an outlier. It was an initiation into a career fraught with similar experiences. And now I've had enough—I'm quitting the mainstream media.

It’s a strange and incredibly demoralizing time to be a black person in American media. The words “racist and “racism” have cynically become clickbait, all while various newsrooms are claiming that they want to hire more writers and reporters and editors of color, but don’t. What it feels like you are hearing is: We’re not really trying to diversify our newsrooms, because we don’t actually have to.