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Oh, that changes the meaning of the sentence significantly.

It does.

Fwiw, Alex Haley was also black, so he was perhaps asking from a shared perspective.

And "Black" was a pejorative.

Steven King used this in "Dark Tower" to show that members of ka-tet were from different times

I'm aware of the context and took no offense when I read it; I asterisked it for 2023.

For what it's worth, the asterix is confusing. Your comment gave me a wildly different (apparently incorrect) impression.