Hi Richard, good to have you in SF! Expat here, living in SF for the past 2 years. Throwaway, because America.

There are three major things entangled here:

> I thought it was normal to feel apologetic that I may have looked or seemed “threatening” to passersby, if I thought I invoked any feelings of fear or discomfort in my presence.

* Personal observation: people who move to SF, for reasons that I speculate to include _baseline niceness_, weather, and lack of generally bad things happening to them become after a while really socially, self-conscious, and apologetic. This spikes, but never really goes away, until you go somewhere else, and get hit by a stranger.

Except...

* There is a massive homeless problem in SF, compounded with mental illnesses, and visible behavioristic problems. Speaking strictly of personal observation, a homeless of a race do not hit one of the same race, which means all those white dudes? yeah, they've been shouted, and crapped at by persons of color.

* People are also, psychologically, can't reliably distinguish people of other races prior to knowing a few members of them personally for an extended period of time. This is not uniformally distributed. People who care about you matter. The average Joe down the street does not.

This checks the "why" on racism, and judgement. Which leads us straight into...

* There is a structural incentive problem in how information ecologies replicate themselves, and feeds to action under conditions of visible racial differences, that is best summed up here: https://i.imgur.com/yjfiYG2.png . Essentially, ideas which cause anger, and anxiety have a higher delta-replication rate, than every other piece of information any human being can imagine up, ever.

* This article of yours? Yeah, it's essentially tapping into the same reaction by referencing it (as evidenced by the number of comments here). This is counter to your own verbalised preferences.
The two most notable summaries of this effect can be found at:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc This Video Will Make You Angry
* http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/

For this reason, here is what you can, actually, do about stuff:

* Get off the toxoplasma. Unfollow people who replicate stuff, which makes you feel compelled to react to hatred.

* IF you read something, which makes you feel hatred, ALWAYS, always check the source. In case of law, read the original statement made by court. In case of newsreports, why are you watching newsreports? see 1. Not enough? open up newsreports 5 years ago, and determine how relevant is whatever they are writing to the now-you.

* BE THE SYSTEMATIC CHANGE YOU WANT TO SEE IN THE WORLD. Does writing " I felt like I had to say something. Anything" solves problems directly? No. Does it suddenly induces fear into >20K people? Heck yes. Does it also generates you traffic? Yes. (you see the incentive problem here?) But is it quality traffic, that will convert? Only to other fear-inducing things. Is this the sort of system you want to increase? If not, can you take that ~40 minutes of writing an article into planning? If not, can you code, and donate whatever you've made in that same 40 minutes? Both hacks at the joints of the problem, instead of escalating it.