This is kind of interesting and may explain why many do not understand blacks or really think in terms of modern race (skin color).
Personally, I don't see myself as white. That means next to nothing to me. I'm German and Irish, with a bit of Scotch. And, historically, prior to modern scientific classifications, those were once seen as races. Race has a blurb on this:
Drawing on sources from classical antiquity and upon their own internal interactions – for example, the hostility between the English and Irish powerfully influenced early European thinking about the differences between people[41] – Europeans began to sort themselves and others into groups based on physical appearance, and to attribute to individuals belonging to these groups behaviors and capacities which were claimed to be deeply ingrained. A set of folk beliefs took hold that linked inherited physical differences between groups to inherited intellectual, behavioral, and moral qualities.[42] Similar ideas can be found in other cultures,[43] for example in China, where a concept often translated as "race" was associated with supposed common descent from the Yellow Emperor, and used to stress the unity of ethnic groups in China. Brutal conflicts between ethnic groups have existed throughout history and across the world.[44]
OK, so to the interesting and explanatory article: How Black Americans View Their Racial Identity:
Or maybe that's an "African American studies" view of things that aren't that way at all, that aren't at all about whiteness, but just how other "races" like the Germans, the Irish, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Cubans, the Mexicans view themselves....This heightened sense of black identity does not appear to be a particularly recent phenomenon — or one that was inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, which began to emerge in 2013. In 2012, about 70 percent of black Americans said that being black was either extremely or very important to their identity, about the same proportion as in 2016, according to surveys conducted as part of the American National Election Studies. In both years, black Americans expressed much greater ties to their identity than white or Hispanic Americans did.4
Part of the story here is about ethnic and racial groups other than black Americans — why aren’t an overwhelming majority of white, Hispanic or Asian Americans saying that their race or ethnicity is very important to their personal identities? This is not a simple question, and we won’t try to unpack it all here. Penn State political science and African American studies professor Candis Watts Smith, who has written extensively about identity, said that “Asian” and “Hispanic” aren’t really the identities that some people who fall under these groups associate themselves with. Hispanic Americans, she argued, might think of themselves as Cuban or Mexican but not embrace the broader Latino or Hispanic labels. Similarly, some Americans of Chinese or Japanese ancestry might not describe themselves as Asian or feel much attachment to that identity. White Americans, Smith said, tend not to think of themselves racially, she said, because “whiteness is viewed as normal by white people.”...