Thanks for your well-considered and well-written response. I agree that in today's information age anonymity is dead for everybody. My point was that it goes double for African American players and in fact, that anonymity was dead for African American players long before the explosion of the internet simply because we visually stand out.
I am by no means a top player, but I can tell you that my recognition factor has been absolutely HUGE everyplace that I've played in the States. On the first night of my VERY FIRST road trip (in '99) I ran a small package on a player by the name of Tim at Chelsea Billiards in Manhattan, and by the next evening I couldn't make a game with a B player at the Golden Cue in Queens because he had already gotten the wire about "the tall black kid with the glasses." A couple years later I got knocked at a tournament by Frankie Hernandez and another guy who had heard about some results in Puerto Rico. They didn't know many details, but knowing that it was "the tall black kid with the glasses from somewhere in the Caribbean" was enough. Imagine how much more so this would be for an African American player who shoots at pro or high shortstop speed!
A couple years ago, a well-known and respected top player originally from the NY/Connecticut area was sneaked into a local (but lucrative) tournament in St. Thomas under the name 'Hector'. I wasn't there, as I was away from the game at that time, but days later when I got the action report about how the guy played, I was able to tentatively identify him by asking about what his stroke looked like, and eventually he was positively ID'ed by the tattoos on his hands/wrists. Still, I was only able to make an initial guess because I had some knowledge of the East Coast pool scene. Now--imagine how much easier that task of identification would have been if the player had the same tournament history and was Black!
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If you don't do those two things you will be known.
