I used to get bothered all the time on buses -- until one day I learned a trick that for some reason discouraged them. I would pull out a copy of Scientific American. Maybe they thought I was going to hit them with it (though other magazines didn't have this effect), or even scarier, talk science at them.
In fact, in high school I started carrying one around just for this use!
Danny Kahneman & Anne Treisman were at Berkeley when I was there as a grad student and were considering moving to Princeton. One of DK's grad students knew he liked M&Ms & kept putting bags of them in his mailbox so he would have "fast" fond feelings about Berkeley and not leave. (But he did.)
"If being 'woke' means actively considering the available data and analyses and responding to them by considering the social contexts, histories, and processes that facilitated and created them, then being woke is just doing good science" https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adj7675
Please read the whole eloquent & powerful thing. The evidence of systemic racism across science is overwhelming, and denying it (or blaming the people who try to fix it) is anti-scientific and statistically impossible. Understand the problems and help correct them, or get out of the way.
Update: we checked with the researcher and are pretty sure this photo (taken and labeled before the species was split into two) is the cute one. (But the ugly one is also cute.)