As someone who is unable to mark herself, because she doesn't belong anywhere, I can say with certainty that (personally) it does have negative repercussions to not be able to say you belong to a group, to say, I am THIS. On the one hand it is liberating, but on the other it alienates severely and not even your family understands, let alone your friends, because they are all marked and you're the only one that's not. So I don't see so much that there are unmarked (white) and marked (ethnic) people, because to me white is marked. There's unmarked (me, bad, alone) and marked (everyone else, good, group).

I don't think the human understanding is fundamentally individual either.