Minorities are the hardest hit because, as a group, they are more likely to work the kinds of jobs most white people can avoid but the country can't function without, they're barely living on those wages, those jobs usually don't offer paid time off in appreciable amounts.

Race does matter. First of all African American culture has a unique, rich, and varied history in this country that barely gets acknowledged except as "they were slaves" and "Jim Crow", basically how it was defined by white culture and history. Asian Americans built our railroads, my wife's family was displaced from their homeland by our actions in Vietnam. Hispanic Americans originally settled the west and were crucial to Texas's war of independence from Mexico, among many other things. Obviously there's way more to this than could fit to a reddit post.

On a much more negative level it matters because it literally defines where you go to school, especially in New York. New York City has some of the most racially segregated schools in the country and that absolutely involves a huge funding deficit for minority-majority schools. Housing also falls along lines that are often both class and race based, and guess how strictly housing regulations are enforced in poor neighborhoods? Many of these houses use pipes built when lead was a common soldering agent, their walls painted with lead paint.

So if you are Black or Hispanic, you are more likely to have grown up in a house with lead in the walls and water, making you more likely to be developmentally and emotionally delayed, exacerbated by underfunded schools with big class sizes and little availability for support services. If you are gifted you are about a quarter as likely as a kid in a white district to get into any sort of a gifted and talented program.

Then there are the outright examples of discrimination. On top of all that, it is just about certain that multiple times in your life people you've never met will yell slurs at you. Elected officials will glorify symbols of their race's oppression of yours. Policies will be pushed that assume you are less an American because your parents weren't born here and people you've never met will scream at you to get out of the only country you've ever lived in.

I know this post is making assumptions about you and your friends and I am saying this more as a general statent than directed at you specifically, but If you ever truly believe race doesn't matter then you have the privlege of living in a bubble.