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This is Code Switch from NPR. I'm Shireen Marifilmuraji.

And I'm Jean Demby. We're still trying to make sense of last week if that's even possible. Here's a quick recap.

In the space of a few days, videos of two different black men getting shot to death by the police,

Alton Sterling and Baton Rouge Louisiana and Philando Castile and Falcon Heights, Minnesota,

drove thousands of protesters into the streets across the country and at one of the protests in Dallas, this happened.

Michael Johnson apparently used his military training and detailed planning in order to pull off an ambush attack on police officers in Dallas.

After killing five Dallas police officers and injuring seven,

Michael Johnson was himself killed by a robot delivered bomb. Johnson told negotiators he was targeting white cops in retaliation for the deaths of black people at the hands of the police.

On our podcast extra last week, we talked to the Harvard historian, Khalil Javran Muhammad, about how that changed the conversation happening in the media.

He wrote the book, The Condomation of Blackness, Race Crime and the Making of Modern America.

The conversation was about the need to change police culture. It was about putting a stop to excessive use of force so these incidents don't occur over and over again.

I have to say 24 hours later, to me, I feel like the conversation has changed to the condemnation of the killing of the police officers in Dallas.

I'm wondering how do we have both those conversations at the same time and do you think we are having both those conversations at the same time?

So I think we must have both those conversations at the same time so we ought to be clear about what should be happening.

But I also think that there's an imbalance in who speaks in terms of the capacity to understand that the police violence as is felt by African Americans and blacks were generally in America cannot continue.

That's a hard stop.

The problem is that there are significant pockets of the majority population of whites in America who on one hand are ambivalent about whether or not those African Americans and others who have been killed is somehow justified and juries and judges have essentially co-signed on that belief.

Consequently, at the other extreme, we have a heroism attached to the occupation of policing where people who are police officers are wrapped in the cloth of patriotism as making sacrifices on behalf of the nation.

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