Previously on what next?

They had my children raise their hands like they were criminals as well.

Something happened the second night and I wish I could remember exactly what it was.

That was the worst night of all of them, right?

Mm-hmm. Sure was.

You never know what you're going to end up remembering in life, and I'll never forget her.

To really understand what happened in Ferguson in 2014, it helps to wind the tape back past the day that Michael Brown was killed.

In the summer of 2014, there were various episodes of black men being killed by the police under circumstances that were either clearly unjustified

or which were unjustified based on the way we first heard about them.

John McWhorter was watching all these incidents play out.

John's Black.

He's a writer, and he teaches at Columbia University.

Did it feel a particular way to sort of see these stories come out? Because the details were really...

The details were shocking. You had a man in a Walmart with a BB gun, gun down by police.

The police officers are here. They're on the scene.

All right. You've had any shots fired. You're starting here going. You're killed for, you know, holding up a toy. You had Eric Garner. Yeah, Eric Garner is, you know, basically pleading for his life. I can't breathe. I can't breathe. I can't breathe. I can't breathe. I can't breathe. and these sorts of things are not happening once every five years.

It was almost numbing.

And what was interesting about it was that finally white America could see what ails a lot of black America.

I think a lot of very well-intentioned whites look at the race debate, and they think,

why are black people still so upset? What's the issue? And a great deal of the issue has been the cops.

In Ferguson, this realization was reinforced by how the police responded in the days after the shooting,

doubling down on strong-arm tactics, wearing body armor, using tear gas.

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