 Another unarmed black American in Atlanta, Georgia, Rayshard Brooks, was murdered by police officers. So you'd think that police officers would be more cognizant about their actions, especially now that everyone is hyper-focused on them, and this is still happening. So let's talk about anti-black violence that has happened specifically since these protests have started. Rayshard Brooks fell asleep in the drive-thru of a Wendy's and police officers confronted him, and then minutes later he was murdered, shot twice. The gunshots led to organ damage, which ultimately caused him to die. Now I'm going to share this clip from CNN, and this along with the commentary kind of shows you a little bit of what happened, but overall there's a lot more questions than answers once you see this clip. Take a look. The engines running. Look at the tail lights. You can see they knock on the door clearly asleep. Don't go back to sleep. Just pull over there. They ask him to pull over, right? At that point in time they don't know if he's been drinking or what the situation is. Do you have any weapons on you or anything like that? I don't have anything on me. Now this is a critical point right here, and I'll mention it because it's easy to go by it, but they're doing a field sobriety test. Apparently they get a breath of water as well. It came out as a 0.108, I believe, and this is the point in which things change. They try to handcuff them for driving under the influence, and then you can see clearly the struggle takes place, and the taser at that point in time, which by the way the officer had in his hand, must have been using what's called a drive stun, which is a pain compliance technique to get him to bring him under control. And then of course he flees, there's a foot chase, and shortly thereafter now you'll hear the shots fire. But there's one point in this video that I think is critically important, which really then brings into question the actual shooting. And that is, when you look at that tape they ask a critical question. Do you have any weapons? He says no. Can I pat you down? He says okay. So they pat him down. Once you pat him down, now you know he's not in possession of a firearm. So the question is, did they run him or shoot him as he was running away? Like, what happened? Now the coroner ruled this a homicide because the gunshots ultimately are what led to him dying. But I mean, this is the problem. If this is happening, when we're all having a national conversation about police brutality, this shows you how much work we have to do, how much changes we have to make in order to stop anti-black violence. Now the police officer who murdered Ray Shard Brooks was fired, and the second officer who was involved was placed on administrative leave. But that's not good enough. His wife is calling for them to be charged, and I want to play this clip from his cousin at the town hall that they attended, or it wasn't a town hall, it was a press conference, but they spoke out after he was murdered. And this was just, it was gut-wrenching. And I want to play this because, you know, when we hear these stories, they happen so frequently that it's easy to become desensitized and just think, wow, this sucks, this is another black man that was killed by police. But it goes deeper than that, right? This is real pain and suffering that is being caused by an issue that has not been addressed in America. He was always happy. He was always smiling. And you'd have to kill him by one of his family members because he wasn't that type of dude. So to you people that are looking around the world and you have your feelings, before it happened to us, I could only guess at what you felt, but now I understand. Life shouldn't be this complicated. Life shouldn't be where we have to feel some type of way if we see a police or somebody of a different color. I didn't come now here to talk to the media. I came to love all my people. But if you ask how old this young black man was, look at your children when you see them laugh. That innocence, that joy, that pureness of soul. And you had a glimpse of what we lost. You have a glimpse of what it feels like because tomorrow we're going to have to deal with it again. We're going to have to bear him. We're going to have to say we miss you. And if we didn't say we love you enough, we got to apologize to him for not telling him that we loved him that much. Yeah, that was very, very hard to watch. They took a life that is going to be gone forever. He's never going to be able to be with his family again. They're never going to be able to hug him or talk to him ever again. And it's never acceptable for police officers to murder an unarmed black American. But I mean, you just would hope that whenever one is watching as nationwide protests about this very issue have been going on for weeks, they try to do better. But it shows you how broken this system is. And it's not just that they're still murdering unarmed black Americans. They're still incredibly brutal, militarized police officers are absolutely tyrannical in the way they try to shut down mostly peaceful protests. In fact, an Ohio activist named Sarah Grossman died after being tear gassed at a George Floyd protest. And while the official cause of death is unknown, well, her sister speculated that it was due to respiratory issues caused by tear gas, which tells you how serious this chemical weapon is that they use gratuitously. But violence against black Americans and white allies in some instances isn't just something that is done at the hands of police officers. Anti-black violence is a real issue in America. And you think that or you'd hope that we would never go backwards, right? Even if we're not really feeling like we're making progress, we're always moving forward. But what people have to acknowledge is that racism, it didn't just not go away. Racism is able to adapt, right? Racism is able to change to the time. It's malleable. So when chattel savory was abolished, it's not like black people all of a sudden were free. Then we got Jim Crow. Once we did away with Jim Crow, then we got mass incarceration, which functionally acts very similar to Jim Crow in targeting and locking up black Americans and denying them the right to vote, the right to housing and education, effectively legalizing discrimination against anyone with the title felon. So it just keeps changing. And it's like we keep coming back to the same place where we were before. And if you think that we've progressed beyond our darkest days, the truth is we really haven't. And as Sandra E. Garcia of the New York Times reports, the families of two black men who were found hanged from trees in Southern California are asking the authorities to further investigate their deaths. The family of Robert L. Fuller, 24, disputed the authorities' initial pronouncement that he died by suicide. The family of Malcolm Harsh, 38, is worried his death will also be ruled a suicide. Mr. Harsh was found at 7 a.m. on May 31 near a homeless encampment in Victorville, California, where bystanders told the authorities he was living. A woman who identified herself as his girlfriend called 911 to say that others in the encampment had notified her that Mr. Harsh had been found hanging from a tree and cut down. The San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department said in a statement, there were no indications of foul play but the investigation was continuing a spokeswoman for the department said Sunday. Firefighters found bystanders performing CPR on Mr. Harsh when they arrived at the scene according to Sue Jones, the public information officer for the city of Victorville. Firefighters took over and tried to restore Mr. Harsh's heartbeat but they stopped after 20 minutes. Now, in the case of Robert Fuller, the times continues around 50 miles west of Victorville in Palmdale, California, Mr. Fuller's family questioned the authorities' pronouncement that his death was considered a suicide. At a rally for Mr. Fuller on Saturday, Diamond Alexander, his sister, said through tears that the initial resolution on her brother's death did not make sense. Everything that they've been telling us has not been right, she said, according to a video of the rally in Palmdale. We've been hearing one thing, then we hear another and we just want to know the truth. A passerby discovered Mr. Fuller's body hanging from a tree in Ponsetlan Square across from Palmdale City Hall at around 3.39 a.m. on Wednesday according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. Though the investigation was continuing, the authorities noted in their news release that Mr. Fuller tragically committed suicide. Mr. Fuller's autopsy has not been completed, the authorities said. Now, the bodies of those two men were found 10 days and 50 miles apart. They're saying Robert Fuller was a suicide. This is not a coincidence. And on top of that, another black man was found hanging from a tree in Houston and this is happening in 2020. We have got such a long way to go when in 2020 lynching is becoming a prevalent phenomenon again. I mean, this is not something that can just be reformed away. You know, you can't expect real changes that are necessary to be made with some sort of incrementalist approach. The entire system which allows for this, which was built on white supremacy and anti-blackness, it has to be overturned entirely. Otherwise, you know, allow for racism to continue to spread and change when you think it's been rooted out. It hasn't been rooted out. It just, you know, is able to transform, to accommodate times, to make white liberals feel comfortable, make it seem like we've progressed and we're living in a different society now. But that's why it's called white privilege, right? Because you can basically live your life pretending as if this doesn't happen. And so finally there's this moment where people have to take to the streets to say, my life matters. I mean, think about this. In 2018, people did not support the Black Lives Matter movement and all of a sudden support for Black Lives Matter has skyrocketed. The fact that Black Lives Matter was controversial at all. That tells you how prevalent white supremacy is. So this is something that as a society, if we actually want to defeat this, we have to get serious about it. It's not good enough now to just say, I'm not racist, I have a black friend. Sorry, that's not good enough. Rooting out white supremacy requires more than just, you know, sharing a Facebook post. It requires direct action. It requires us tearing down these existing institutions that have white supremacy embedded in them. So I mean, this is just a tragic, sad story. I mean, Robert Fuller is 24 years old, 24 years old. This is a kid. And he was found hanging from a tree. This is so tragic and heartbreaking that I don't know what to say. Face it, head on, force yourself to grapple with uncomfortable truths about how you helped to uphold white supremacy. How we all uphold white supremacy, either wittingly or unwittingly, and just try to change it. But, you know, that's not going to bring back these lives that were lost. Not going to bring back Raichard Brooks or Robert Fuller or anyone who has died because of white supremacy or anti-black violence. It doesn't bring them back. So it's heartbreaking all around. And, you know, I'm just rambling at this point so I'll end the video. But again, this is happening in 2020. History just keeps repeating itself. Either that or not much really changed in the first place.