The recent spotlight on systematic racial profiling and police brutality against Black boys and men has exposed a painful truth long known in the Black community: just about every Black youth and man seems to have a story about being stopped by the police.

In the middle of June, at the Old Bronx Borough Courthouse at East 161st Street and Third Avenue, a large gathering of people came together to hear panelists parse the "New Dynamics in the Bronx Art Scene."

I am a native South Carolinian. Charleston is my maternal ancestral home. My great grandmother was born during slavery. My great grandfather I have been told was a plantation overseer. Never have I been more proud and more ashamed of my dueling ancestral heritages than right now.

When a person objectively combines the history of Emanuel AME Church with Pastor Pinckney's political leanings, it is clear that racism was the main factor in the Charleston church shooting.

The protests for "Ferguson" and Staten Island have not been about single incidents of one black man getting killed by one (white) police officer. They are about institutional racism in the United States, and about excessive use of police force that ends only in its most visible and extreme form.