- As an African-American male growing up here in the States, my parents thought that I would be sheltered from a lot of this stuff being up here in the Northeast where things are more liberal, more progressive.

And yet you never, you can't escape it.

It's always there.

There's a specter of prejudice, of discrimination, wherever you go.

And some places are better than others but, to have experienced what I've experienced in my life, to know people like me who've experienced the same thing and to watch things not change, those conversations not being heard the way they are now.

To see that happen, for a great deal of the time you think.

And this is the conversation in living rooms in African-American families all the time, in bedrooms, in backyards.

It's, "Well nothing's ever gonna change.

Things aren't gonna get better.

This is what we gotta deal with."

Or, "Things do change.

It's incremental.

It's slow.

It'll get there one day, but we're never really gonna get over that mountain that Dr. King talked about, getting to the top of that mountain."

And, to see something like this happen, it may seem trite, but it's a quantum leap from where, if you had asked me five years ago.

Do you think we'd get a verdict like that, on a case like this?

I would have said, "There's no way, he'll get acquitted and whatever."

But, I think social media and technology have helped change that.