An image from a news story has stuck in my mind: white men openly carrying their firearms around the streets of Ferguson, seeing themselves as a volunteer militia protecting the city from looters and villains.
I imagined myself in their shoes; imagined how I would be seen. I compared that image to Michael Brown. The question of policing reframed in my mind. The world turned upside down.
I remembered the Metallica and Guns-n-Roses concert in Denver in 1992. Body Count opened the show. For their final song they performed the controversial song, Cop Killer. wikipedia 
Ice-T tried to get the Mile High Stadium crowd to chant along with the lyric "fuck the police." I remember feeling confused, not understanding why the band were so angry at the police. Then I noticed one of my friends being equally angry, but angry at Ice-T, not the police.
He wasn't alone. The stadium wasn't full yet, but some among the crowd boo'd the song. A stadium full of mostly suburban white kids, and among them mostly young men, there wasn't a lot of common ground between the band's experience with the police and the crowd's.
It was protests of the killing of Michael Brown that helped me understand Ice-T's anger at the police. I could have walked around Ferguson, MO amid the protest and unrest, and I could openly carry a firearm, and even sing Cop Killer at the top of my lungs. I would be seen as exercising my First and Second Amendment Rights. But if Ice-T showed up and sang his own song, even without a firearm, he would almost certainly be shot and killed. And he would be seen as inciting violence.
As a white man, I get to enjoy The Bill of Rights. As a black man, he does not. It's like we don't live under the same Constitution. The de facto truth is there is no equal protection under the law.