Don Lemon Says 'Yes, Sir' To Cops Because He Wants To 'Stay Alive'

Don Lemon offered a sober reminder on Thursday that, for black men in the U.S., no amount of “respectability” is guaranteed protection from police brutality.

“I am an American … I shouldn’t have to be yes-sirring anybody,” the CNN anchor said on a segment about the police killings of Alton Sterling on Tuesday and Philando Castile on Wednesday. “I’m a grown, you-know-what man … but I do it because I want to stay alive … Now my friends, my white counterparts, don’t do that. They speak to police officers in a way that I would never in a million years do, and that is the reality of it. I do that because I want to stay alive.”

Lemon went on to say that, even with his success and fame, the manner in which he speaks to cops could be a matter of life and death.

“As accomplished as I am, as a man of color on television who [is] recognizable to many people, I have to do that because I don’t want to be shot and I don’t want to be killed,” he said.

But even complete compliance with officer’s demands isn’t always enough, as the account of Philando Castile’s girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, suggests.

“A police officer stopped us for a busted tail light that was not busted,” she said in a Facebook video. “As [Castile] was reaching for his license [in his back pocket], he told the officer he was licensed to carry.” Then, she said, police fired multiple shots, “for no reason.”

Police shootings in the United States disproportionately affect black men. Black men make up only 6 percent of the U.S. population, but a Washington Post report found that 40 percent of unarmed men shot and killed by cops in 2015 were black And while the majority of incidents where police killed people attacking someone or wielding a gun involved white people, “a hugely disproportionate number — 3 in 5 — of those killed after exhibiting less threatening behavior were black or Hispanic,” the outlet wrote.

H/T Mediaite