I was editing this week’s newsletter, which had the usual 2-3 bits of analysis and a sidebar links, when my wife told me that another black man was killed by police today. A day after police killed a black man in Baton Rouge. Suddenly, trying to reason about what’s up with Facebook felt so much less important. So this week, I just have this. I don’t know if it fits in a newsletter about tech and media but for me, writing is how I think, it’s how I try to make sense of the world. I can’t make sense of any of this but I’ll try to write anyway.

A black man was killed by white police officers, this time in Baton Rouge Louisiana. Two officers had him pinned before shooting him while he was on the ground. He was selling CDs, almost certainly in violation of some ordinance, but nowhere near the scale of what tech companies get away with every day. The police officers had body cameras but both of them were deactivated during the confrontation with and eventual murder of Alton Sterling.

A day later, another black man was killed by police outside of St. Paul, Minnesota. Philando Castile was pulled over, with his girlfriend and her four-year-old daughter in the car, for a broken tail light. He was shot four times when he tried to get his driver’s license.

That we have any record of these tragedies is one of the true revolutions of the day — ubiquitous high definition, internet connected video cameras via everyone’s mobile phones. (Related: What to say to the police when they tell you to stop filming.)

From The Washington Post:

“The video of the shooting was captured by chance by members of Stop the Killing Inc, a local anti-violence activist group and documentary team that listens to police scanners and shows up at the scene of potentially violent confrontations to take video. A second video that emerged later in Wednesday appeared to show one of the police officers removing a gun from Sterling’s pocket after he was shot.

Stop the Killing Inc. was founded by Arthur ‘Silky Slim’ Reed, a former gang leader turned anti-violence activist, who said that two members of his organization drove to the scene of Sterling’s shooting after hearing police scanner traffic about a potentially violent disturbance. Reed declined to say which member of his team shot the video, or confirm if he himself was present for its recording, citing safety concerns.

Reed said his group didn’t immediately release the video because it wanted to see how transparent police would be about the shooting.”

I feel a complete sense of paralysis in these moments — which I realize is just such an incredibly privileged thing to say. I watch these videos and read these stories and never know what to do or what to say only that I feel broken and disconnected. None of us escape this violence, even those of us born with the privilege of never having to face it directly.

One thing I can not deny, one thing none of us should be able to deny in the face of such overwhelming evidence, is how police treat people of color in this country.

I will admit it took the events of Ferguson, the deaths of Freddie Gray and Tamir Rice and Eric Garner and Sandra Bland and countless others for me to personally realize how consuming this problem is, how pernicious and pervasive white supremacy is, and how much I benefit from this system every single day. This is a problem — no, a cancer that eats at our society — that black and brown communities have been trying to tell us about for literally decades. Rodney King was not an isolated incident. Amadou Diallo was not an isolated incident. Police brutality is as real in 2016 as it has ever been.

I do know one thing. The people who bear witness to these tragedies, who are able to hold a shaky cellphone camera in the face of police officers murdering someone in front of them, are heroes in ways I can not even comprehend.