Via HuffPo:

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.”