Trevor Noah wasted no time getting to the point during Monday’s The Daily Show. “Another Monday in the middle of corona and in the middle of protests about police brutality, and yet it’s another Monday of another police brutality incident,” the weary-looking host said. “Another story that has people going, how long? How much? When is it enough?” Noah could have been talking about any number of unarmed black men, women, and non-binary people who have been killed by cops, but in this case, he was referring to Rayshard Brooks, who was fatally shot last Friday in Atlanta.
After going through the details of the incident (Brooks had fallen asleep in his parked car while drunk), Noah said, “He’s broken some law, a law not worth dying for. I think we can all agree on that. The police approach him, and even then, I ask the question: why are armed police dealing with a man who’s sleeping in his car? He posed no threat to anybody… Why, why, why, why, why, why? Why are armed police the first people who have to go and respond to somebody who’s sleeping in their car who is drunk?”
The whole clip above is worth a worth, but the biggest takeaway is this:
“People always say the same thing. They go, ‘Well, you know, if you didn’t do that, then you would still be alive.’ They say this sh*t all the time. ‘If you didn’t do that.’ But the truth is, the ‘ifs’ keep on changing. If you didn’t resist arrest, then you’d still be alive. Or if you didn’t run away from the cops, you’d still be alive. Well, if you didn’t have a toy gun and were 12 years old in the middle of a park, then you would have still been alive. Well, if you weren’t wearing a hoodie, then you would have still been alive. If you didn’t talk back to the cops, you would have been still been alive. If you weren’t sleeping in your bed as a black woman, you would have still been alive. There’s one common thread beyond all the ‘ifs.’ If you weren’t black, maybe you’d still be alive.”
If this is The Daily Show‘s worst legacy, Noah asking the tough questions is the best.