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A recent video posted to YouTube by Willie Upchuck captures the same incident resulting in two distinctively different responses from police. A White gentleman is politely questioned by police, while a Black man is harshly told to get on the ground at gunpoint.

On Wednesday, Roland Martin and the NewsOne Now Straight Talk panel discussed the aforementioned video of the two men legally carrying a weapon in an open carry state.

NewsOne Now panelist Paris Dennard recounted the drastically different responses saying, “What you saw was a classic example of how Black people are portrayed in this country.”

“When you have a reinforced stereotype that Black people are — Black men especially – are scary, are threatening, and you saw how they describe Black men in these instances — when you have that, fear takes over and that goes back to my point about training these officers on how you deal with and what is your perception of Black men.

Maya Rockeymoore summed it up as “explicit and implicit bias.”

“The condition of having Black skin means criminality to certain people that are not able to discern or use their police investigative skills or anything like that — they see Black skin and they see criminality and therefore a threat and that means we have something fundamentally wrong in the psyche, particularly of our nation, but certainly of police officers that hold this view.”

Rockeymoore added, “If you have this view, you should not be a police officer.”

Watch Martin, Dennard, Rockeymoore, President and CEO of Global Policy Solutions, and Communications Strategist Michelle Hudgins discuss the open carry video experiment in the clip above.

Watch the entire open carry video experiment below.

Be sure to watch “NewsOne Now” with Roland Martin, weekdays at 9 a.m. EST on TV One.

Subscribe to the “NewsOne Now” Audio Podcast on iTunes.

SEE ALSO: Media Bias And The Alleged “Credible Threat” Of Gangs Retaliating Against Police In Baltimore

White Man & Black Man Carry AR-15 Rifles In Open Carry Video Experiment  was originally published on newsone.com

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