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Last Sunday, before the game between the Cleveland Browns and the Cincinnati Bengals, Cleveland wide receiver Andrew Hawkins walked out on the pregame field wearing a T-shirt to challenge our nation's conscience.

The front of his shirt read, "Justice for Tamir Rice and John Crawford III." On the back: "The real Battle of Ohio."

I wish I could assume that everyone knows about Tamir Rice and John Crawford by now and I could just get to what happened next, but I know that's not true. So much recent coverage of our nation's nightmare has focused, rightfully so, on two other unarmed black males who died in police shootings, one in Ferguson, Missouri, and one in Staten Island, New York.

We've got a deep brew of racial tension roiling in Ohio, too. I was born and raised here and call Cleveland home. This is personal — and in the worst way, because here we are blinking fast and trying to explain how we didn't stop the trouble we could see coming.