The killing of George Floyd has caused massive civil unrest in the past two weeks and the Inside The NBA crew was no exception. Shaquille O'Neal, Charles Barkley, and Kenny Smith gave some heartfelt thoughts of what have been days of heartache seeing how this nation arduously battles racism and police brutality.

Via SportsNet Canada:

“It’s stressful being a black man,” said Barkley. “You know, I’m sitting at my house a month ago and a young black man is out for a jog and he gets shot and killed — like white folks don’t have to deal with that every day. This kid is out for a jog and his life is over.

“Two weeks later in New York City. A black man is bird-watching, he asks politely to a white woman, ‘Please put your dog on a leash.’ She goes off on a tangent, ‘I’m gonna call the police to say I’m [being] harassed by a black man in the park.’ These are things that black people have to deal with.”

O'Neal backed up Barkley, noting the unrest has been adding up with every case of a black man or woman killed by police.

“People are just tired, people are just frustrated, people are upset, and they have a right to be,” said O’Neal. “There was a lot of protesting, there was a lot of looting, there was a lot of people complaining about people looting. You have to understand what these people are feeling.

“And to the people that control the system, I think one way to deplete systematic racism is you have to listen. You have to listen to how we feel. You don’t know how we feel.

Then was the issue of Drew Brees and his rhetoric of defending the flag, which insulted many supporting the Black Lives Matter movement.

NBA stars like LeBron James were insulted that even after many years following Colin Kaepernick's initial kneel during the national anthem, he still didn't know what the sentiment stood for. Smith was on the same boat, offended by Brees' words:

“I was very offended,” said Smith. “I looked at it as the definition of what we call ‘white privilege’ because he has a systematic holdback and you’re only looking at it from your point of view. … So you’re not looking at it from the other ethnic race. It made it worse that it was Drew Brees, someone who we cheer for, someone we cheer for who has teammates like us, that didn’t get us. Someone who’s in a locker room every day. He doesn’t have the same excuse that some other people may have had.

“… So, you would think that he would be more educated to the sensitivities of everyone else. Someone we cheered for is using his white privilege to say he couldn’t understand what we were going through at that moment. That was very offensive for me.”

Brees is a white quarterback that has spent the bulk of his 19-year career in the league throwing to black wide receivers. Yet it seems even two decades of sharing the gridiron with his black counterparts haven't inculcated enough to understand the struggle African Americans have gone through.

While Barkley and O'Neal were forgiving in a way, Smith wasn't having any of it.

George Floyd's death was the tilting point of longstanding civil unrest for the black community, something O'Neal, Smith, and Barkley can all relate to even after making millions of dollars.