Seattle Seahawks quarterback shared some thoughts in a Zoom interview on Wednesday but he wasn’t talking about football. Wilson chose to address the racial inequality that is plaguing the nation.
“When you think about the idea of Black Lives Matter, they do matter,” Wilson said. “The reality is that, me as a black person, people are getting murdered on the street, people are getting shot down, and the understanding that it’s not like that for every other race. It’s like that in particular for the black community. I think about my stepson, I think about my daughter, I think about our new baby boy on the way, and it’s staggering to watch these things happen right in front of our faces, so I have a heavy heart right now.”
Wilson then opened up about his own experience being an African American male, sharing a story about a recent incident that had him reeling.
Wilson recalled a time in California, shortly after the team won the Super Bowl in 2014, that he was confronted by an older white man in line for breakfast. “That’s not for you,” the man told Wilson.
“And I said, ‘Huh? Excuse me?’ I thought he was joking at first,” Wilson explained. “My back was kind of turned. I had just come off a Super Bowl and everything else, so if somebody is talking to me that way, you think about circumstance and how people talk to you. In that moment, I really went back to being young and not putting my hands in my pocket and that experience. That was a heavy moment for me right there. I was like, man, this is really still real, and I’m on the West Coast. This is really real right now.”
Wilson said he chose not to confront the man – “not lash back out in the moment” – but stood up for himself, saying, “Excuse me, sir, but I don’t appreciate you speaking to me that way.”
“Being black is a real thing in America,” Wilson said. “It’s a real thing in the sense of the history and the pain, even my own family, personally.”
Here’s Wilson’s statement he issued on June 1.
— Russell Wilson (@DangeRussWilson) June 1, 2020
You can listen to his entire Zoom interview here.
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