Actor Terry Crews is speaking out about the injustices he’s experienced as an African-American man in the United States.
The “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” star told NBC News that a white landlord called him a racial slur and spit on him in Los Angeles during the late 1990s, and also recalled an incident as a kid in which he feared for his father’s life when they got pulled over.
“I’ve been victimized since I was kid,” Crews told the news outlet in an article published Monday.
“I mean, being a black man in America, there’s so many things that I had to blink past in order to make it and continue to exist,” Crews continued. “Most of the time as black men, we are not recognized as victimized until we’re dead.”
Massive protests against racial injustice and police brutality have taken place throughout the United States and beyond in recent weeks following the death of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, in police custody on May 25 in Minneapolis.
Fired Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin has been charged with second-degree murder and is accused in a criminal complaint of kneeling on Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes.
“Any sudden move could mean my life,” Crews told NBC News. “I know this, because no one’s going to talk to me. They’re just going to shoot. This George Floyd incident has really got to me deep. I haven’t been able to sleep. And when you do nod off, you wake up thinking, ‘What if the police come to me?'”
Crews, 51, said he believed police would “be there to attack” him if he spoke out in 2017 about the alleged sexual misconduct he suffered from agent Adam Venit. A lawsuit involving that allegation was settled in 2018.
On Sunday, Crews garnered backlash for tweeting: “Defeating White supremacy without White people creates Black supremacy. Equality is the truth. Like it or not, we are all in this together.”
He seemed to address the controversy regarding the “Black Supremacy” comment on Monday in a separate tweet.
“Please know that everything I’ve said comes from a spirit of love and reconciliation, for the Black community first, then the world as a whole, in hopes to see a better future for Black people,” he wrote.