After Amanda Seales blasted Justin Timberlake for half-stepping, he’s been using his platform to make passionate pleas for change.
The singer joined Taylor Swift to call for the removal of Confederate memorials. “When we protest racism in America, people think we are protesting America itself. Why is that the reaction? Because America was built by men who believed in and benefitted from racism. Plain and simple,” Timberlake wrote. “If we plan to move forward, these confederate monuments must come down.”
JT was reacting to a post from ACLU that noted statues of Confederate general and KKK leader Nathaniel Bedford is still standing tall in the Tennessee State House.
Last month Swift called on the Capitol Commission and the Tennessee Historical Commission to permanently remove the statues of two Confederate figures, Edward Carmack and Nathan Bedford Forrest.
“Taking down statues isn’t going to fix centuries of systemic oppression, violence and hatred that black people have had to endure but it might bring us one small step closer to making ALL Tennesseans and visitors to our state feel safe – not just the white ones,” Swift wrote as part of her lengthy argument. “We need to retroactively change the status of people who perpetuated hideous patterns of racism from ‘heroes’ to ‘villains.’ And villains don’t deserve statues.”
President Donald Trump has defended the monuments memorializing Confederate figures and vowed to veto any bill that proposes renaming military bases that are originally named after Confederate leaders.
