This morning, actor Terry Crews was trending on Twitter for all the wrong reasons. The America’s Got Talent host was on Twitter Sunday night.
Apparently, Terry was feeling some type of way with all the solidarity happening with folks of color across the globe. He felt the need to take to Twitter to express an unwanted and guilt-laden perspective.
Upon later explanation by Crews, 51, he was trying to say that if white and black people don’t work together, “bad attitudes and resentments can create a dangerous self-righteousness.”
Following the death of George Floyd on May 25, Crews shared an emotional video to Instagram. There he told his followers that he saw himself in the 46-year-old, who died when former police officer Derek Chauvin put a knee on his neck for eight minutes.
“First of all my heart is broken,” he said the video. “George Floyd looks like me. George Floyd could be me. I could easily, easily be that man on the ground with that police officer’s knee on my neck. That could easily be me.”
Pro-Black Is Not Anti-White
There is a popular misconception that being proud to be Black means that you are anti-white. This is not the case.
However, what that statement reflects is a truly enslaved mentality because you cannot operate with that suspicion unless you are co-opted by white supremacy.
White guilt is defined as the feelings of shame and remorse some white people experience when they recognize the legacy of racism and racial injustice and perceive the ways they have benefited from it.
With his statement, Terry Crews is signaling that he has internalized white guilt for white people even though he is not white himself. All one needs to do is look at the front lines of every protest across the globe and white allies are there.
Allies who see their privilege as an invaluable asset to people of color are appreciated by the protest movement. Whether that involvement stems from guilt is a personal motivation, however, the action is needed and respected.
For Crews to create some mythological vacuum where black people are working in a silo for justice is not even close to reality. How he could justify fearing “black supremacy” when the protests are only initial surface pressure shows he doesn’t understand the true goal: system reform.
Feelings on either side will have to subside to doing what is right and if an ego or two is bruised in the process it is a small fee to pay for justice.
Terry Crews is still caught up in the rapture of Black unity optics in a society still encapsulated in white supremacy. If he wasn’t, he would count the white allies in a sea of black faces instead of lamenting how Black the movement looks and feels.
