Terry Crews Promotes Unity and Equality…And Gets Ridiculed

The host of America’s Got Talent, Terry Crews, has been actively using his platform in recent weeks to promote racial equality. However, his remarks have provoked great controversy.  The actor said in a tweet earlier this month, “I stand on my decision to unite with good people, no matter the race, creed or ideology. Given the number of threats against this decision- I also decide to die on this hill”.  And the threats continued after this statement, even publicly. Users called him out as not being smart enough to be an activist, while others said he was distracting from the “cause”. 

Crews has previously stated that, “Defeating White supremacy without White people creates Black supremacy. Equality is the truth. Like it or not, we are all in this together”.  People thought this statement was preposterous at the time, but just a couple months later, fellow actor Nick Cannon (along with others) made comments that confirmed Terry Crews’ prediction.

Cannon said in a podcast alongside Richard Griffin that the people that don’t have as much melanin are “a little less”,“closer to animals” and “the true savages”. He stated that as white people lack melanin, they also lack compassion and soul. 

These remarks caused Terry Crews, alongside several others to push back against this narrative. Terry referred to remarks in a former interview in response to Cannon, “We have to include this white voice, this Hispanic voice, this Asian voice. We have to include it RIGHT NOW, because if we don’t… it’s going to slip into something we are really not prepared for”. 

Charles Barkley, NBA legend, opened up a recent TNT podcast criticizing Cannon, Desean Jackson, Stephen Jackson, and Ice Cube, “Y’all want racial equality. We all do. I don’t understand how insulting another group helps our cause”. 

Society is preparing itself ーas Crews and Barkley have pointed outーfor more inequality. The great Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream that people of all ethnic backgrounds in society would “not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character”. This vision cannot be lost. 

The amount of melanin a person has (which is nothing more than a pigment in the skin) should not determine their validity in society. All of us are one race, and should treat each other with the same amount of respect that we would expect anyone to treat us with.