In the wake of the death of Trayvon Martin, David Banner recently stopped by BET’s “106 & Park” to discuss how racial profiling is alive and well in America and why it needs to stop. During a fiery diatribe, the Mississippi rapper said that the police system needs to change in order to ensure order and prevent future corruption.
“There’s a couple of things. What I want everyone in America to realize is that no matter what we teach our kids about being safe, if it’s a flawed system, then there’s nothing our children can do. We have to change the system. The truth is, about racial profiling, if there are laws intact that make people who feel they’re impowered, that if they do the wrong thing and there’s repercussions, then they won’t do it,” he said. “The problem is, it’s not about the hoodies. It’s not about the t-shirts. It’s not about any of that. Basically, America is telling us, if we don’t make them feel comfortable, then they will murder us. It will go that far. So the thing I will ask everybody in America is, we have to find out what the end result is. Is it legislation? Do we get people to police the people who are supposed to be policing us?”
Banner drew from his own personal experience with racial profiling. He says that every time he gets pulled over in his expensive car, he always feels like he did something wrong, even though he isn’t at fault. Banner says that Americans need to raise their voices to enact change in the world.
“How do you feel when you get pulled over? I have a Bentley and I get pulled over and I still feel like something’s wrong. Why is that? Also everybody, be focused. They try to talk about black-on-black crime, they try to talk about our music. They try to say, well what if Zimmerman got attacked? At the end of the day, there is a black child dead. The thing is, I just want us to figure out what can we do to make sure this doesn’t happen again. We just had Sean Bell. We just had Oscar Grant. How many times does this have to happen before we realize, we can march, we can sing, we can make songs? No. We have to do something that means something so this will never happen to another child again.”
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