“How did you afford this car?” she says police asked her son.
Niecy Nash says police “pulled a taser” on her son at a traffic stop.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, the actress shared her concerns about being a Black mother amid the protests against racial injustice and police brutality in the wake of George Floyd’s death, including a recent encounter her 28-year-old son had with law enforcement.
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“My son got stopped leaving my house last Sunday,” she recalled. “And they pulled a taser on him for a rolling stop. And then proceeded to question him and ask him, ‘You have on a T-Mobile shirt. Do you work there? Because if you do, how did you afford this car? Because this is a 2020.'”
Nash continued, “They don’t know if he was a manager. They don’t know if he was an owner. They don’t know if he had a rich mama. But what they probably felt like was, ‘How did this young black boy get a car that I don’t even have?’ And we fitting to make you suffer for it.”
The “Claws” star said her identity is to be “of service in the world” and pointed out how this starts at home. However, this has been difficult for Nash as she’s struggling with how to explain everything to her son, while also being asked how she thinks non-POC should respond.
“So while I receive phone calls where people are saying, “What can white people do? What can non-black people do?” Nash told the outlet. “I’m trying to figure out what to tell my own son. I used to say, if you just comply, get home, and if there was a wrong that happened, we’ll right it later.”
“But now we watched a murder on national TV when George Floyd was murdered. I don’t know because he complied,” she continued. “He was in handcuffs. He was on the ground with his hands behind his back. So I don’t even know. People are calling me, asking me to tell them something. And I’m trying to figure out what to tell mine.”
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Nash stressed that it’s not the “responsibility of the oppressed to tell the oppressor what to do and how to right the wrong.”
“So my suggestion is you need to ask non-black people what they can do,” she explained. “Don’t call one more black person and ask them nothing about nothing. You call the white people and ask them what they could do because black people, by definition, can’t be racist because we’re not the ones in power.”
Nash’s interview came just a couple of weeks after she spoke out about Floyd’s death on “Good Morning America,” revealing that the “Reno 911!” cast was donating $10,000 to Floyd’s family.
“Our cast of ‘Reno 911!,’ we play bumbling cops on TV,” she said. “But in real life, this is no laughing matter to any of us. I’m the mother of a black son, and I’m devastated. Our entire cast is brokenhearted about the passing of George Floyd. Prayerfully, this donation will be a small step toward healing for his family.”
For nearly two weeks, protests have been taking place across the country over the death of Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man who died while a white police officer kneeled on his neck for nearly 9 minutes in Minneapolis, Minnesota on May 25.
Video captured Derek Chauvin with his knee on Floyd’s neck while he died, igniting outrage across the globe. Floyd was unresponsive when paramedics arrived and was later pronounced dead.
Chauvin now faces a second-degree murder charge. The three cops with him — Tou Thao, J. Alexander Kueng and Thomas Kieran Lane — have been charged with aiding and abetting second-degree murder as well as aiding and abetting second-degree manslaughter. All four disgraced police officers face up to 40 years behind bars.
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