Hollywood couple Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively feel ashamed that they have allowed themselves to be “uninformed about deeply rooted systemic racism”.
Now, they are determined to address it and fight against it. As a start, they have donated $200,000 (Dh734,514) to the NAACP Legal Defence Fund as protests and riots continue across the US after the killing of unarmed Black man George Floyd by police, reports Daily Mail.
Reynolds, 43, and Lively, 32, shared the news through a joint statement on their social media.
“We’ve never had to worry about preparing our kids for different rules of law or what might happen if we’re pulled over in the car. We don’t know what it’s like to experience that life day in and day out. We can’t imagine feeling that kind of fear and anger. We’re ashamed that in the past we’ve allowed ourselves to be uninformed about how deeply rooted systemic racism is,” they began.
The statement continued: “We’ve been teaching our children differently than the way our parents taught us. We want to educate ourselves about other people’s experiences and talk to our kids about everything, all of it… especially our own complicity.
“We talk about our bias, blindness and our own mistakes. We look back and see so many mistakes which have led us to deeply examine who we are and who we want to become. They’ve led us to huge avenues of education. We’re committed to raising our kids so they never grow up feeding this insane pattern and so they’ll do their best to never inflict pain on another being consciously or unconsciously.”
On why they decided to contribute to the NAACP Legal Defence Fund, they explained: “That’s the least we can do to honour not just George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and Eric Garner, but all the black men and women who have been killed when the camera wasn’t rolling.”
