In the October 31 “NBA Preview” edition of ESPN The Magazine, they spoke with Carmelo Anthony about everything but basketball. Instead it was an in depth discussion about police brutality, race, and the issues plaguing society. The New York Knicks star has come out in the forefront of black athletes speaking out with all these police-involved shootings and issues in black neighborhoods.
HB: When you talk about this, you’re not really talking about police brutality specifically. You keep saying, “The system is broken.”
CA: The system is broken. It trickles down. It’s the education. You’ve got to be educated to know how to deal with police. The police have to be educated on how to deal with people. The system has to put the right police in the right situations. Like, you can’t put white police in the ‘hood. You just can’t do that. They don’t know how to react. They don’t know how to respond to those different situations. They’ve never been around that, you know? When I was growing up, we knew police by their first name. We gave them the nicknames. But that’s only because we related. And when the white police came into our neighborhood, the black police said, “Yo, we got this.” That doesn’t happen anymore. You got black police afraid to go into black communities now, and the white police are like, “Shit, I’ll come. It’s a job. I’ll go in there and do it.” Not knowing what’s going to happen.
I think athletes now are just going off of what they’re seeing now, which is what? Police brutality. Police killing people. You haven’t seen one thing about schools closing. There’s no rec centers. You haven’t seen none of that on the news. All you see is police killing people. And if I’m sitting there watching that every day all day, I’m going to feel a certain kind of way. Like, against the police. If it was showing schools and why they shut them down and there’s no funding for this and no funding for that, you would feel a certain way about that too. But that’s not what they’re putting out there.
source: ESPN
