Singer and fashion designer Pharrell Williams weighed in on the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, Missouri on Monday’s “CNN Tonight.”
Pharell said “I’m disappointed in the way that it [the Brown shooting] was handled from the government side. I think that officer should be punished because that was excessive force…that kid didn’t ask to get killed, and so I feel like that officer should be punished, but then, at the same time, we’ve got start looking at ourselves too because we are feeling hunted and we need to be able to avoid these things, and sometimes its unavoidable.”
He added “when they told him to get out of the road, he probably should have gotten out of the road. I wouldn’t have been in the road to begin with, though, but look, let me make it very clear…I love my culture I don’t want my culture to want nothing from nobody else. I think we can do what we need to do ourselves.”
On the shooting, Pharrell concluded “this is going to be the longest hangover in race relations ever. Want to know why? Because we thought we had gotten so far but now there are certain people that are like ‘man, they shouldn’t put a tape out of him being in the store, this, that, and the other, that ain’t got nothing to do with the crime.’ You’re absolutely right, but I come from a black family that, like, my grandma would have said ‘but let me see that other tape too,’ and you would get a beating for that, ecause no stones are left unturned, no Ts are not crossed, no Is are not dotted. That’s the kind of pride that we have in our culture that doesn’t get enough light on television.” He further stated that Bill Cosby was “smart,” and that he wants the black community to not rely on other people.
He also criticized the media coverage of the protests following the shooting, saying “we had so much peaceful protesting going on, what the media chose to cover most of all and highlight was the random few people that threw Molotov cocktails, the random people that had guns on them, the random incidents where, not random really, actually, motivated, but some of the rioting that was going on and some of the looting of the stores. And the looting of the stores in our own neighborhoods, I’m not telling you to do it nowhere else, but damn, why are you doing it in your own neighborhood? I didn’t get that neither.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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