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 to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund as protests and riots continue across the US after the killing of unarmed Black man George Floyd by police, reports dailymail.co.uk.
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 the large sum of money to the NAACP Legal Defense 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.”
Back in March, Reynolds and Lively donated $1 million to Feeding America and Food Banks Canada, as well as $400,000 to the hardest-hit hospitals in New York amid the coronavirus pandemic.
