John Legend, Tessa Thompson and 1,000 other Black artists in the entertainment industry are coming together to put an end to the racial injustice.
Dubbing themselves the “Black Artists For Freedom”, the group released a statement in honour of Juneteenth, calling for all cultural institutions to make changes in order to eliminate racism.
Along with Legend and Thompson, Sterling K. Brown, Niecy Nash, Gabrielle Union, Trevor Noah, Ava DuVernay, Barry Jenkins, Lena Waithe, Lupita Nyong’o and David Oyelowo are among signees.
RELATED: John Legend Vs. Alicia Keys In Juneteenth Piano Showdown
The statement also comes after the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, among other Black citizens promoting Black Lives Matter protests all over the world.
“The fact is plain: Black people are still not free. Day after day, generation upon generation, we are threatened, brutalized, and murdered by law enforcement and vigilantes,” the statement reads. “When we hear ‘I can’t breathe,’ we hear the voices of our children, parents, brothers, sisters, cousins. We hear our elders and ancestors. We hear ourselves, some future day.”
RELATED: John Legend On George Floyd Video: We ‘See Our Family Members When That Happens’
“The representation of Black people in the media has long been used to justify the violence against us. Racist stereotypes of Black criminality, monstrosity, unchecked rage, hyper-sexuality, immunity to pain, and so on, are still recycled today in books, films, and on the Internet,” the statement continues. “Consciously and unconsciously, these stereotypes are invoked — in everyday interactions and in courts of law — as reasons why Black people do not deserve human rights. We do not wish merely to modify or alleviate this racist culture. We aim to eliminate it.”
Read Black Artists for Freedom’s full statement and five demands here.
