Will Smith said he disagrees with defunding the police ‘because then people who help you won’t’ and instead, he would rather say ‘defund the bad police’ – just as he wishes people would call critical race theory ‘truth theory’.
‘This is a difficult area to discuss,’ Smith said when talking about the Black Lives Matter movement. ‘Anybody who tries to debate Black Lives Matter looks ridiculous,’ he added.
The 53-year-old Hollywood star told GQ that the slogan, which gained national attention in May of last year after George Floyd was murdered while in police custody in Minneapolis, Minnesota, ‘gets it done’.
‘I feel like the simplicity of Black Lives Matter was perfect,’ he said. However, he didn’t express the same feelings towards the ‘defund the police’ movement that followed, and noted that changing the marketing would get more people to support the campaign.
“‘Defund the police” doesn’t get it done, no matter how good the ideas are,’ he told GQ.
Will Smith said he disagrees with defunding the police ‘because then people who help you won’t’ and instead, he would rather say ‘defund the bad police’ – just as he wishes people would call critical race theory ‘truth theory’
Smith expressed caution about the movement’s goals. The movie star graced the November 2021 issue of the men’s magazine and used it as a platform to ‘speak his truth’.
He said: “‘Defund the police’ doesn’t get it done, no matter how good the ideas are. I’m not saying we shouldn’t defund the police. I’m saying, just don’t say that, because then people who would help you won’t.’
Smith also noted that as a Black American, he wants ‘us to change our marketing for the new position we’re in’. ‘I would love if we would just say, “Defund the bad police,”‘ he said.
‘So “critical race theory,” just call it “truth theory,”‘ he added.
He feels the change would ‘capitalize on the moment or the future of Black Americans without discounting the difficulty and the pain and the emotion’.
Smith noted, now that he’s in his so-called ‘f***-it 50s,’ he feels he’s reached a turning point in his 35-year career. Up until now, he recalled how he prioritized being an entertainer over being a spokesperson.
‘In the early part of my career…I wanted to be a superhero,’ he said, adding: ‘I wanted to depict Black excellence alongside my white counterparts. I wanted to play roles that you would give Tom Cruise.’
In an interview with GQ Smith said he’s spent decades seeing himself as a coward and ‘always avoided making films about slavery’. ‘In the early part of my career…I wanted to be a superhero. I wanted to depict Black excellence alongside my white counterparts. I wanted to play roles that you would give Tom Cruise’
He told GQ that for decades, he’s seen himself as a coward.
‘I’ve always avoided making films about slavery,’ Smith said in the candid interview. ‘I didn’t want to show Black people in that light.’
He said in the interview published Monday that’s why he turned down the title role in Django Unchained, which then went to Jamie Foxx.
Yet Smith is starring in the AppleTV+ film Emancipation, which tells the story of ‘Whipped Peter,’ the Black man whose scarred back is shown in one of the most famous photos of an enslaved American.
Instead of seeing such a film as a ‘slavery movie,’ he said that ‘it’s also about perseverance’.
‘This…was about love and the power of Black love, and that was something I could rock with,’ he added.
The 53-year-old Hollywood star told GQ that the ‘Black Lives Matter’ slogan, which gained national attention in May of last year after George Floyd was murdered while in police custody in Minneapolis, Minnesota, ‘gets it done’
“‘Defund the police” doesn’t get it done, no matter how good the ideas are,’ Smith said
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