On the eighth day of demonstrations against police brutality, Kevin Hart has praised the Black Lives Matter protests reaching all 50 US states.
The 40-year-old comedian captioned a screenshot of a CNN news report on the nationwide demonstrations: “This is POWER. Enough is Enough. It’s time for change.”
On Sunday (31 May), Hart took to social media to voice his outrage at the fate suffered by George Floyd, whose heart stopped on 25 May as a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes.
Hart started out by asking the media to focus less on the rioting and looting and more on the injustice that sparked the protests in the first place.
“You guys control the narrative,” he said. “So I feel like you guys have a job to do about pushing the correct narrative. Right now I’m watching that narrative slowly change into the rioting, into the looting.
“We’re not talking about the reason, we’re not talking about why we’re witnessing what we’re witnessing. There’s a reason. I don’t want to lose sight of that reason. That reason is because another man died in the hands of a police officer.
“George Floyd, rest in peace, as we know was killed by a cop. It was another senseless death. When I say ‘another’, that’s because we’ve got several that we can talk about. Several that we can talk about, that’s the reason.
“So within the narrative, when you know that people are looking for justice, when you know that people are looking for this to stop, when you know that you’re looking for correction, your job should be pushing that as well.”
He continued: “The media, you should be pushing that there needs to be a change as well. You should be pushing. It’s not just the people that are protesting. You know why they’re protesting.
“You know why people are enraged. You know why they’re angry. So as the media, you should be on the side of angry people. You should be on the side of the solution and not the problem.”
The father of three then brought up Colin Kaepernick, the American football player who began kneeling during the national anthem to protest racial inequality and police violence. “We’ve seen a narrative change before, happened the same thing with Colin Kaepernick,” he added.
