Don Cheadle, the star of Black Monday and the upcoming Space Jam 2, talked to Jimmy Fallon on Thursday about growing up in America, and his experiences of being targeted by the police.
"I think a lot of Black people have this story of how their parents had to caution them about how to comport themselves when they would come into contact with law enforcement and the rules of how to just make sure you come home and be safe and what you had to do," he says. "Unfortunately it was something that was put into our minds very early."
Cheadle talks about growing up in Kansas City, Missouri around his family in a predominantly Black neighbourhood. "I don’t even recall ever seeing the police, really, and never in our neighbourhoods, and never being anything that was to worry about. But then when I moved into the suburbs, and we were the minority there, it was very different. That’s when I first knew. That’s when a lot of bullying started, when I was at school, and definitely predicated on race. And that’s when it started to be clear that the cops were not on Team Don, and that there was a different treatment."
Cheadle says this was something that continued when he moved to Los Angeles, during the tenure of Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department Daryl Gates and his Operation Hammer program, which has been criticised as thinly veiled racial profiling.
“I got stopped more times than I can count and guns put to my head and I always ‘fit the description," says Cheadle. "I used to finish their sentences. They’d go, ‘Well, we’re stopping you because…’ I’d go, ‘Fit the description, I know. I fit the description.' I always 'fit the description'.
"This was something that was happening over and over again, and I have good friends who were almost killed by the police for nothing. So this is not something that was new to me once all these videos started coming out. It’s things that we knew very well that were happening. They just weren’t being filmed.”
