Over the years, we’ve watched star NBA player Carmelo Anthony evolve into a leader not only in the game but in the community. Recently, much of his voice has been driven from observing the recent horrible events resulting from racism and police brutality.
In the upcoming issue of ESPN, Howard Bryant sits down with Melo to gain an understanding of how he sees the world. Check out excerpts below.
HB: What you’re touching on is the one part of this that’s been really difficult for me and people wanting to talk about Colin Kaepernick. They’re not focusing on why he’s doing what he’s doing. They look at Baltimore and they’re not looking at the fabric of Baltimore. You have no parks. You’ve got no infrastructure. What do you expect that to look like if you’re taking all the resources out of the community?
CA: When you don’t have resources, it becomes hopeless. There’s nothing to look forward to. I know when I was coming up, it was after-school. We had rec centers to go to in our neighborhoods. We had parks to go play in. We had football fields to go to. You had different things that you could go do. I always find it fascinating when I go back to my community and kids that I have known, or their parents, just hearing them talk. The one thing I get out of it is they just want a voice. They just want to be heard. It’s like, “We want everybody to hear us.”
HB: When you talk about this, you’re not really talking about police brutality specifically. You keep saying, “The system is broken.”
CA: The system is broken. It trickles down. It’s the education. You’ve got to be educated to know how to deal with police. The police have to be educated on how to deal with people. The system has to put the right police in the right situations. Like, you can’t put white police in the ‘hood. You just can’t do that. They don’t know how to react. They don’t know how to respond to those different situations. They’ve never been around that, you know? When I was growing up, we knew police by their first name. We gave them the nicknames. But that’s only because we related. And when the white police came into our neighborhood, the black police said, “Yo, we got this.” That doesn’t happen anymore. You got black police afraid to go into black communities now, and the white police are like, “Shit, I’ll come. It’s a job. I’ll go in there and do it.” Not knowing what’s going to happen.
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