Actor and comedian Tiffany Haddish claimed this week she has avoided having children because she’s scared the police will hunt them down to kill them.
“I’m a little older now and people are always like, ‘You gonna have some babies? When are you gonna have some babies? You gonna drop some babies?’” she said. “There’s a part of me that would like to do that, and I always make up these excuses, like, ‘Oh, I need a million dollars in the bank before I do that.’ ‘I need this, I need that.’”
Haddish continued, “But really, it’s like, I would hate to give birth to someone that looks like me, and then, knowing that they’re gonna be hunted or killed. Like, why would I put someone through that?”
The “Nobody’s Fool” star made the comments during a YouTube interview with professional basketball player Carmelo Anthony.
In 2019, the latest year for which comprehensive data is available, police fatally shot 13 unarmed black men. Black Americans account for about 13% of the country’s population.
White people, Haddish told Anthony, “don’t have to think about” being killed by police. “It’s time to talk about that,” she continued, “and how we have to come together as a community and work as a unit and maybe we don’t all agree on the same things, but we need to just find some common ground and move forward as human beings.”
“We’re all trying to figure out: how do you fix this” the 40-year-old celebrity continued. “How do you stop this? And all I can think is we have to figure out how to change people’s hearts, and that’s what I’ve been trying to do my whole career.”
Haddish said she knows two black men in her life who were killed by police, saying those experiences led her to have the feeling black people are being intentionally hunted by law enforcement officers.
Entertainment commentators discussed Haddish’s comments: