Comedian, political commentator and author D.L. Hughley knows what it is like to be criminalized by police without a warrant.
During a Wednesday, July 11, appearance on The View, Hughley revealed he first encountered racial profiling when he was only 8. A young Hughley was walking with a friend in Los Angeles when a police officer stopped and questioned him about a suspect he had no connection to at all.
“I’m walking down the street, me and my best friend, and police screech up to us and ask, ‘Where's such and such?’ We said, ‘We don't know!’” he said.
The officer ordered him to place his hands on the hood of the hot police cruiser during the unlawful stop. Hughley, like most people in this situation, had reservations about burning his hands. But the officer did not care about the young child's hands or wellbeing.
“'N-word, if you take your hand off this car, I'm going to blow your head off," he recalled the officer saying.
Without a doubt, this moment made a lasting impact on his life. He referenced the story of a 10-year-old Chicago boy who urinated on himself during an interaction with police in June.
"50 years [later] and thousands of miles away, this kid's gonna have the same introduction to police that I did," he told the co-hosts.
Being black is all the reason an officer needs to kill a black person. In his 10-minute interview, he touched on several issues such as the NFL protests calling out racism, America's obsession with black bodies and white people's irrational fear of black people.
“We've been murdered for reading, for looking somebody in the eye, for whistling at somebody,” he said. “The murder of black people at the hands of people of authority has always happened… police [are] doing what they've always done, which is… keeping you in your community where you belong.”
His new book, How to Not Get Shot, which is out now, aims to serve as a reference point for avoiding deadly police encounters.
Here's the full segment:
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