Yesterday Serena Williams vowed to continue to speak out about racial injustice, posting a
to her 5 million Facebook followers.
Williams talked about how when her nephew was driving her to work she realised she was scared for his safety when she saw a policeman up ahead. ‘Today I asked my 18 year old nephew (to be clear he's black) to drive me to my meetings so I can work on my phone #safteyfirst’ the 35-year old wrote. ‘In the distance I saw cop on the side of the road. I quickly checked to see if he was obliging by the speed limit. ‘Than I remembered that horrible video of the woman in the car when a cop shot her boyfriend. All of this went through my mind in a matter of seconds. I even regretted not driving myself. I would never forgive myself if something happened to my nephew. He's so innocent. So were all "the others.”’
The horrible video the tennis star talks about presumably is the Philando Castile incident, where the girlfriend of the fatally shot man shared the fallout from his killing on Facebook Live. ‘The others’ she’s referring to are of course those who've lost their lives as a result of racial prejudice: including the 173 African-Americans who’ve died as a result of police shootings so far in 2016.
In September alone, black men have been shot and killed by police in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and in Charlotte, North Carolina. In both cases violent protests broke out as a result. And just yesterday a peaceful protest was conducted in San Diego after an unarmed black man was shot by police. ‘Why did I have to think about this in 2016?' Williams continues. 'Have we not gone through enough, opened so many doors, impacted billions of lives? But I realized we must stride on- for it's not how far we have come but how much further still we have to go.’
'As Dr. Martin Luther King said "There comes a time when silence is betrayal".’
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.