Gabrielle Union nails discussion on raising Black sons: ‘It’s terrifying’

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During an interview with The View, Gabrielle Union opened up about what it’s like to raise Black sons in today’s world.

When asked by Whoopi Goldberg to speak about raising her two stepsons and husband Dwyane Wade‘s nephew, Union said, “It’s terrifying.”

She spoke about the worry of living in Florida, which is a Stand Your Ground state, before specifically telling the story of the “drive-by dunk challenge,” where kids will drive through neighborhoods and get out of the car to dunk in any basketball hoops they see in the neighborhoods.

–Gabrielle Union says anyone can be sexually assaulted–

“I’m looking at Snapchat, and I see our boys are doing the dunk challenge,” Union said. “And I literally, my arm goes numb, and I’m panicked. But they second they got home, I was like, ‘They can kill you and get away with it, because now you’re trespassing.'”

She said that her boys wanted to “reap all the benefits of me and my husband’s hard work” and that they wanted to act like their friends and talk back to authority figures.

But Union said that she told her boys, “You’ll die.” She said it was one of the “Black truth bombs that you have to drop on your kids so they’ll understand.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ow1_43hBNo0

She lamented the fact that it was necessary to have those conversations in today’s world, saying, “What do you say? Your very Blackness, by birth, has been demonized and weaponized and is considered inherently threatening and less-than. What do you say? How do you raise your kids?”

But in a lighthearted moment, she joked about how her husband had to deal with this aspect of raising their kids too, but he was sort of the exception to the rule.

“He could go to a Klan rally, and they’d be like, ‘Well, it is D-Wyane,'” she joked, adding that her husband was “that exceptional negro.”

“There’s always one,” she laughed.