Michael Bennett wants to take NFL players’ protest against police brutality and racial inequality all the way to the top.
The Seattle Seahawks defensive end has been sitting during the national anthem since the preseason, continuing a protest quarterback Colin Kaepernick began last season to bring awareness to injustices people of color face in the United States. Bennett joined CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360” on Monday and explained to the host why he’s protesting and how it relates to the instance of racial profiling he says he faced in Las Vegas.
“It just makes me know that everything that we’re talking about, every issue that we bring up is a reality for any one of us at any time,” Bennett told Cooper. “It happened to me, and it could happen to anybody, but at the end of the day, I don’t hate law enforcement. I don’t hate any police officers. But I think there are some people out there that could judge you on the color of your skin, and I don’t want people to say, ‘Hey, you’re bashing every single officer.’ I don’t believe that every single officer is a bad person. I’m not going that way.”
But for Bennett, it doesn’t end there. After President Donald Trump went on a rant Friday at an Alabama rally calling NFL players who protest “sons of b——,” Bennett said he’d like to talk to Trump face-to-face.
“I would love to sit down with the president and talk about these issues and be able to find a way to fix them or be able to find a way to have the voice of the people, the people that don’t have a voice, that they’re not listening to,” Bennett said. “I don’t — I can’t sit here and say that he’s not my president … because at the end of the day, he is the President of the United States, and for him to say that it’s a privilege and we shouldn’t speak on what we believe in because we’re making money. He was a rich man, too, and all of a sudden he’s speaking on what he believes in, and he still stood up for what he believes in, and he’s the President of the United States, so what makes him different from us?”
Thumbnail photo via Kirby Lee/USA TODAY Sports Images
