Never one to shy away from the spotlight, a big moment or a microphone, the Seattle Seahawks' outspoken cornerback, Richard Sherman, was supposed to be talking about the upcoming game against Aaron Rodgers and the Green Bay Packers, but he took the moment to address the Black Lives Matter movement.
According to ESPN, Sherman started the news conference Wednesday by noting that he had not written a blog post, which many had seen and believed he had authored, that condemned the Black Lives Matter movement. Sherman noted that while there were some points in the piece that he agreed with, there were many he found to be "ignorant."
"I don't think it's any time to call for an all-out war against police or any race of people," he said. "I thought that was an ignorant statement. But as a black man, I do understand that black lives matter. I stand for that. I believe in that wholeheartedly.
"But I also think that there's a way to go about things, and there's a way to do things," he continued. "I think the issue at hand needs to be addressed internally before we move on, because from personal experience, living in the hood, living in the inner city, you deal with things. You deal with people dying, dealt with a best friend getting killed. It was two 35-year-old black men. There wasn't no police officer involved, wasn't anybody else involved. And I didn't hear anybody shouting 'Black lives matter' then."
Sherman added: "I think that's the point that we need to get to, is we need to deal with our own internal issues before we start moving forward and start attacking other people. We need to solidify ourselves as a people and deal with our issues because I think as long as we have black-on-black crime and one black man killing another, if black lives matter, then they should matter all the time. You should never let somebody get killed. That's somebody's son, that's somebody's brother, that's somebody's friend. So you should always keep that in mind."
Sherman noted that he believed that there were many cops across the country who do their best to uphold the badge. He also added: "But there are bad cops, and I think that also needs to be addressed. I think the police officers we have right now, some of it is being brought to light because of video cameras; everybody has a camera phone. But these are things a lot of us have dealt with our whole lives."
Sherman said that the climate is ripe for addressing these concerns.
"And I think right now is a perfect time to deal with [it]. The climate we're in, everybody's being more accepting, so I think the ignorance should stop. I think people should realize at the end of the day, we're all human beings. Before we're black, white, Asian, Polynesian, Latino, we're humans."
Read more at ESPN.