Niecy Nash recently admitted that she’s going through a difficult time. Not only because she’s been affected by the death of George Floyd and the ongoing protests, but because her son Dominic Nash was harassed by a police officer.
The “Mrs. America” actress spoke with The Hollywood Reporter about it and said the officer assumed that Dominic, who is in his late 20s, couldn’t afford the vehicle he was driving. Nash did not mention what kind of car he was driving.
“My son got stopped leaving my house last Sunday, and they pulled a taser on him for a rolling stop,” Nash explained in a interviewed published Monday, June 8. “And then proceeded to question him and ask him, ‘You have on a T-Mobile shirt. Do you work there? Because if you do, how did you afford this car? Because this is a 2020.'”
“They don’t know if he was a manager,” she continued. “They don’t know if he was an owner. They don’t know if he had a rich mama. But what they probably felt like was, ‘How did this young Black boy get a car that I don’t even have?'” And we fitting to make you suffer for it.”
Although Nash didn’t specify exactly where this incident took place, she lives in Los Angeles, and Los Angeles Police Department responded on Tuesday to Page Six with an emailed statement about the incident, saying they “did not received information regarding that incident. Without a location of occurrence, we are unable to ascertain if it even occurred in our jurisdiction.”
Nash said she’s currently at a loss about what to tell her son about how to deal with police, because she used to tell him to comply with whatever he was being told.
But now she feels that advice won’t protect him, as it didn’t seem to protect Floyd, who died in May after ex-Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin drove his knee into Floyd’s neck for over eight minutes. Chauvin has since been charged with second-degree murder.
A spokesman for the Minneapolis Police Department, John Elder, said that Floyd resisted arrest after getting out of his vehicle. But surveillance footage from a local restaurant showed otherwise.
“I’m trying to figure out what to tell my own son,” Nash stated. “I used to say, if you just comply, get home, and if there was a wrong that happened, we’ll right it later. But now we watched a murder on national TV when George Floyd was murdered.”
“I don’t know because he complied,” she added. “He was in handcuffs. He was on the ground with his hands behind his back. So I don’t even know. People are calling me, asking me to tell them something, and I’m trying to figure out what to tell mine.”
Nash has been posting a lot about the protests on her Instagram page. Like one photo that she shared of a little girl holding a sign that read, “All lives can’t matter until Black lives matter.”
In her interview, Nash revealed that she and the cast of her show “Reno 911” donated $10,000 toward George Floyd’s funeral.
She also talked about the ongoing protests and responded to the people who’ve said they should mirror the peaceful marches that Martin Luther King Jr. organized during the civil rights movement.
“The people that are saying be peaceful, stay at peace? That was all Martin Luther King stood on and he was murdered anyway,” Nash explained.
“Stay peaceful in a country that has only taught you that you get what you want by uprising?” she continued. “See, America is only America and belongs to white people because they stole it from the Indians. And then they stole Black people from Africa and forced us into service for 400 years and then have the audacity to look at us and say, ‘Well, what can we do to fix it?'”
