Longtime NFL quarterback Josh McCown urged white people in America to help “break the cycles of racism” during a roundtable on race relations on NFL Network on Monday.
McCown, who spent last year with the Eagles, appeared on the program with Steve Wyche and Michael Robinson as well as Bills cornerback Josh Norman. McCown and Norman are members of the Players Coalition task force, a board of 12 voting members that formulates policy for the larger group of NFL players interested in social justice.
We wanted to start using our voice and leveraging our platform for good to hope we make a dent in this and bring about change,” McCown said. “It’s not about praying for change but it's praying for courage to be the change. That's what it is about right now. I'm thankful that other people, in the middle of this global pandemic, we're finally realizing what the real pandemic is, and we're finally seeing it.
NFL Network devoted Monday’s NFL Total Access to the topic of race relations following a difficult weekend in numerous U.S. cities marked by peaceful protests, violent confrontations and widespread looting a week after the death of George Floyd while in police custody in Minneapolis.
It's the conversations inside our own walls that we must change, and it's a language inside our own walls that we must change,” McCown said. “I'm so heartbroken for George Floyd and his family. So my prayer is that there would be courage to rise out of this and good to come from this, and that we would continue to move this thing forward and gain ground in this area because this is a true thing that's going to kill us. It's not COVID-19, it's this. This is what we have to fight against. It's on us as white people to step up, have a conversation with one another that would start to change and break the generation of cycles of racism that we see throughout our country.
McCown spoke about how he as a white person in America simply doesn’t have to concern himself with the same things African Americans do.
"As a white person in America, when you wake up there's things you're not even contemplating, that you don't even have to think about,” he said. “Whereas an African American in this country, the experience is vitally different. … It burdened my heart that we're different and our experiences are different. If our experiences are different, we have to talk about that. And that's not for the African American to talk to a white person about it — it's white people to talk to white people about that.”
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