"We need to find a way where we come together and sew that band-aid up. No longer let it be a band-aid, no longer let it be a wound that's there"
Tuesday 2 June 2020 11:30, UK
NFL veteran Josh Norman says now is the time to "sew" up a familiar wound in the United States following the death of George Floyd.
Protests have taken place across America over the past week after Floyd suffered a cardiac arrest while white Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on his neck for several minutes on May 25. Chauvin has been sacked and charged with third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter.
Floyd's death was officially listed as "cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression", with the 46-year-old having been seen pleading that he could not breathe in a video of the incident.
"This is a time we definitely need to take out and reflect," Norman, now of the Buffalo Bills, told NFL Network.
"It's definitely one of those times where racism has been at its highest point since Jim Crow. I think that if you go back all the to that time, there's been plenty of cases where we've been band-aiding what's been going on and when you look at it decade after decade after decade, these racist events have occurred and there have been band-aids pulled over them.
"But now we're here in the new millennium, 2020, and that band-aid has been pulled off, and you see what it really is for those who have blinders on and don't really want to see what it is to go through life in America as a black man.
"It's really really hard and frustrating to grasp how others don't understand what the feelings is, but now they're seeing that things have transpired, that it's much much worse than they thought. And as I go back to that band-aid analogy - we need to sew that up.
"We need to find a way where we come together and sew that band-aid up. No longer let it be a band-aid, no longer let it be a wound that's there, we need a doctor to come in and souse that thing up. Or else the next generation is going to carry it on. They're seeing it."
NFL commissioner Roger Goodell released a statement over the weekend outlining an "urgent need for action" along with the league's commitment to addressing "systemic issues".
A number of NFL teams and players, including Super Bowl MVP Patrick Mahomes and No 1 overall pick Joe Burrow, have also spoken out on the need for change.
Norman added: "You see pictures and videos of children out there protesting, little people - those are our future. So what are we sharing with them? What are we telling them?
"I just think if you look at it overall, the scope of everything, people really need to come together and ask themselves, what can I do to help out my African American brother? What can I do, as a white person, as an American, as a Hispanic, everybody - we're all in this together - what can I do to help out the next race?
"Because if we don't, things like this are going to continue and it should start right now because everybody is being affected by it.
"The aggression is all in there and they want to get it out and express that because of what's going on and people who lost their lives for a senseless act. Just senseless.
"But it's been going on for years and decades, so now we're at a point where we can actually voice that and fight that back. So what does that look like, what are those solutions?"
Free agent quarterback Josh McCown meanwhile expressed the importance of white people 'changing the conversation' in order to snap an issue entrenched in American history.
"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 added.
"Whereas an African American in this country, the experience is vitally different and that's what I learned from my brothers around the table was that they're waking up and having conversations, just like me as a player, about the playbook.
"Just the basic things that you shouldn't even have to talk about, but you have to talk about it in an African American context. From then on 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.
"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. I'm thankful that other people, in the middle of this global pandemic, we're finally realising what the real pandemic is, and we're finally seeing it.
"I'm so heartbroken for George Floyd and his family. 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."
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