Niecy Nash Says Police Pulled a Taser On Her Son & Asked How He Could Afford His Car

On May 25, George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer while handcuffed, on the ground and not resisting arrest. And as Niecy Nash told The Hollywood Reporter in a new interview, she’s been a “f—ing wreck” in light of everything that has unfolded. She found herself questioning the fact she’d always taught her son Dominic, 28, that compliance would keep him safe — a lesson that, in the past week, she was forced to scrutinize even more when Dominic was pulled over by cops.

“My son got stopped leaving my house last Sunday. And they pulled a taser on him for a rolling stop. 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?” Nash told THR, continuing, “They don’t know if he was a manager. 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.”

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Understandably, Nash is still grappling with the emotional weight of the incident. She explained, “So while I receive phone calls where people are saying, ‘What can white people do? What can non-black people do?’ I’m trying to figure out what to tell my own son.”

“I used to say, ‘If you just comply, get home, and if there was a wrong that happened, we’ll right it later,’” she shared. “But now we watched a murder on national TV when George Floyd was murdered. I don’t know because he complied. He was in handcuffs. He was on the ground with his hands behind his back. So I don’t even know.”

Does all of this infuriate you? Upset you? Make you want to demand change? It should. If you aren’t sure where to start, though, Nash offers some valid insight.

“It isn’t the responsibility of the oppressed to tell the oppressor what to do and how to right the wrong. So my suggestion is you need to ask non-black people what they can do,” she said, adding, “Don’t call one more black person and ask them nothing about nothing. You call the white people and ask them what they could do because black people, by definition, can’t be racist because we’re not the ones in power.”

Before you go, discover 12 books that examine systemic racism.