David Oyelowo found it "emasculating" having to warn his sons they wouldn’t be treated fairly by police.
The ‘Selma’ actor – who has two sons and two daughters with wife Jessica – admitted he has spent "so much" time crying since the death of George Floyd, who passed away after an arresting officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes, because he realised even avoiding confrontation with cops may not be enough for black people to walk away unharmed.
David appeared on the first night of Oprah Winfrey’s two-part special, ‘Where Do We Go From Here?’, and the host asked him about the emotional video he recently shared on line in which he discussed having "the talk" with his son about how people of colour should deal with the police.
He said: "I posted [the video] because I had made the mistake of thinking that things would be different for my son.
"I say mistake because I had watched things progress in some ways, and then the knee on the neck is so symbolic of so much. It’s something I didn’t realise that I had internalised in a way that makes it difficult for me to function. I didn’t realize how deep the wounds were.
"I have spent so much of the last two weeks crying.
"One of the moments where that began was when I went to speak to my son and I didn’t have the words, because George Floyd wasn’t resisting arrest.
"So it’s not like saying to my son, ‘Put your hands on the dash, don’t be confrontational.’ Those conversations are already emasculating to basically say, ‘Forget about justice in an interaction with the police, come home alive.’ "
But Oprah insisted David wasn’t alone in making the "mistake" as she admitted "every black parent" feels the need to have a similar conversation with their children.
She said: "Yeah. And for everybody who’s watching who is not black, that is the conversation, that is the talk that every black parent has had to have with their children, particularly their sons."