Actress Sandra Bullock suggested this week that she sometimes wishes she were black like her children, and has recalled an interaction with her six-year-old son where she discouraged him from wearing a hoodie outside because of how people would perceive him.
“To say that I wished our skins matched — sometimes I do,” Bullock said on an appearance of the Facebook show “Red Table Talk” hosted by actress Jada Pinkett Smith.
“Then it would be easier on how people approached us,” Bullock elaborated. “I have the same feelings as a woman with brown skin, and it being her babies. Or a white woman with white babies.”
Pinkett Smith’s daughter Willow interjected, “It’s the mother–child dynamic. There is no color.”
“Maybe one day that will go away,” Bullock responded. “Maybe one day we will be able to see with different eyes.”
Pinkett Smith then asked Bullock about apparent criticism concerning her decision to adopt black kids, as opposed to white children.
“No one would say that to my face,” Bullock answered. “But guess what? You get the racism. There’s been … sure, a lot of it. Guess what? Not my problem. Your sickness is not my problem.”
During a recent interview with the Grio, Bullock recalled telling her six-year-old son not to look suspicious by wearing a hoodie outside the home.
“At the age of six, he popped on a hoodie and I was like, ‘We’re going to have a conversation,’” she said, according to the Grio.
“I said, ‘What does it look like you’re doing with the hoodie?’” Bullock continued. “And he says, ‘Well, I look like I’m hiding.’ ‘Do you have anything to hide?’ He said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘Then you don’t need to wear it like that outside.’ I said, ‘People are scared and will react to you differently than if you were a white boy.’ And he knows it.”
“I let them see everything,” the actress told the outlet. “I let them hear and know everything, see it all. I don’t care if it scares them because it’s my job to let them know that outside of these safe walls, that things are different.”
Speaking about her new film, “The Unforgivable,” Bullock said it focuses on “a system of unfairness,” and related back to her sons.
“It’s a scary thing to think that when your beautiful son grows up and becomes a man, someone’s not going to treat him the way that you treat him simply because of the color of his skin,” she said. “It breaks my heart. It makes me full of rage. It makes me afraid. But all I can do is my job. Protect them. Enlighten them. Show them their power. Show them how to be safe.”
“But the system is not fair,” Bullock asserted.
Sandra Bullock…..I love you ❤️
🎥@theGrio pic.twitter.com/qmd1RXK8GW— Viola Davis (@violadavis) November 30, 2021
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