The following month, amid ongoing Black Lives Matter protests and calls for police reform, Union told Self, “We are feeling a lot of different things right now. Personally, I’m anxious, I’m depressed, I’m enraged, I’m heartbroken. I’m experiencing so many different feelings that these words don’t even carry the weight of it all. Waking up each morning to the non-stop murder of my brothers and sisters is excruciatingly painful. There’s terror in my body. As a family, we are all trying to cope. We are open with each other about the mixed feelings we are having and talk about the ways in which we can help bring attention to the lives that have been lost but also how we can help create real change to a system so inherently wrong across the board.”
As mom to daughter Kaavia, stepdaughter Zaya, stepsons Zaire and Xavier and “neph-son” Dahveon, she is also teaching her and husband Dwayne Wade‘s kids that they are worthy and do not need to “shape shift” to put others at ease, a change from how she herself was raised.
“Basically, if you subscribe to respectability politics, that is your pathway to success and safety,” she said of her own parents’ standpoint. However, as she told Self, “You cannot price your way out of, educate your way out of, move yourself away from racism, anti-Blackness, discrimination, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia…All of those things exist no matter how successful you are. No matter how you speak. They exist. So this idea of teaching our children to constantly be shape-shifting to make themselves more palatable or less scary for people who are committed to oppressing you anyway, no matter what you do, I rejected it. I started to reject that.”
