Former NBA player Kwame Brown, who played for several franchises such as the Washington Wizards and the Los Angeles Lakers, spoke out in defense of Kyle Rittenhouse. Rittenhouse was acquitted on November 19 in a controversial defensive gun-use case.
Brown used his former-professional-athlete status as a platform to voice his opinions about recent court cases and race relations issues.
Last week, Brown posted a video on social media where he said that Rittenhouse acted in self-defense and criticized commentators “who get paid to stoke racial grievances.”
Brown asserted that a significant portion of wealthy African American “elites” make a living by telling other African Americans that they can’t achieve success in America due to whites and systemic racism.
The former NBA player believes that the US is not as racist as some mainstream commentators would like people to believe.
In his video, Brown called out black elites and white liberals for their excessive focus on Kyle Rittenhouse when they should have focused on the Ahmaud Arbery trial.
“Kyle Rittenhouse, that to me, in my opinion, looked like self-defense,” Brown said.
Brown added, “The courts found it as self-defense. The only bad thing is that he had to sit in jail for so long because they made something political that wasn’t or shouldn’t have been political.” He proceeded to criticize individuals who he felt attempted to racialize and politicize the Rittenhouse case.
Brown stressed that individuals who bring race into every conversation do not have anything meaningful to say.
The former NBA player claims that these individuals are hypocrites because “they get paid off of talking about how racist” America is, but they “got good cars, good houses, good everything, telling you how bad it is” in America.
Brown then singled out some individuals by name, including Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Roland Martin, as people who he believes live lavishly while publicly declaring that African Americans cannot make a living in the US.
“They stayed at the hotel I stayed there, they over there living good and pimping so high,” Brown added. “So how is it so bad?”
Earlier this year, Brown started his own podcast. Before that, he spent 12 seasons in the NBA. He was selected as the No. 1 overall pick in the NBA Draft by the Washington Wizards in 2001, becoming the first top-pick to be selected straight out of high school.
