George Clooney has written an essay calling for people to vote Donald Trump out of office in the forthcoming US presidential election, to help combat the racism he describes as a “pandemic”.
The actor and activist called for “systematic” changes in law enforcement, criminal justice and political leadership as protests continue around the US over the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers.
He also praised the “defiant” reaction of the millions of people around the world who are taking part in demonstrations.
“There is little doubt that George Floyd was murdered,” Clooney wrote in The Daily Beast. “We watched as he took his last breath at the hands of four police officers.”
The 59-year-old continued: “We don’t know when these protests will subside. We hope and pray that no one else will be killed. But we also know that very little will change.
“The anger and the frustration we see playing out once again in our streets is just a reminder of how little we’ve grown as a country from our original sin of slavery.”
He concluded by pointing out that “we created these issues so we can fix them” and urging US citizens to vote for change in the next election.
“This is our pandemic,” he said. “It infects all of us, and in 400 years we’ve yet to find a vaccine. It seems we’ve stopped even looking for one and we just try to treat the wound on an individual basis. And we sure haven’t done a very good job of that.”
