Source: Michael Tullberg / Getty
Russell Simmons visited Hot 97’s The Morning Show yesterday to promote his new energy drink and touched on the recent mass shooting in Charleston, South Carolina during the sit-down. Asked about what he and other celebrities can do in response to tragedies like this and more general injustices, Simmons offered, “You do the best you can.”
“Each of us can make a difference just by our voice, if we show up it’s even better,” he added. “We do the best we can and then we go to sleep. We get up every morning, we do the best we can, we try to be the best people we can be, we use our resources to benefit others if we can, and then we be able to sleep with ourselves, or somebody else.”
While the wound from the South Carolina incident is still fresh, the Def Jam cofounder turned his eye to local politics and called out New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio for failing to follow through on his promises to the city.
“Our police commissioner is bullying our punk mayor that we worked so hard to put in office,” he said. “He knows his kids are at risk. He knows that if a cop shoots his kid and there is no footage that cop’s not getting charged. That’s because there’s no special prosecutors. There should be independent prosecutors who don’t work for the police who have to look at these cases individually.”
“It’s shocking to me that he has not stood up for the people of New York,” he later said. “The Eric Garner case, all those cases, all those rallies, all those promises that, ‘We’re gonna have special prosecutors.’ And they haven’t done anything. They’re trying to lullaby us to sleep.”
Watch the full interview below:
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