Through her We Are Here movement, Alicia Keys recruited a number of artists including Alicia Keys, Beyoncé, Kevin Hart, Bono and Adam Levine to create a public service announcement video that highlights the ongoing racial injustice in the country.
The title of the video is 23 Ways You Could Be Killed If You Are Black In America, or 23 Ways for short. In the video, the various artists each give out the reasons behind the deaths of certain black individuals in the U.S., according to ET Online.
All of the reasons stated in the video are very random and ordinary, yet they still led to the deaths of certain people. This notion seems to further highlight the point of the PSA that if a non-black did those things, the outcome would have probably been different.
Keys opens the video by saying "failing to signal a lane change," which refers to the case of Sandra Bland, who was arrested on July 10, 2015 due to a minor traffic violation. She was then found dead three days later inside her jail cell in Texas.
Beyoncé then follows this up with the reason "riding in your girlfriend's car with a child in the back," which is in reference to the scenario that Philando Castile was in when he was shot and killed by a police officer in Minnesota last week. This happened just a day after Alton Sterling was shot several times by a member of the Baton Rouge Police department in Louisiana.
Common, who is also in the video, states "walking away from the police," which is then followed by Queen Latifah's reason "walking toward police." These two statements respectively refer to Mario Woods and Laquan McDonald.
The video ends with Keys telling viewers to visit the We Are Here movement's website to learn more about the social issues that they are tackling, People reported.
"We demand radical transformation to heal the long history of systemic racism so that all Americans have the equal right to live and to pursue happiness," she said in the PSA.
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