Terry Crews responds to critics questioning the race of his retired wife

Actor and game show host Terry Crews has faced criticism over assumptions about his wife’s race. He explained that his wife, Rebecca King-Crews, is biracial and, despite her light skin, was raised by a black woman. The two have been married for nearly three many years.

During an interview on Shannon Sharpe’s “Club Shay Shay” podcast, Crews said that even after 40 years with his wife, people still ask him about her racial identity and he at all times has to persuade them that she is a sista.

“She’s black, that’s right, black mom… white daddy and she was raised that way, but again, just because she doesn’t have that look, her mom is black,” the Friday After Next star said.

He also emphasized that his wife got here from a predominantly black town.

– She’s from Gary, Indiana, bro. My wife’s name was Miss Gary, Indiana in 1984. And Gary, Indiana is like Flint,” Crews continued. “It’s just Black people. She was raised in black culture, so it wasn’t like she was raised on the periphery.

Although Rebecca grew up in Gary, she didn’t meet Crews until his sophomore 12 months at Western Michigan, where she served as music minister at a church near his school. They married in 1989, three years before he entered the NFL.

After Terry’s skilled football profession from 1991 to 1997, he took up acting.

In 2010, the world met his wife and family (five children and later one grandson) once they appeared on the reality show “The Family Crews”.

Many people on social media commented on the need to make clear the wife’s race.

“Why (does) the race of his wife matter, for whom it matters whether she is white/black,” asked one user X.

“Knowing that his wife is biracial makes all the smoking that Terry Crews was doing for black women a few years ago look even worse,” wrote one other social media user.

Crews got here under fire in 2020 when critics claimed he dismissed Gabrielle Union’s claims of racism on “America’s Got Talent” while she was a co-host. In a January 2020 interview with “Today,” Crews actually said that the allegations of racism against “AGT” were made anonymously and never by Union — at that time, the claims got here from a Variety article citing an anonymous source — so he could only say that his experience as co-host of “AGT” was positive.

Many pointed this out, saying he had an issue with black women. In the interview with Sharpe, he also talked about how he apologized to Union and her husband, Dwyane Wade. His wife was also there to help heal the wound.

Fans admitted that King-Crew can have had a black upbringing, but wondered what that actually meant.

“Wait, is she black or not…. Because “being raised in black culture” doesn’t automatically make you black. Ask Rachel…Like what?!” one other comment To read.

“I’m not sure why he said it that way because she’s really mixed,” said one one that posted photos of the Crews couple once they were young.

Photos of King Crews, pulled from her social media, from her childhood show that she is as black as many families in America.

The 58-year-old was born to Anna King Lund and Samuel Dean King, a mixed-race couple who married in 1965, two years before the U.S. Supreme Court’s historic decision in Loving v. Virginia, a landmark civil rights ruling that prohibition laws interracial marriages violate the equal protection and due process clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

The world has modified dramatically in the last 60-plus years when it comes to marrying people of one other race. In 1967, when the Loving judgment was handed down, only 3 percent of marriages in the country were interracial. Nowadays, this rate has increased to 17 percent of newlyweds.

Moreover, in 1958, Gallup asked Americans whether or not they accepted interracial couples. Only 4 percent of respondents agreed with this. In 2022, the survey asked the same query, and acceptance of interracial marriage in the U.S. reached a brand new high of 94%.

Even with this high acceptance rate, many individuals have racial and marital problems.

During the interview, Sharpe pressed the actor to explain how he handled the discrimination his family faced from closed-minded people willing to misidentify her race. Crews said it was something that they had develop into accustomed to in any case these years.

Crews said: “That’s what I like about her. It never bothered her.

“She said, ‘I really like Black people, and even when some people think I’m white, I understand that.’ … Wow, that’s profound to me,” he said.

“I had to start thinking like that because I always got angry,” he added. “But to look at her, the way she handled things peacefully, saying, ‘I’m not going to go there. You know what? It’s a trauma they had to deal with and I understand that. But I love them anyway.”