Top Quotes: “Tough: My Journey to True Power” — Terry Crews

Introduction

“Rebecca stepped in and started with the officer, saying it wasn’t my fault, but this cop didn’t want to hear anything we had to say. I was going to jail. He walked over, taking his cuffs out, and he was pulling my arms back behind me when this old white man walked up, waving his arms and saying, “No, no, no! I saw the whole thing, officer! This man was with his wife and this guy was bothering them. This man was protecting his wife. You’ve got the wrong guy.”

It was literally one white guy telling another white guy, “No! You’re arresting the wrong Negro! It’s the other Negro!” But you know what? Thank God he did. If I’d been arrested that night, I would have gone to prison, and everything would have been over. But thanks to the word of one old white man, the cop decided to let me go. We thanked the old white guy, got our car from the valet, went on to the wrap party with Adam Sandler and Chris Rock, and played the whole thing off like a funny “Isn’t this crazy?” anecdote for the rest of the night.

But it wasn’t funny. It wasn’t just that my rage might have ruined my whole life that night — it had been ruining my life, for years.

After we got home from the wrap party that night, Rebecca sat me down and said, “Terry, you have to promise me promise me that you will never ever get violent like that again. I know that man shoved my arm, but I will be okay. If you do this again, either you are going to wind up in prison or the police are going to kill you, and I’ll lose you forever.”

“But Becky …” I said.

“Nope, nope, promise me. Promise that if anything like this ever happens again, you will walk away.”

So I promised her that I would. “Okay,” I said. “T’lI walk away.”

What I didn’t know at the time, what I would come to understand only with hindsight, is that I wasn’t merely promising to walk away from a fight. I was promising to walk from the man I had become. I had grown up and lived my entire adult life with a false idea of what it meant to be tough. I walked around this world with my chest puffed out, like I was the alpha male. I saw myself only as strong and powerful. In fact, I was weak and powerless, and everything I did was driven by shame, insecurity, and fear.

When I promised Rebecca to walk away from that fight, I took the first step on a road to becoming a completely different person, and to become a completely different person, you need more than a promise. You need therapy. You need mentorship. You need love and support and patience from your family and friends. More than anything, you need time. As I write this, it’s been seventeen years since I made that promise to Rebecca, and it’s only now that I can look back and fully understand and articulate how I made the journey from there to here.”

Childhood

“I discovered the gym when I was thirteen years old. I had never been big before. I wasn’t scrawny, really, just on the skinny side of average, and being bigger had always been an obsession. I used to dream of being powerful and strong like the superheroes in my comic books.”

“I was obsessed with being bigger — tougher. I loved to draw, and I used to sit at the kitchen table for hours, drawing superheroes and villains with big, bulging muscles. My idol was my uncle Buddy. He had the biggest arms I’d ever seen on a man. He was a giant. Every time I saw him I’d say, “Make a muscle!” and he would. Then I’d jump on it and he’d hold me up with one arm and I would hang on to him, in awe.

Then I found the gym. Berston Field House was down the street from my school, Flint Academy, in Flint, Michigan. The gym was down in the dingy basement. It was primitive compared with what gyms are today, just pig iron, a bench, and one leg machine. But I’d do that all day, back and forth. Leg machine, bench. Leg machine, bench. At home, I would put my feet underneath my bed and do sit-ups until my stomach was so cramped and numb with pain I’d have to curl up in a ball. Then I’d wait until the feeling came back, and I would do more, going and going to the point where it would be difficult to walk.”

“This was a time when exercising every day and bodybuilding were considered strange. Everyone around me thought I was crazy. They used to look at me like, “Why are you doing all this?” I couldn’t have articulated an answer at the time, but looking back now, the reason is obvious: I was getting ready to kill my father.

My father and I share the same name. Growing up I was always Little Terry, and he was always Big Terry. He was aptly named. He was a burly, intimidating man with calloused hands the size of bowling balls and a deep voice that filled me with fear. We lived in an old house with creaky floors, and when he walked, every step would reverberate through the walls BOOM, BOOM, BOOM. When he stumbled home at midnight, piss drunk and spoiling. for a fight with my mom, it felt like an earthquake shaking the house down to the foundation, or like Godzilla raging through downtown Tokyo, laying waste to everything in sight.

One of my earliest memories is of my dad knocking my mother out. Their fights were epic. My brother Marcelle and I shared a bedroom that was separated from the living room by only a thin dividing wall. We used to curl up in our bunk beds, petrified, pulling the covers up over our heads and listening to our father yell and stomp and bounce our mother off the walls.

The fights used to spill over into our room, too. The bedroom door would fly open and light would flood in and she would come bursting in ahead of him, telling us to get dressed, making a big show about taking us and leaving him and never coming back.

“I’m takin’ the boys! I’m doin’ it! I’m goin’!”

“You do that, and you’ll be sorry!”

I would bolt up in bed, my heart beating wildly, scared of what was happening, scared that we might be running out in the middle of the night and, at the same time, scared that we’d be staying in the middle of this madness.

But of course, we never went anywhere. It was an empty threat, a card she could play. Turning on a dime, she’d storm back out of the room, Big Terry close behind her, telling us to go back to sleep. But sleep was impossible. I could still hear them in the living room — and I’d stay up for hours waiting for the adrenaline to wear off, eventually falling into an uneasy sleep that offered no rest at all. Eventually, as Marcelle and I grew bolder, we’d climb down out of our beds in our matching onesie pajamas and open the door a crack so we could peek through and watch the action in the other room. Mom’s hair would be all messed up. Sometimes she’d be fending him off with a kitchen knife. They’d yell back and forth for what felt like forever.

“You ain’t nothin’! You’re a drunk. I’m sick of you.”

“Leave me alone, Trish. Don’t make me do somethin’! Don’t make me do somethin’!”

She’d hit him and push him away and it would escalate and escalate until finally he’d haul off on her. “You made me do this!” POW! She’d hit the floor, and the room would go silent, leaving only the sound of her sobs.

The one saving grace was that, for all the violence Big Terry did to our mom, he never laid a finger on us. She always told him, “I’ll kill you if you ever touch these kids,” and he never crossed that line. But that didn’t stop me from fearing that one day he might, and it did nothing to save me from the terrible feeling that consumed me every minute of every day: being powerless.”

“I’d sit and watch these stories about men murdering their wives and their children, and I’d think, “Yeah. My father could do that.” It was never in my mind to kill Big Terry. I never raised a hand to him; I was too scared. But I always felt a big confrontation between the two of us was coming. One day he was going to go too far, and when he did, I’d need to be strong enough to take him out. And I knew that he knew that that’s what I was thinking, because he’d call me on it. “Don’t you ever think you can take me,” he’d say. Of course, once he said it, I couldn’t help but think about it more. So I hit the gym, and I decided to make myself as big, as strong, and as tough as I could.”

“What I managed to piece together over the years, because it was never explained to me when he was sober, is that my dad was raised by his grandmother because his mother had abandoned him. But it wasn’t like his mother was out of the picture. She still lived in this tiny town of a thousand people; he’d see her all the time. So my dad grew up in a bizarre situation. There was a woman down the street he didn’t live with, but he still called her Mama. Then there was the grandmother who raised him, and she was called Other Mama. My dad had a brother and three sisters, and Other Mama raised them, too. They all had different fathers; nobody’s ever told me much about any of them.

My dad left Edison at eighteen, joined the military, and after being stationed over in Germany for a while, came back to the States and followed all the other black folks heading up North to look for work. He signed on at the GM plant in Flint, eventually working his way up to be a foreman on the second shift.”

“I also used to sit and watch my dad getting ready for work, wanting to be close to him and learn about the ways of the world from him, but I never was able to. Sober Terry didn’t like to talk. In the mornings, all I ever got out of him were clipped, one-word answers.”

“I was dying for any kind of affection or recognition from my father, and I only ever got it on a handful of occasions. Some nights he’d barge into my room, flip on the light, and stand unsteadily by our bunk bed, holding court for me and Marcelle. On one of those nights he jolted me awake and I stared at him, paralyzed as he came closer to the bed, scared of what he might do. But then he said, “Boy, I love your mother. I love you guys.” I puffed up with happiness. It might have been nothing more than a sloppy, drunken confession, but it was the most acknowledgment I’d ever received. I was still smiling when he stumbled out of the room.

The next morning, Big Terry was leaning over a sheet of newspaper, shining his shoes before work as always. I strolled up to where he sat, and smiled and said, “Hey, Dad. I love you.”

“Hm-hm,” he said, not even looking up. It was like the night before had never happened. I was crushed. Even though I was scared of drunk, after-work dad, I started to think that that dad might be the only one I’d be able to connect with. A couple of nights later, I screwed up the courage to approach him in his chair. He was sitting there, listening to his Bobby Womack, and I leaned in and kissed him on his cheek. He turned and looked at me like I was crazy. I’ll never forget it. It was a look of disgust. I backed away from him so fast I nearly tripped over my own feet.

I never made that mistake again. Whether he was sober or drunk, I kept myself apart from him as much as I could. Eventually it got to the point that if he was coming, I was going. I was scared of him. But what I was really scared of was the knowledge that, deep down, I was so similar to him.”

“One afternoon I was chatting with Andy Samberg on the set of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and he asked me, “Hey, I heard you don’t drink. Is that true?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“You mean you’ve never had a drink? Like, not a drop?”

“I’ve had a sip, but I’ve never liked it. Not for me.”

“C’mon, you’ve never gotten wasted? Why not?”

“Because,” I said. “I don’t want to find out what would happen if I did.”

And that’s the truth. It’s a can of worms I’ve never wanted to open, because I know for a fact that I would become a violent drunk like my father.”

“I had a whole summer where kids were nervous to come over. “You cool, Terry?” they’d ask before coming up the driveway. “You cool?” “Yeah, yeah,” I’d say. “I’m cool.” Even as a kid, I knew I need to control my temper because I don’t like being alone. I had to behave differently so people would stay. If I didn’t get picked, I would bite my tongue and say, “You guys want some Kool-Aid?” Then I’d go in the house and get some Kool-Aid and take a minute to wind down.”

“What saved my life was Flint Academy, a magnet school that was the last, best hope for anybody who wanted to make it out of Flint. I loved to sketch and draw and paint, and in seventh grade, because of my talent in art, I was invited to enroll. Flint Academy was 60 percent black, 38 percent white, and 2 percent everyone else. That 38 percent white was the school’s saving grace, because it meant the city still cared about it enough to not write it off the way all-black schools were, and still are, being written off all the time. I had teachers and coaches who cared about me, and all the students were encouraged to care about school and aim to go to college and make something of themselves.”

“I think the deeper reason he did what he did was that he needed someone to look up to him. Everyone wants, and needs, respect. Everyone wants to feel looked up to by someone else. That’s true of men and women, but our society makes it especially true for men. You’re nothing in this world if you don’t have that status.

And that’s what my brother and I gave to Chris. We were his audience. Anything he did, we worshipped. We made him feel like a man, and in the absence of any real male role models, Chris was the best example we had of what a man should be. Which, when I look back, is terrifying. Chris was street smart, but that’s all he was. I spent the night over at his house one time and was asking him all these questions about girls, and he started filling my head with everything he knew, most of which was wrong. “Look, man, to get a bitch, you gotta have game,” he said. The “game,” it turned out, was to lie. Game was making a girl believe you cared. “Tell her you love her even if you don’t,” Chris told me. And on and on like that. It was like learning a magic spell, playing a depressing game of make-believe, and I was nodding along, soaking it up, because he was literally the only role model I had.

The sad truth is that Chris and the Top Dawgs were boys pretending to be men. The even sadder truth is that a lot of the men in our neighborhood were men pretending to be men. I can remember going to the barbershop on Saturdays. It would take five hours to get your hair cut because older guys would walk in and cut ahead of you, and there was nothing you could do except wait.”

“I’d say for every ten black men I saw around the neighborhood, four of them were out of work. They had no way to support their families, no sense of purpose, no means to earn dignity and respect. They had no way to be men — at least, not according to the standards of what it meant to be a man at the time.

These guys had nothing to do to pass their days except hang around on the corner all day. All the neighborhood kids used to play football in the street, and inevitably a handful of these guys would always saunter over to get in on the action. I’m talking about grown men competing in a kids’ game. Maybe they were bored or just reliving their youth, but for whatever reason they’d decided it was their job to make us tough, and they didn’t mess around.

During one game, I took my position on the line, ready to get moving as soon as the play started. Then a big, grizzled man in his late twenties or early thirties, his arms roped with muscle, hunched down across from me. I was thirteen years old, and this guy was staring me down, psyching me out. “Hey, little nigger,” he said. “You ain’t gonna do shit in here.” The second the ball was snapped, he lunged at me. Knowing better than to show any fear, I ran at him as hard as he was coming at me. He tackled me and smacked me down on the pavement so hard I could feel the pain in every inch of my body. I lay there, gravel sticking into the back of my head, trying to catch my breath, but in an instant I was up. I knew if I showed any weakness I was done. I took hits that hard from grown men every time I played in these neighborhood pickup games. It was kill or be killed.”

“Being an athlete, being strong, gave me a sense of status and self-esteem I didn’t get anywhere else, with the exception of my talent as an artist. In a society where people’s worth is judged by their wealth, I never had much. I never had any allowance to buy nice shoes or go out to cool places. Add to that the fact that my grades were just okay. I wasn’t dumb, but I wasn’t an A-plus honor roll kid, so I was always scared of people thinking I was dumb. My strength and my ability on the field helped me compensate for all those feelings of inadequacy. Maybe I didn’t have the prettiest girlfriend, maybe I wasn’t the richest or the smartest kid in school, but I could be bigger and tougher than anybody. My body was literally the only thing over which I had some measure of control, and I used it.

It was also true that being an athlete was one of the few things that got you a pass from the gangs. You were seen as having promise. “Okay, he’s got a chance of making it out. Don’t fuck that up for him.” Plus, if you had some neck and back on you, they’d think twice about coming after vou. Still, it was hard being on the outside of that, because in the hood, gang culture defined what it meant to be a man.”

Tough

“I was surprised to find out that joining the NFL meant I hadn’t left the streets at all. I had teammates who were gang members. And I’m not talking about “former” gang members. These were guys with active ties to the Crips and the Bloods, and they brought all that macho bullshit into the locker room with them. The need to put up that front doesn’t go away the second you get a signing bonus and a house. It takes years to unlearn. Getting those big NFL signing checks hadn’t taken these guys out of that culture. It had amplified it.”

“It had changed nothing. It was just me beating the shit out of my own father. On Christmas.

The whole thing was tragic and pathetic and sad. Even though my father had been so violent and a lot of people might say he deserved it, a real violation of nature took place that night. A son beating his father is something that shouldn’t happen.

The holiday was ruined. Everybody tried to put on a happy face for the kids, but there wasn’t much point. We stayed a couple of days and then flew home. I was happy to go.

I didn’t set foot back in Flint for the next ten years.”

“As the self-appointed alpha male, I was trying to control everything. After I started making good money on Everybody Hates Chris, one afternoon I took Rebecca’s old car and traded it in and got her a huge black Escalade. It had rims and tinted windows and everything. It wasn’t what she wanted at all. It was too big, too ostentatious, too “Look at me.” She’d been perfectly happy with her old car, but I ignored what she wanted because I wanted my wife to have the big status symbol. I liked how her having the car would make me look like the big shot I thought I was. I’d picked it out for her, and told her it was what she should drive, without ever asking her what she wanted. And it was the same with meals, vacations, everything. I’d always made all the decisions and expected my family to like it because it was what I wanted.”

“The purpose of being tough is not to attack, but to protect. The purpose of being strong is not to dominate, but to support. The purpose of having power is not to rule, but to serve. What I’ve learned is that to be a true man is to be the ultimate servant. With any talent or advantage that life has given you, whether by birth or by circumstance, your duty is to use that advantage in the service of others.”

“I can honestly say that the toughest, most masculine thing l’ve ever done was not stomping a man who bumped the arm of my pregnant wife. The toughest, most masculine thing I’ve ever done is to come forward as a survivor of sexual assault, because it was something I did to put my strength and my power in the service of others, to try to protect the voices of those who were scared to come forward themselves.

I still have an ego – a huge, huge ego. I spent my whole life trying to satisfy that ego by getting more and more for myself: more money, more power, more control. But the ego was never satisfied, because those things can never satisfy you. But once I humbled myself and put myself in the service of others, guess what? The ego was fnally sated. I was nourished. Because by using my strength on behalf of others, I was finally serving my purpose as a man.

I still have feelings of rage, too. They haven’t entirely gone away. But now that I know what they are, I know how to deal with them.”

“I feel that rage coming on and I tell myself, “Yo. . . relax. You’re good right where you’re at.” Because I am good right where I’m at. Life’s a game of musical chairs; sometimes you don’t get a chair. You can either get mad that you don’t have a chair, or choose to be happy doing something else.

I choose to be happy.”

“As abusive as Big Terry was to my mom, he never laid a finger on us. I think I got a spanking from him maybe twice, and it was nothing, But Trish would beat the snot out of us. If one of us mouthed off, Powl, she’d pop us right in the face, When it was bad, when I knew a real whoopin’ was coming, I’d run. I ran all over that house, trying to escape her, but she always caught me. She’d make me lie down and take my pants down, and she’d get out the belt and it would be WHAP! WHAP! WHAP!

Screaming or crying would only make it worse, She’d be whoopin’ and I’d be cryin’ and she’d yell “Be quiet!’ Then she’d hit me harder, which only made me scream louder, which only made her yell more. I learned to force myself to stay silent, hoping it would be over sooner if I did what she said, but the whoopings were always long and drawn out and horrible no matter what

I lived in constant fear of her hand. My brother and sister got it bad, but I got it worse. The reason for that, I believe, is that I look like my father. I was the embodiment of her abuser, only smaller, weaker, and unable to stand up for myself. Back in the day, before everyone had video cameras, we used to make audio tapes of ourselves playing and talking. A few years ago I broke out an old cassette I had of me and my siblings playing games and singing church songs. On this tape, four-year-old me was singing a gospel song. At the time I didn’t enunciate well because I had some hearing problems, so I was messing up the lyrics and POW!, she smacked me hard across the face. “Stop it!” she said. “Sing it right!” What’s truly weird is that we used to listen back to those tapes as kids and we would laugh. “Whoa, Mom really popped you! That’s hilarious!” But looking back as an adult, it’s the saddest thing in the world.”

“Her mother, my grandmother, had been part of the migration up to Flint to work in the auto factories. She worked at AC Spark Plug for almost forty years. She sat on the assembly line, putting a nut on a bolt – the same nut on the same bolt – nine hours a day, every day, for forty years. That was considered a good job. It paid well, and she was happy to have it. She saved her money, too. My grandmother owned her house, bought the duplex next door to our house as a rental property, and even drove a Cadillac. She was set.”

“So those folks from Georgia were around, different cousins and aunts and uncles. We just didn’t see them.

Because we were in a cult.

My whole childhood we attended Greater Holy Temple Church of God in Christ, a Pentecostal denomination.”

“My father had family up in Flint, too. His brother Sonny lived nearby. The few times we went over to his house, folks would be drinking and listening to music, and my mother would sit there and not talk to anybody. She had an attitude like “This is beneath me. I’m holy and I’m saved and I don’t do that.” She acted as if we would get dirty if we spent too much time with those people. So, of course, they didn’t like her, either. They thought she was stuck up and that she was a snob, and they were correct.”

“I felt nothing. I tried. I prayed for it. I begged God for it, and every week I waited for this thing that would come and take me and make me run around, shaking and speaking in tongues. But it never happened.”

“What my father knew, and what my mother had chosen to ignore, was that Elder Jones was (a) sleeping with several of the married women at the church, (b) selling crack out of the pulpit, and (c) smoking a fair amount of crack himself. (All of which is true, You can read about it in his book When Life Hurts, Dreams Fade, Hope Again, by Bishop Roger L. Jones Sr. he’s still around preaching today.)”

“Elder Jones wasn’t the only one at church leading a double life. Homosexuality was loudly denounced, but the choir director was gay. He had boyfriends on the side. Everybody knew, but it was always “don’t ask, don’t tell.” As long as he stayed in the closet to give everyone plausible deniability, nothing was ever said.

At least forcing the choir director to hide his personal life didn’t harm anyone except the choir director.

The church’s sexual hypocrisy had other, darker consequences as well. There were child molesters in the congregation, serial abusers. The older kids would warn you about them. “Yo, don’t go anywhere with that dude. Don’t get in his car.”

“Why not?”

“He’ll turn you out.”

My mother knew who they were, too, and she’d quietly steer me and Marcelle away from them. But she’d never actually say anything, and these guys would go on hunting for other victims.”

“She called me stupid a lot. That was her blanket answer for why I wasn’t allowed to do anything. “Why can’t I do it?” “Because you’re stupid and you’ll get in trouble.” It was an insult that cut extra deep. Marcelle had struggled with real learning disabilities; he’d been held back a grade, and I’d seen the way people treated him because of it.

To this day, if someone treats me like I’m less intelligent, or like I’m too dumb to follow what they’re telling me, it makes me really, really angry. Because I hated it when my mother called me stupid.

She would still hit me, too. Even as I was bulking up in the gym and becoming a varsity football player, she’d smack me like I was still five years old. Usually I didn’t let it get to me, but one time she whacked me, and before I could stop myself, I lifted my hand in the air, as a reflex. I was never going to hit her, and I was already lowering my hand when she snapped, “You raise your hand at me?” Big Terry happened to be walking into the room, and Trish turned to him with a wild look in her eye and said, “Terry, he was gonna hit me! He was gonna hit me!”

Big Terry started running after me and caught me at the stairs and tried to kick me. He missed and I looked back and he was howling in pain. He’d chipped a bone in his foot. Served him right.”

College

“Before I got to Western Michigan, I never would have thought of myself as a man who hated women. I was “the nice guy.” Because I couldn’t date in high school, I was also the safe guy, the sweet guy. My best friends were three white girls I ate lunch with every day. They were wonderful.”

“Maranatha was mixed. Mostly white, but it heavily recruited black kids, especially among student athletes. Rose Weiner, however, was very white, and when she took to the podium to give her speech to all the black students, she said, “We have to be grateful for the love of God, and for Christianity, and for all of you being saved, because if it weren’t for Christianity, all of you would be worshipping idols in the jungle.”

You could almost hear a collective snap as every head in the room whipped around simultaneously to stare at her. The same expression was on every face, too: “Oh, she did not just say that.”

I couldn’t believe it. I sat there, trying so hard to process what she’d said that I couldn’t pay attention to another word she spoke. Once she was done, Brett Fuller, one of Maranatha’s few black ministers, took over the stage.

Brett is currently the senior pastor of Grace Covenant Church in Virginia along with being the chaplain for the NFL’s Washington, DC, team.

“Now,” he said, “you all know we needed to hear that.”

“Nope,” I thought. “I did not need to hear that at all. The Kool-Aid may have gotten to you, brother. But not to me.””

“After Maranatha, I decided I would never again give myself over to any religious organization. To this day I have an allergic reaction to it. It’s visceral. Anytime I hear gospel music, I can feel myself getting angry as the dark memories come flooding back. I hate any kind of choir music; when gospel singers come on America’s Got Talent, I literally have to stop and remind myself to evaluate them on their merits and not let my own bad experiences get in the way.”

“On top of my father’s violent alcoholism and my mother’s abusive personality, poverty was yet another reason why I had to put Flint in my rearview. It was also the reason I didn’t follow my dream on the way out. Football was not my dream. What I loved was art. Visual art. Painting, sketching, sculpting. I’d started drawing when Marcelle went off to kindergarten, leaving me home alone with Trish all day. To keep me busy, she’d set out crayons and pencils on our brown wooden coffee table. I’d grab a pencil and kneel over the paper and let my imagination take over. Drawing was cathartic. I could visualize a different kind of world and escape to it. I could control what happened on the page or the canvas the way I couldn’t control anything in life. I had the talent and the aptitude for it, too. Starting in elementary school, all of my teachers had nurtured that talent. My high school art teacher, Mr. Eichelberg, used to tell me I was the best student he’d ever had. Even my father — a man who rarely took notice of anything his children were doing used to look at my drawings and paintings and say, “Boy, you’re like a Michelangelo right there!”

That was my dream, to be an artist. I loved movies and pop culture as much as fine art and dreamed of becoming an animator or a set designer on films. I was talented enough to follow that path if I wanted to, but by senior year, my parents had already told me, “You ain’t got no money for college. We’re tryin’ to put it together, but don’t go gettin’ your hopes up.”

The place I wanted to go to college was the Center for Creative Studies in Detroit, but there was no way they were going to give me a full ride. They didn’t have a football team, so that meant no football scholarship, either. If I went there, I would need to pay my own tuition, and that wasn’t going to happen.”

“All. my memories of childhood involve us having no money. My mother bouncing checks and juggling Peter to pay Paul, and always with the constant refrain of “We don’t have it. We don’t have it. We don’t have it.” But we did have it. We just didn’t keep it. My father had a job, a good job. He was a foreman, a management-level position with General Motors, one of the largest and richest corporations in the world. For a black man in the 1970s who’d grown up with nothing in Jim Crow Georgia, my father had done well for himself. But he drank, and he gambled. And that’s where the money went.”

“Once we were a bit older, Marcelle and I started going out and finding our own odd jobs, getting paid a few dollars here and there to mow lawns and shovel snow. My dad, knowing this, always used to come and stand in the doorway to our room and say, “You guys got any money?” We couldn’t lie to him, so we’d say, “Uhhhhh… yeah.”

“Okay,” he’d say. “Lemme see it. Don’t worry, I’ll give it back.”

So we would give him everything we’d saved, and then we’d never see it again. Marcelle was a meticulous saver.

At one point, he’d saved up almost $400 under his mattress, which in those days was a crazy amount of money. Then one night my father walked in and snatched it, and my brother never saw that money again.

I learned that lesson quickly: if you get it, spend it.”

Acting

“That’s how life actually works. Luck doesn’t fall on you from the sky. You can’t just name it and claim it. Yes, it’s luck, and you don’t control when or where it happens — or if it’s good luck or bad — but it comes only if you’re working for it. It comes as the fruit of what you’re putting out into the universe. For a long time, the only vibe I was giving off was arrogance, selfishness, and entitlement, and nothing came my way. After my experience at Labor Ready, I was giving off only exuberance and enthusiasm and dedication, no matter how menial the task. People noticed.

With Cast Security, I started working on movie sets, Jim Carrey’s Man on the Moon, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s End of Days. I didn’t look like your average movie set security guard. I would iron my shirts, stand at attention. I would be pleasant and upbeat all day, and I wasn’t faking it. As far as I was concerned, I was in the movie business. Doing any job on a film set, to me, was like paid film school. I decided to make every day a learning experience, to make good use of every single moment of every single shift.

There were days when I worked twelve hours straight. Since I didn’t have time to go to the gym, I’d jog in place for an hour, and that was my day’s workout. If there was a light pole without many people around, I’d jump on it and do pull-ups, then drop on the ground and do push-ups, too. I didn’t let my brain atrophy, either. I went to the library and filled up a gym bag with books on the entertainment industry. When no one was looking, I read book after book after book. I even wrote scripts standing up sometimes. I spent every day filled with joy from the privilege of being at this job.

One afternoon, while working on End of Days, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s makeup artist, a guy named Jeff Dawn, walked by me and said, “Dude, are you a security guard?”

“Yes, I am, sir.”

“You should be in there on the set. You need to be in the movies. You’ve got a great look.”

I thought he was hitting on me. “Thank you, sir,” I said.

“No, man. I’m telling you. You belong in front of a camera.”

I shrugged it off. I’d only ever wanted to work in the movie business, not be in movies themselves. Then the same thing happened on a couple of other sets, so I asked Rebecca, “Do you think I should try this acting thing? People keep telling me I should.”

“It can’t hurt,” she said. “We’ve got nothing else. Go for it.”

So I went for it. A guy I knew through Cast Security heard about auditions for a new reality show, a modern-day gladiator competition called Battle Dome. I went in, I auditioned, and I got it.

A year later I got my first major acting job in Schwarzenegger’s next movie, The 6th Day. When I walked into the makeup trailer, Jeff Dawn was there, and he said, “Hmm, you look familiar …”

“I know,” I said. “A year ago I was working as a security guard on End of Days and you told me I should be in the business. And here I am.”

“Oh my God!” he exclaimed. “I remember you. Standing outside the place! And now you’re here on this movie. I’m making people rich, I knew it! I knew it!” And that’s when stuff started happening. From that moment came Training Day. Friday after Next. White Chicks. The Longest Yard. Idiocracy. It all started with a broom and me crying my eyes out sweeping up a factory floor. That was the moment that saved my life.”

“Tithing 10 percent of your income is like that hour at the gym. It’s a way of imposing discipline on yourself. It’s giving something up to get more in return. Because that’s how the world operates. That’s how everything operates. It’s a basic, universal principle. There is no free lunch. You never get something for nothing. The sweepstakes and the lotteries are BS. Tithing is the diametric opposite of the sweepstakes mentality I’d grown up with. In order to receive, you first have to give. It’s not “They got theirs, how come I ain’t getting mine?” It’s “Let me give to them so that I get mine in return.””

“I always seek to provide value in the entertainment that I create, but in addition to that, tithing makes every dollar 1 earn valuable no matter what, because 10 percent of every dollar is going to someone in need. When the Bible speaks of giving back, it tells the story of farmers who, when harvesting from their orchards, always leave something on the vine for those who have nothing. If you have ten apples, you pick nine and leave one. That’s what I do. Ten percent of every dollar I make goes to pay for a shelter to help a woman like my mom escape a man like my dad. Ten percent of every dollar I make goes to helping a kid like my childhood friend Chris stay off the streets. Ten percent of every dollar I make goes to helping students get the kind of scholarship that would have allowed me to follow my dream of going to art school. Because I tithe, everything I do has value.

When I bring up tithing, people always ask me, “How do you make money by giving money away?” But the fact is that tithing creates a virtuous cycle. Money has to flow like a river. If you dam it up and keep it all to yourself, you’ve stopped the flow of the river, and eventually it’s going to run dry and there’s nothing more coming back to you. Meanwhile, you blow what you’ve got on fancy cars and clothes to make up for the emptiness in your life, and eventually you’re broke. By releasing it and letting it flow, you’ve created a bigger waterway, and more money is going to come back your way. And that sounds very Pollyanna and kumbaya. But it’s the only way society works.

Just as I learned that the best thing to do with my strength as a man was to put it in service of other people, the same thing is true of money. The best way to become successful is to serve people. The more people you serve, the more valued you are. The more valued you are, the more you receive, which can come in the form of more money, or it can come in the form of other intangibles that are worth more than money, like happiness, respect, and a sense of purpose. Work becomes its own blessing. So now, the question I ask myself every morning is not “How do I make more money?” The question I ask myself is “How do I increase my value?””

“If you force yourself to do something for twenty-one days, it will become a habit, which means no matter how bad your circumstance is, you can change your life in twenty-one days.”

“As we drove, I started to think about an experience I’d had a few years earlier working on Everybody Hates Chris. There was a guy I worked with on the show. We got along well, and he would come by my dressing room all the time and we’d hang out and talk. Most days he wanted to talk about the problems he was having with his wife. Everything was “she’s too this” and “she’s upset about that.” As you do in those situations, I’d commiserate with him. “Yeah, man. I hear you. My wife does that all the time.” At first it was a way to have a laugh and pass the time, but eventually these hangouts turned into gripe sessions about marriage. Fast-forward a couple of months, and I found myself at home, getting irritated by every little thing Rebecca did, even if she wasn’t doing anything. I’d just be in a bad mood. That’s when I realized, “It’s him. It’s that guy.” I’d given him my aux cord. I’d let him jack right into my mind and influence my thoughts. No marriage is perfect, of course, but this guy and his gripe sessions were slowly but surely making me focus almost entirely on the things about my wife and my marriage that I didn’t like, instead of focusing on the positive things that I knew were wonderful. Once I realized what these gripe sessions were doing, I started making myself busy whenever he came by. “Can’t talk right now, man! Sorry! Gotta go.” Once I did that, right away I started appreciating my marriage again. I was less irritable, and my attitude improved.”

“To this day, if you ask most black guys of my generation who inspired them to get into comedy, nine out of ten will say Richard Pryor. For me it was Carol Burnett. Everything about my love for comedy and entertainment was born out of the experience of watching that show with my mother.”

“When he said that, I thought, “If he can do this for me, I can get my grades up for him.” I made the honor roll every semester after that.

The irony is that Coach Lee’s approval meant so much to me, and I was such a pleaser and approval seeker to my core, that I spent the next decade chasing a dream that wasn’t actually mine. I gave everything to that game; my blood, my body, and my soul. Then one day years later while I was in the NFL, I was out on the field at practice and I realized, “Wait a minute. I don’t actually like football.” Because I didn’t. I just liked being outside and the camaraderie that came with being a part of a team. The game itself? Never liked it one bit. But Coach Lee’s praise meant that much to me. His was the only voice I heard in the darkness, so I followed it.”

Activism

“We’d been there only twenty minutes when I noticed out of the corner of my eye that a guy across the room was looking and leering at me. He was stocky, around five feet five inches, bald with a goatee, and it looked to me like he was on something, like he was tweaking. He was acting like Tyrone Biggums, that Dave Chappelle crack-addict character. His eyes were all over the place, and he kept sticking his tongue out and wagging it around, the way someone would do if they were pretending to be the devil. It was weird, but no weirder than a lot of shit I’ve seen in Hollywood. I kept glancing over every few minutes to see if the guy was still looking at me, and he was.

Finally, one of my friends noticed my glancing over and said, “That’s Adam Venit. Sandler’s agent.” I knew who Venit was. He was one of the most powerful people in Hollywood, the head of the film department at my agency, William Morris. My agent at the time, Brad Slater, was always talking about him. I’d done movies with lots of his clients. He represented Sandler, Sylvester Stallone, Eddie Murphy, Gal Gadot, a bunch of people. I had always heard of the guy in passing, but I’d never met him. If I had run into him on the street, I wouldn’t have recognized him at all.

Venit started coming over to me with his hand out, and I stuck mine out, too, doing that thing where you’re extra friendly with someone to try to keep them at an arm’s length.

“Hey, Adam!” I said. “How you doing?”

Then, without warning — no “Hello,” no nothing — he reached his hand under mine and grabbed my nuts. I yelled, “HEY!” and pushed him off me into this crowd of people. He sort of wobbled back, got his bearings, and then came back at me and grabbed at my crotch again, hard. It was that way people get when they’re drunk or high, where they don’t even know how rough they’re being.

When he tried to grab me the second time, I pushed him off again, yelling, “YO! What are you doing, man?! Get off me!”

Immediately Rebecca heard me and snapped her head around. “Terry? What is going on with this guy? What’s he doing?”

“He’s grabbing my nuts, Becky!” I said. “That’s what he’s doing!”

Venit, after I’d pushed him off the second time, looked at me and started cracking up, “АНАНАНАНАНАНА!” It was this bizarre, maniacal laughter. Meanwhile, Venit’s wife was right next to him. She seemed out of it, too.

People were starting to take notice and stare, and with all those eyes on me, I was keenly aware of how I was being judged. If Adam Venit had done what he did to the old Terry Crews, he might have wound up in the hospital. Stomping a random dude into a Pasadena sidewalk just for brushing my pregnant wife’s arm too roughly had nearly cost me everything. Now, after one of the most powerful men in Hollywood had groped me in public, I knew I couldn’t respond the same way.”

“I knew that if I let Venit make me angry, I would be putting him in control of the situation, and I wasn’t about to let him be in control of anything. Once I got past the initial shock of it, I stayed perfectly calm. I went over to Sandler. I didn’t raise my voice or lose my temper. I said firmly, “Adam, you’d better go get your boy, because he’s gonna get his shit cleaned.”

Sandler was like, “What? What’s going on?”

“Look at your man!” I said.

Sandler looked over at Venit, who was still acting a fool. “What the fuck is wrong with him?” Sandler said. He said it like, “Hmm, this is so strange and completely out of character for him to act this way.”

Sandler and Venit had been buddies for years, so I don’t know if Sandler was genuinely shocked to see his boy acting this way, or if he’d seen it before and was acting shocked for my benefit. Either way, I was out of there. Even without the violation of being groped, my normal anxiety and hypersensitivity to being around drunk people was being triggered, too. “I can’t stomach this anymore,” I told Rebecca. “It’s time to go.” I grabbed her hand and we got out of there.”

“So I waited. For a year. A year went by, and William Morris did nothing. Venit was too powerful. He represented the agency’s top clients, all of whom were higher in the pecking order than me. It felt like William Morris was waiting me out, like it was going to memory hole the entire thing and make it seem as if Venit had never done anything to me at all.

As I slowly realized that William Morris wasn’t going to do anything to Venit, it also started to sink in what it was going to do to me. From that moment, things got weird with Brad. My career had been going so well with Brooklyn Nine-Nine, but now he was sending me these terrible offers, presenting them to me as if they were gold.”

“The next day, the Weinstein revelations continued to spill out. Everyone was reading them, and I couldn’t focus on set. I couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t get my scenes done. I kept thinking about Venit, about how part of me had wanted to knock him out, even though I knew it would have been a terrible way to respond. Then, on a break between scenes, I looked down at my phone, saw all the Tweets scrolling by, and realized, “Wait a minute. Maybe this is a way to strike back, nonviolently. Maybe this is a way to purge these feelings of anger and shame that I’m carrying around. More important, maybe this is a way for me to support these women.” So without telling my agent, my manager, my publicist, or even my wife, I sat down and tweeted out, “This whole thing with Harvey Weinstein is giving me PTSD. Why? Because this kind of thing happened to ME.” Then, over a thread of sixteen tweets, I kept going, laying out what had happened, how a high-level Hollywood executive had groped me, how I’d reported it to my agent only to see the issue get buried, the whole story. I concluded by saying, “Hopefully, me coming forward will deter a predator and encourage someone who feels hopeless.” I closed my phone and immediately felt relief. I had done something. I had taken the action I needed to take.”

“William Morris and I parted ways after that, and from that moment on I was in the wilderness. Rebecca and I were treated like pariahs. Everything went dark and weird. Our close friends stood by us, but all those casual industry acquaintances, all those people who say, “Hey, we should work on something together someday,” they all disappeared. The phone didn’t ring.

If I was abandoned in Hollywood, online I was attacked. Now it was my turn to get dragged by men, particularly black men. “You should have knocked that white boy out,” they’d say. “Terry Crews is a simp. Terry Crews is a pussy. Terry Crews got all that muscle and it ain’t meant for nothing. How are you going to let an old white man fondle your balls?” That stuff would get tweeted and retweeted and retweeted, all day long. That was the sports community. That was the rap community. That was everyone.”

“The first thing I did was file criminal and civil charges against Venit and William Morris. I knew from the jump that the criminal charges weren’t going anywhere. When I walked out of the police station after filing them, paparazzi from the gossip website TMZ were waiting for me, which meant someone in the police force was tipping off the media. Then I found out that the event chairman of the Los Angeles Police Foundation, and one of its major donors, was Adam Venit. Like many abusers, he’d spent his whole life cultivating the relationships that he’d need to protect himself if he was ever found out. So from that moment on I knew I couldn’t trust the police, and I wasn’t surprised when they announced that they wouldn’t be pursuing criminal charges.

That left my civil case. As the months passed and the wheels of the legal system slowly began to turn, the entire attitude of William Morris was “Okay, what’s it going to take to make this go away? How much money does he want?” But I didn’t want money. Because I know that money isn’t real. Money is only what it symbolizes, and if I took a payout for my silence, what would that money mean?

I don’t mean that as a judgment on any other abuse victim who’s taken money in the past. Many of those people, particularly women in show business, were forced to make a brutal calculation. Their careers were effectively over at such a young age, destroyed by the men who wanted them silenced. For them, the money was a life raft they couldn’t afford to turn down. I couldn’t say the same. Even if I never worked in Hollywood again, I had enough money for Rebecca and me to go and make a new life for ourselves. So for me to take a payoff would have been simply backing down and giving up. I knew what my value was: it was in standing up and telling the truth and trying to have an impact on the culture of Hollywood. I made it perfectly clear: I didn’t care what it cost me in attorney’s fees. I would spend a million dollars to go to trial to win a dollar in return. All I wanted was for Venit to face real consequences.”

“That January, I was at the Sundance Film Festival when a man approached me. I can’t say his name, but he’s someone I know through different projects I’ve done. “Venit did the same thing to me,” the guy said. “I can’t go public because of my family, but I’d like to join your case privately.”

He was the first. In the months that followed, my attorney and I were contacted by four more, all of them sharing stories of sexual assault at the hands of Adam Venit. They all agreed to help with the case.”

“That April we hinally got to sit down for arbitration. My one sticking point was that Venit be terminated, which was the one thing William Morris refused to do. The agency dug in its heels and was ready to go to war, and then we put the testimony of the other accusers on the table. Now it wasn’t just a “he said, he said.” It was a pattern of abuse going back years. William Morris couldn’t wave the white flag fast enough. It wanted this over and done. Venit was required to resign as part of the settlement. I’d spent nearly half a million in attorney’s fees, and I got every penny reimbursed. Most important, William Morris had to agree to put real accountability measures in place. What had happened to me, where I informed my agent of what Venit had done only to see the matter get buried? William Morris can’t let that happen again. If it does, it’ll face real legal consequences.

A couple of months later, I was contacted by Amanda Nguyen. She’s a Nobel Peace Prize nominee and a Harvard graduate. She’s also a rape survivor. Amanda asked me to join her on Capitol Hill to speak to a Senate committee on behalf of the Sexual Assault Survivors’ Bill of Rights, which she was trying to push into law. Amanda told me she wanted me to testify because she knew that no matter how many women came before the committee, if she had one man, people would pay that much more attention, especially if that man was a celebrity.

I accepted the invitation. The day I went to Congress to testify, it was standing room only. For a kid from Flint, Michigan, to be the subject of a packed Senate hearing was unreal. It was the moment when I realized how far my own experience went beyond me. What had started with “I’m going to show Ari Emanuel that he’s not going to get away with this” had become part of a larger crusade on behalf of any and every person who’s ever suffered sexual abuse.

The moment from the hearing that went viral online was Senator Dianne Feinstein asking me the same question everyone else on social media had been asking: “Why didn’t you just knock the guy out?” The obvious part of the answer is that I knew, as a black man, what would happen to me if I did. I’d have been arrested. But the deeper answer is that rage and anger are never the way. Anytime you’re acting out of anger, you are not in control. You’re allowing yourself to be provoked. To be filled with anger and rage is to be powerless and weak.

When I die and people take the measure of my public life, everything I’ve done outside of being a husband and a father, I feel — or at least I hope — that my decision to stand up against sexual abuse will be remembered as the most important thing I ever accomplished. Not simply for what I did but for how and why I did it. The whole time, I was never angry. I was never driven by rage. I was controlled, thoughtful, methodical. It was the polar opposite of the way I reacted to every other abuser I’d had in my life. I’d always bottled everything up.”

“My art teacher in high school was a guy named Mr. Eichelberg. White guy. Very white. When he wasn’t teaching he was a corn farmer out in rural Michigan; he used to bring us fresh corn to class.

Mr. Eichelberg was the guy who always used to encourage me to be an artist. “Terry,” he’d say, “you’re the best artist I’ve ever taught. The work you’re doing right now, I can’t even do. You have a talent that I’ve never seen.” For a long time I didn’t believe him. Sometimes I even thought he was putting me on. I felt that in part because I was so hard on myself. I wanted my work to be perfect.

I’d spend hours on a painting, going late into the night, obsessing over every detail. When I finally went to bed, I’d think, “This is awesome.” Then, as soon as I woke up in the morning, I’d think, “This is horrible.” I could only see what was wrong with it.”

“My senior year, Mr. Eichelberg did two things that changed my life. First, without even telling me, when he heard I was going to Western Michigan, he took pictures of my work and submitted them with an application for me to get the art scholarship that paid part of my tuition and allowed me to go. Then, after he did that, he applied for and got me a full-tuition grant from the Chrysler Corporation to attend a six-week summer program at the Interlochen Arts Academy in northern Michigan.

I flipped when he told me. Interlochen was, and still is, one of the most prestigious art schools in the world. As it turned out, Interlochen would also be my first experience with entering an all-white world, which was . . . wow. My buddy Ron Croudy had been awarded a slot, too, and he and arrived to find that, out of maybe 2,500 kids, we were two of only a handful of black students there.

That cultural imbalance led to some awkward moments, of course, but fewer than you’d think. We were all there because we had something in common that transcended the way we looked. Also, no amount of tension or awkwardness could dampen the incredible experience of being there. I got to be outside and play and draw and paint and have fun. We had a big old VHS camera that we used to make videos and short movies. We were nowhere near the city lights, and at night the stars would come out.

We would lie on our backs and look up, and it felt like we were falling in the sky. After all the darkness of growing up in Flint, it was extraordinary. I can’t even describe it; it was bliss. There was no abuse, no alcoholism, no shootings; the only big drama was that two kids got caught making out in a tuba locker.

Interlochen also gave me an experience that changed my life. In my drawing class, we had been doing still lifes in charcoal. Each student had to submit two pieces to be judged in a competition, and they were submitted anonymously so the judging would be objective. Since there were about twenty kids in the class, that meant about forty works in the competition — various paintings of pottery and bowls of fruit and that sort of thing.

The judge was a professor from the Art Institute of Cincinnati. We all stood in the back, nervous, as he walked down the gallery of work. He did one pass and then went right back to the first of my two paintings. “This,” he said, “is the best one in the class.” Then he walked all the way across the room to the other work I’d submitted. “And this,” he said, “is the second best.” I was like, “Holy shit . .. I’m the best one here.” And it wasn’t just American kids in the class. There were students from Germany and Italy and all over the world, the best of the best of the best, and when my name was revealed as the artist behind the two winning pieces, they all burst into applause. For me. After eighteen years of being told, both explicitly and implicitly, that being black made me somehow inferior, that was the first moment in my life where I felt that I was as good as everybody else, no matter what color my skin was or how I spoke or what neighborhood I came from. It was euphoric, and I’ve been chasing that high ever since.”

“The first time I got called a nigger was in fourth grade. We’d just moved to Civic Park. The neighborhood was flipping, but there were enough white kids around that they felt like it was still their turf. One day on the bus, a white kid who was older than me stood up and turned around and, literally out of nowhere, called me a nigger. All of the kids around us were like, “Oooooooh,” watching and waiting to see what I would do. Since it was mostly white kids on the bus, I didn’t do anything. I ignored it.

When we got off the bus, he followed me, and he kept saying it. “I’m gonna kick your ass, nigger!” Then his brother came up behind him, getting in on it. I kept walking and saying, “Man, forget you.” Then I heard “Hey!” real loud. I turned around and POW! The dude coldcocked me dead in the face. I saw lights and went down, and he jumped on me and kept pounding on me, yelling. “Fuckin’ nigger! Fuckin’ nigger!”

The thing is, being a kid, I was more confused than insulted. The experience didn’t make sense because I couldn’t put it together, meaning the slur and me. I knew what “nigger” meant, and I knew who Terry Crews was, and I knew Terry Crews wasn’t a nigger. So it didn’t compute, and because it didn’t compute, I didn’t know to be insulted. I had plenty of other insecurities that kid might have teased me for, but being a black kid on a white bus wasn’t one of them.

An insult hurts only if there’s a ring of truth to it; it only hurts if you believe it. My mother calling my dad a broke-ass drunk cut him to the bone, because it was true. But if you called Bill Gates broke, you wouldn’t be insulting the man, because he knows he isn’t broke. He’d laugh at you and shrug it off. That’s how I felt walling away from the bus that day. I didn’t like that I’d gotten my ass kicked, but that kid didn’t hurt my feelings by using that word. Nobody’s ever hurt me by using that word, because I’ve always known that that word has nothing to do with who I am.

I don’t know where that confidence came from, because it didn’t come from my mom or my dad, that’s for sure. Just like my parents taught me nothing about sex or money, they taught me nothing about race, nothing about what it meant to be a black man in America. Our family’s past, growing up in Jim Crow Georgia, it wasn’t talked about. It was too painful.”

“Then came seventh grade. That’s when everything changed. The gas crisis hit and the factories started to close and, other than old Mrs. McCauley next door, white people couldn’t get out of there fast enough. As the city started to crater, the newspapers salivated over every detail. If it bled, it led, and if a black man was responsible for it, all the better. Anytime a black man did anything, the headlines would literally read A BLACK MAN KILLED THREE PEOPLE TODAY OF BLACK MAN HAS CRACK DEN OF FOUR DEAD IN CRACK DEN, WITH SEVERAL BLACK PEOPLE. If it was a white man, he was just a man, but if it was a black man, his race was always called out. Now, imagine reading that as a thirteen-year-old black boy who was in the process of becoming one of those black men.

Seventh grade was the year I went from being treated like a black boy to being treated like a black man, and the difference was stark. I noticed it the minute it happened. My mother loved going to the big department stores at the mall. As a kid, I hated it because she would spend all her time trying stuff on but then never buy anything because we didn’t have any money. As an adolescent, I hated it because I had white salespeople on me all the time. “What do you want? What are you looking for? What do you need? Can I help you?” Even after they backed off, I could feel their eyes following me around the store, like I was about to steal something.

Even well-meaning white people used to say things to me like “You’re a good kid, Terry. Don’t become a criminal.” I would stare at them, like, “Criminal? What are you talking about? I’m twelve.”

I spent my whole childhood always navigating between the Two Michigans. For football and basketball, we used to take a bus to play at schools in the suburbs, and we’d always stop at McDonald’s after the games. We would get off the bus and go in, and the minute we walked through the door, all the white people would stop eating and look at us. We knew enough not to eat inside. We’d get our food and get back on the bus and eat there. It was too awkward to sit inside with everyone staring at us.”

“There were still two Michigans, for sure, but the borders were broken down, and people moved freely back and forth. We had black kids assimilating with the white kids, but we also had white kids assimilating with the black kids. When Eminem came along as this black-talking white boy in the nineties, people looked at him as an anomaly. But back in the day we had fifty Eminems. I still remember my man Matejik. He was a straight-up white boy, and he had a Jheri curl. He’d be in the men’s room literally spraying in curl activator right along with the black guys. We had white girls with Jheri curl, too; their hair would look wet the whole day.

By senior year, my three best friends were three white girls. I had secret crushes on each one of them at one time or another, but I wasn’t allowed to date.”

“In middle school, I got Mr. Krabill, an old white guy with horn-rimmed glasses. Mr. Krabill laid out his class seating chart from smartest to dumbest — and I’m not kidding. After every test score, he’d put out a new list of seating assignments and you’d have to go find your new one. Whoever had the best score would get the first seat in the front row. Then it would go down in descending order to the lowest in the back. Of course, because all the black kids were being funneled in from the worst elementary schools, the front rows of the classroom were always all white, while the back rows were always almost all black. You couldn’t help but feel less than. Anytime I asked a question, Mr. Krabill used to look at me like I was an idiot, like I was a waste of his time.

On the other hand, there was my senior guidance counselor, a black woman. One day she saw me in the hallway and waved me down. “Terry,” she said, “do you. have a moment? I’ve got something very important i need to tell you.”

“Okay,” I said.

She turned and I followed her back to her office, thinking, “Oh my god. I must have gotten a scholarship to one of the colleges I applied to.” Then, when we got to her of-fice, she closed the door, asked me to sit down, and said, “Terry, what I’m about to tell you is important. It’s going to affect your life forever.”

“Okay.”

“And I want you to hear me because it’s very important that you listen to me and follow my instructions.”

“Oh, man. Okay. What is it?”

“Stay away from white women.”

I stared at her. “Excuse me?”

“Terry, listen to me, they will be your downfall. They will stop anything you want from happening in your life. They will be the reason you fail.”

“Huh?”

“You have to stay away from white women. They will be the end of you.”

“Okay. Thanks!”

“Do you hear me?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

I didn’t even argue with her. I wanted to get out of there and have the conversation be over. I thought it was the most ridiculous thing I had ever heard, even at the time.”

“It didn’t take long to notice that they played all the white guys in what they called the “thinking man’s positions.” Meanwhile, the black players were just out there on the field to be enormous pieces of meat. I was stuck playing defensive end. I knew I should have been playing linebacker, but I had a coach flat out tell me I wasn’t smart enough to play linebacker.”

“Nobody was doing anything to me. The photographers want something that will sell, and their lazy assumption is that the photo of the white person who’s already famous is going to sell better than the photo of the black guy who’s famous mostly only to black people. But the reality is that the photo that’s going to sell is whatever gets eyeballs and clicks. So I decided to give the photographers that. I started to do a thing on the red carpet where I would jump. I went out and announced it to the press. “Okay, guys, I’m gonna jump at the count of three and you’re going to get me in midair.” I did it, and they all got pictures of me, and the pictures sold. The next day the pictures were all over the papers and the movie blogs and the entertainment press.

Today, if you google “Terry Crews jumping,” there are probably hundreds of pictures of me jumping in the air, because it became a thing. I’d come out and people would say, “Terry! Do the jump!” and I’d do the jump. There were white people next to me, and they were like, “Terry! Terry!” and the next day I’d be in the papers.”

“The character that had been written is an entertainer at a big South African resort. It’s a scene where he’s supposed to be entertaining a dinner crowd. He comes out into the dining room in a grass skirt with a spear and his face painted. Then he starts running around scar- ing the dinner guests, going, “Ooga booga! Ooga booga! ARGGHH!!!” Then he gets up onstage and says, in this posh British accent, “Hello! My name is Nickens!” I wish I were making this up. It was horrible. It was extremely degrading to African people. This shit would have been racist in 1913, and we were in 2013. And this movie had been green-lighted by Warner Bros. Everybody had read the script and signed off. They were in preproduction. Serious money was being spent to make this.”

“I felt Adam was at least aware enough to know he didn’t want things to go wrong like that. So I called him. “Bro,” I said, “you’ve gotta understand, if I did this, black people would never talk to me again, and it wouldn’t be too pleasant for you, either.”

For a minute or two, he still didn’t get it. He was like, “Whaddya mean? You don’t think it’s funny?”

“Adam. Dude. It’s really, really bad. It’s not going to work.”

Then I made a suggestion. I said, “I can’t do this the way it is, but why don’t you let me try to redo it in a way that I feel would actually be great? And if you don’t like it, I understand.”

And Adam, to his credit, said, “All right, I’ll see what you got.”

So now I was back to the problem of how to play the fool as a black man in America. How was I going to Will Ferrell this thing to make the character ridiculous but in a way that didn’t read as degrading to black people in general and South African people in particular?

I sat on it, and the idea I came up with was to make him sort of an African Wayne Newton, all the preening ridiculousness of a Las Vegas showman, but transplanted to an African resort. Now it was about an individual being self-centered and narcissistic as opposed to lampooning the culture of an entire continent with a spear and a grass skirt. I spent five grand and got a wig made and then I spent another five grand and had all these African suits done. We got Ladysmith Black Mambazo, the famous South African group, to back me up as my band, and we worked on songs together and the songs were catchy and authentic to the place where we were filming. And we stole the movie. It was hilarious. The writers loved it and they kept calling me back to set and adding new scenes for me. When we wrapped the film Adam told me, “Dude, I’m so glad that you came up with all of this. This is way better than what we had in the script.” And I thanked him. I thanked him for listening because most people in Hollywood wouldn’t have been open to change.”

“In the middle of the afternoon, I was driving on the 101 in my Nissan Pathfinder. I got pulled over, and four cops from two patrol cars came at me with guns drawn, shouting at me through a megaphone to roll the windows down and put my hands where they could see them. Because I can’t hear very well, I have a hard time understanding people when I can’t see their lips. I was petrified I might mishear what they were telling me and end up getting shot. I sat in the driver’s seat like a statue, the red and blue lights flashing, all four windows down, my hands glued to the steering wheel. It was the most frightening thing I’ve ever experienced, and it’s hard to describe, the feeling of knowing that with one wrong move your life could be over. It’s so intense it’s like you’re outside of yourself watching yourself go through it.

And the reason they’d pulled me over? The tint on my car windows was too dark. The kept me there on the side of the freeway for an hour and a half, and pretty soon it was rush hour and the road was packed and all the drivers were rubbernecking from the cars going past, which made the whole thing degrading as well as terrifying.

The problem wasn’t just in LA, either. A couple of years later, after I got cut from the Packers and signed at the last minute by the Chargers, I had to jump on a plane to San Diego with literally a few hours’ notice. I paid cash for my ticket when I boarded in Kalamazoo, and when we landed for a connection in Chicago, a bunch of armed police boarded the plane and pulled me straight out of my seat.

They were real aggressive, too, talking to me like cops on TV. “You. Over here. Now.”

Once I was off the plane, they had me up against the wall of the gangway, their hands on their guns as they grilled me. “What’s the nature of your business on this flight?”

“I’m going to San Diego.”

“Why are you going to San Diego?”

We kept going back and forth and, it turns out, they thought I was a drug dealer because I’d paid cash for my ticket.

“Officer,” I said, staying as calm as I could. “I’m a professional football player. I’ve just been picked up by the San Diego Chargers and I paid cash because it was a last-minute flight.”

“Ohhhhh,” they said, suddenly all apologetic.

Then they asked for my autograph.

It was the weirdest, most offensive thing ever. But as pissed off as I was, I signed every last one, forcing a smile on my face to make sure the TV cop routine didn’t start up again. When I got back on the plane, all the other passengers were staring at me. But I didn’t care. I was just happy I hadn’t been arrested or shot.

Getting let off the hook for being an NFL player was my first experience with the benefits of what would later become recognition and fame. I can’t count the number of times I’ve had police officers approach me because of my size and my skin color, only to visibly relax and take their hands off their sidearms once they realize that they’ve seen me on TV before. I’ve often wondered, especially given my problems with anger and rage, what might have happened to me if I hadn’t become famous, if I’d remained just another big black guy.”

“When I started doing Everybody Hates Chris and Brooklyn Nine-Nine I was nominated several years running for the NAACP Image Awards. Rebecca came with me. Walking down the red carpet, we would get the same cutting, evil looks we’d seen at church, all these black women rolling their eyes and going, “Mmmmmm-hmmmmm.” As of now, we’ve just stopped going.”

Conclusion

“Another amazing fact I learned was that five years after the Civil War, my family changed their last name from Newsome to Elbert, which I thought was brilliant. So many people kept their slave names moving forward.”

“Claude Smart was born in the late 1800s. He never had more than a third-grade education, but he learned to read and write, and he taught all the other black kids and even some of the grown-ups how to read and write, too. In fact, Claude Smart was so smart, and so capable, that once he grew up, the boss at the local lumber mill hired him on as a foreman, choosing him over several white guys for a job that, in those days, should have gone only to a white man.

It caused such a firestorm in town that the white men who’d been passed over said that if Claude Smart showed up to work, they were going to kill him.

“We cried all day and all night,” Seuk told me, “knowing there was a truck of white people on the way into town to kill my daddy. That night we were sitting in the house, hugging him and crying, and the next day he went to work knowing he was gonna die.”

Claude Smart went to work that day, but he was clearly troubled, and the boss asked him what was wrong.

“Boss,” he said, “they’re going to kill me for taking this job.”

“If they’re going to kill you,” the boss said, “they’re going to have to kill me first.”

The truck never showed up, and Claude Smart stayed at the mill and kept his job.”

“Even that guy is not an object I need to control. He’s a person in a hurry I need to try to understand, and the more I understand and empathize with him, the better I feel, because I don’t get angry.

When I do get angry, I’ve learned to manage it. I don’t fly off the handle anymore. I don’t snap. I’ve literally re-wired my neural pathways to work differently. I feel the anger coming on, I identify the source of it, and I ask myself, “Why am I letting this make me angry? Oh, I’m getting angry because I have an unrealistic expectation of how this other person should be acting. I need to let that go.” Or, “I thought this person was antagonizing me, but really it’s a miscommunication. I need to let that go.” And I do.”