Katherine Heigl pens powerful essay about talking to her eight-year-old black daughter about racism

Katherine Heigl penned powerful message about the difficulties talking to her eight-year-old black daughter Adalaide about racism.

The 41-year-old actress took to Instagram with two lengthy captions about how she is struggling to explain the current state of America and systemic racism to her young children on Sunday.

She also addressed her own ‘white bubble’ and admitted she’d been naive to issues of race in the past but called for a reckoning for racists.

Heigl wrote in the caption that it has been challenging to find the words to properly inform her children of the protests currently taking place across America following the killing of George Floyd. 

George died last week after a police officer – who has since been arrested on charges of third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter, and sacked from the force – knelt on his neck for almost nine minutes.

The Grey’s Anatomy star is mom to an eight-year-old black daughter whom she adopted at birth, as well as her older daughter Naleigh, who was adopted from South Korea in 2009 and son Joshua, Katherine she gave birth to in 2009.

Writing on Instagram, Heigl said: ‘I can’t sleep. And when I do I wake with a single thought in my head. How will I tell Adalaide? How will I explain the unexplainable? How can I protect her? How can I break a piece of her beautiful divine spirit to do so? 

‘I can’t sleep. I lay in my bed in the dark and weep for every mother of a beautiful divine black child who has to extinguish a piece of their beloved baby’s spirit to try to keep them alive in a country that has too many sleeping soundly. 

‘Eyes squeezed shut. Images and cries and pleas and pain banished from their minds. White bubbles strong and intact. But I lay awake. Finally. Painfully. (sic)’ 

Katherine went on to say she feels ‘hopeless’, but knows she must speak out for the sake of her family. 

Along with the posts, the star shared several candid shots with her children, including beautiful and goofy selfies with Adalaide and some of Katherine’s sister Meg, who was also adopted from South Korea.

She added: ‘My white bubble though always with me now begins to bleed. Because I have a black daughter. Because I have a Korean daughter. Because I have a Korean sister and nephews and niece. It has taken me far too long to truly internalize the reality of the abhorrent, evil despicable truth of racism. 

‘And now I weep. Because what should have changed by now, by then, forever ago still is. Hopelessness is seeping in. Fear that there is nothing I can do, like a slow moving poison, is spreading through me. 

‘Then I look at my daughters. My sister. My nephews and niece. George Floyd. Ahmaud Arbery. Breonna Taylor. The hundreds, thousands millions more we haven’t even heard about. I look and the fear turns to something else. The sorrow warms and then bursts into flames of rage. (sic)’

In her second post she addressed more directly the issues that sparked days of protests against racism and police brutality across the U.S. 

‘I’m not sure what most think justice looks like but right now, to me, it looks like a hard, ugly life in prison for Officer Chauvin and the others who just stood there. On their phone. 

‘I want them to pay. I want that payment to be harsh. I want it to be a painful, irrevocable consequence for their evil acts and behaviors and for those consequences to scare the s**t out of every other racist still clinging to their small, stupid minded hate. 

She added that there was a time when she wanted to try to change the minds of racsits but that time is long gone.

‘I don’t care anymore. For their hearts or minds or souls. I don’t care if they die with their ugliness stamped all over them,’ she wrote. ‘They can take this s**t to their maker and he can deal with them.

‘What I want is for them all to be so scared by Officer Chauvin’s consequences that they are afraid to breathe in the direction of a black man, woman or child. Let alone try to hurt them. 

‘I want them to shake in their beds at night for fear that they too could end up like Chauvin. I want him to be an example of what happens to a racist in this country.’

The actress ended her emotional essay admitting that she knows her anger and rager are not ‘very Christian’ but noted that Jesus himself ‘got pretty damn mad at the temple.’

‘God brought the floods, the famine, the locust and the pillars of salt. Perhaps rage is part of the divine. Perhaps the heavens want our rage right now. Perhaps our rage is theirs. All I know is that I want it to end. Today. Forever. Whatever it takes,’ she concluded.