During a recent sit-down with Shannon Sharpe on his Club Shay Shay program, actor Terry Crews touched on people questioning the racial identity of his wife Rebecca King-Crews, and the criticisms that have come their way because of that.
When Sharpe raised that particular topic, the Everybody Hates Chris actor explained that though his wife’s father is White, she was raised in a predominantly Black city in Indiana, Complex reported.
“She’s black, yes, Black momma white daddy and been raised like that, but again, just cause she don’t have that kind of look, her momma is Black,” Crews, 55, said. “She’s from Gary, Indiana, bruh. My wife was Miss Gary, Indiana 1984. And Gary, Indiana is like Flint. Ain’t nothing but Black people. And she was raised in Black culture, so it wasn’t like she was raised in the outskirts.”
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Despite his wife’s racial identity being questioned, Crews said that issue never bothered her when Sharpe asked how he handles it. “This is what I admire about her,” Crews said. “It never bothered her; she was like, ‘I love Black people, and even if some feel that I’m white, I understand it.’… Wow, and it’s deep to me.”
“That’s the way I had to start thinking because I would always get angry,” he continued. “But to watch her, the way she dealt with things peacefully, like ‘I’m not gonna go there. You know what? That’s trauma that they had to deal with, and I understand it. But I love them anyway.'”
Crews was in his second year at Western Michigan University when he met Rebecca. They tied the knot in 1989 and share four daughters and a son. They are also grandparents.
Besides touching on the aforementioned topic, Crews in the interview also recalled an incident where he got into a physical altercation with his father after he learned he had assaulted his mother.
“That was the darkest day,” the former NFL player recalled. “You got to understand the context of that situation is he had just hit my mother. I wasn’t there, but I got a phone call. ‘Oh, your daddy just hit your mama.’ Now, I’m a grown-ass man, post-NFL, I already played the league. Like, ‘Hey man, what? I’m 245. I ain’t five, you ain’t talking to a five-year-old boy.'”
