Mark Wahlberg's past is catching up with him after he shared a post in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. On Thursday (June 4th), the actor posted a photo of the late George Floyd who was murdered by police last month in Minneapolis. "The murder of George Floyd is heartbreaking," Mark wrote. "We must all work together to fix this problem. I'm praying for all of us. God bless. #blacklivesmatter."
Many were quick to point out Mark's hypocrisy considering his violent history of hate crimes against people of colour. One Twitter user responded to Mark's tweet with a screenshot of the section of his Wikipedia page titled "Hate Crimes," the first of which occurred in June 1986.
According to court documents, Mark and his friends chased three Black children while yelling "kill the n***er, kill the n***er." The next day, they found one of the same kids on a field trip, and threw rocks at him and his Black classmates while yelling racial epithets and "summon[ing] other white males who joined" in the harassment. A civil action lawsuit was filed against Mark and later settled, although the three victims made it clear that they would never forgive him. "A racist will always be a racist," said one of the victims.
Mark also committed two more (known) hate crimes in 1988. In the same day, he attacked two Vietnamese American men at different times while calling them racial slurs. He knocked the first unconscious with a wooden stick and punched the second, whose name is Johnny Trinh, so hard in the eye he thought he'd blinded him. Mark was charged with attempted murder, pleaded guilty to felony assault, and was sentenced to two years in jail, but only served 45 days. In 2014, Mark appealed for a pardon for his hate crime convictions, but prosecutor Judith Beals argued that "Wahlberg has never acknowledged the racial nature of his crimes" and it appears as though many activists agree. Many expressed that Mark needed to fully atone for his horrific past before making any claim to support a Black movement.
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