George Floyd protests: Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively donate £161,000 to NAACP

‘We’re ashamed that in the past we’ve allowed ourselves to be uninformed about how deeply rooted systemic racism is’

Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds have donated $200,000 (£161,000) to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) amid nationwide protests over the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.

The couple also posted a message on Instagram explaining their stance on the protests.

“We’ve never had to worry about preparing our kids for different rules of law or what might happen if we’re pulled over in the car,” they wrote.

“We don’t know what it’s like to experience that life day in and day out. We can’t imagine feeling that kind of fear and anger,” continued the post.

“We’re ashamed that in the past we’ve allowed ourselves to be uninformed about how deeply rooted systemic racism is.”

Lively also said that she and husband Reynolds “want to educate ourselves about other people’s experiences and talk to our kids about everything, all of it… especially our own complicity”.

The donation and message follow days of heated protests across major US cities.

Derek Chauvin is set to appear in court today (1 June) after being filmed kneeling on Floyd’s neck for nine minutes while the 46-year-old repeatedly said he was struggling to breathe.

Chauvin faces a charge of third-degree murder, but a lawyer for Floyd’s family says the charge should be upped to first-degree murder and that he believes the killing was “pre-meditated”.

“We think that he had intent... almost nine minutes he kept his knee in a man’s neck that was begging and pleading for breath,” Benjamin Crump told CBS News.

Floyd’s death follows countless other high-profile instances of police violence enacted on black people in the US.