Katherine Heigl is opening up about how she's struggled to find the right way to discuss George Floyd's death with her 8-year-old daughter, Adalaide.
The former "Grey's Anatomy" star, 41, shared a photo of Adalaide, who is black, Sunday on Instagram. In her caption, the anguished mom revealed that she "can't sleep" at night.
"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?" she wrote.
"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," she continued.
Heigl, who's also mom to daughter Naleigh, 11, who was born in South Korea, and son Joshua, 3, went on to say that it took her too long to wake up to the realities of racism, in part, because she was raised in a loving multiracial household.
"It has taken me far too long to truly internalize the reality of the abhorrent, evil despicable truth of racism," she wrote. "My upbringing of inclusivity, love and compassion seemed normal. I thought the majority felt like I did. I couldn’t imagine a brain that saw the color of someone’s skin as anything but that. Just a color."
"I was naive. I was childish," she added.
"And now I weep. Because what should have changed by now, by then, forever ago still is," she wrote. "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."
Heigl's emotional post came nearly a week after George Floyd, a black man, died on May 25 after Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin pressed his knee into Floyd's neck for more than eight minutes while Floyd was pinned to the ground. Chauvin was later charged with third-degree murder.
Heigl followed up by sharing a slideshow of photos of her and her children.
In her caption, she wrote that "justice," to her mind, meant that Chauvin and three other police officers who stood by during the incident would spend "a hard, ugly life in prison."
She also said she hoped Chauvin's punishment would "scare the s--- out of every other racist still clinging to their small, stupid minded hate."
"There may have been a time when I cared to try to change the mind of a racist. To show them through example and just the right words they are wrong. 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. They can take this s--- to their maker and he can deal with them," she wrote.