Recording artist and fashion designer Pharrell Williams warns that the aftermath of the killing of an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, will have a lasting effect on race relations in America.
Williams told
CNN's Don Lemon in an interview broadcast Monday that he is disappointed in how the government handled the case and in how the media chose to focus on rioters over peaceful protesters.
But, he said, the black community is more than is portrayed in the media.
"That's why I feel like the president needs to come down there," Williams said, "because when your parents come in the room, whether it's you or your cousin that knocked the vase down, both of y'all sit up at attention, and, as my dad would say, 'tighten up.'"
Williams said he doesn't agree with the initiative to get young black men to stop wearing their pants baggy and below their waists, but he also believes in personal responsibility.
"When they told him to get out of the road, he probably should have got out of the road. I wouldn't have been in the road to begin with," he said, alluding to the fact that the shooting death of Michael Brown began when police officer Darren Wilson told him and a friend to stop walking in the middle of the street.
Williams also discussed the anger that some people had over the police releasing a store surveillance tape of Brown stealing cigars and shoving a store clerk minutes before he was killed.
"I come from a black family that my grandma would've said, 'Let me see that other tape, too.' And you would get a beating for that," he said.
Williams said the killing came at a time when people thought race relations were getting better. Instead, they have been stirred up all over again.
"This is going to be the longest hangover in race relations ever," he said.
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