Rami Malek reveals he was racially profiled by police
Actor Rami Malek has revealed he was once racially profiled by the Los Angeles Police Department and feared he could wind up in jail for something he didn’t do.
The Egyptian-American star of The Amateur made the revelation during a wide-ranging interview with The Guardian in which he spoke of feeling like an outsider growing up in Los Angeles. His parents were Egyptians from the Coptic Orthodox Church who moved to the US in 1978, and Malek revealed the family spoke Arabic at home. In fact, he didn’t learn English until he was five or six.
Malek revealed that his background always made him feel slightly alienated and admitted, “I’m what’s called ‘white-passing,’ but I have very distinctive features, and we definitely didn’t fit in.”
This feeling of alienation was compounded when Malek found himself thrown on the bonnet of a police car as a teenager in a racially motivated case of mistaken identity. He shared, “Someone had robbed a liquor store and stolen a woman’s bag. They said the [thief] was of Latin descent and, ‘You fit the description.’ I remember how hot that engine was. They must have been racing over there, and it was almost burning my hands.”
Thankfully, the friend Malek was with at the time had the wherewithal to tell the police officers that they’d targeted the wrong man. “My friend, who was Caucasian, was clever enough to go, ‘Actually, sir, he’s Egyptian. Not Latin,'” remembered Malek. “I remember laughing on the cop car, thinking, ‘OK, this is a very precarious situation. I may well be going to jail for something I’ve not done.'”
Malek went on to reveal his worry that discrimination and animosity toward immigrants will worsen when Donald Trump takes the office of President of the United States for the second time on January 20th. He still holds hope that the precarious situation can bring out the best in the populace, though, and pointed to former President Barack Obama’s background as a sign to keep persevering.
“The idea that a man with a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas could become president of the United States,” marvelled Malek. “It was one of the most hopeful moments from the story of the American dream. That’s been flipped on its head. I always look at situations like this and just hope that it brings out the absolute best in us.”
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