“Knowing that if Donovan had been white he wouldn’t have gotten shot multiple times and left in the street for an inhumane amount of time, ’til the next morning, no gun in hand-that’s gravity. We see it in broken educational systems.” At times this force can be crushing. We see it in what we’re fed, what is marketed to us. “The gravity is one that we see in our rules and regulations and laws. “As a Black person, when you’re born in this country, you immediately feel a much heavier gravity,” he says.

The epidemic of police violence is, Williams says, rooted in a four-century-old force of “gravity”-a weight, invisible to many white folks, that can manifest as a literal knee on the neck, though it is typically felt as a persistent and pernicious downward pull. “And it’s a much larger problem, you know?” The family and other advocates have called for a federal investigation. It’s also the cause of the loss of life,” Williams says, running his hands over his face. The bodycam of the officer involved was never activated, a violation of department procedures, so no footage of the incident exists. In the days after the shooting, the police department gave varying stories about whether Lynch had brandished a gun. “I wasn’t able to deliver the speech with the fire and intention I wanted,” he says, his voice wavering, “because I was just choked with emotion.” Lynch was gunned down by the police in his and Williams’s hometown of Virginia Beach, Virginia, on March 26 Williams has just returned to Miami after speaking at the funeral. So the day the music producer and impresario turned 48 years old was devoted not to his own life but to one cut short at 25, that of Donovan Lynch. 'We had to bury my cousin on my birthday,” says Pharrell Williams.

Pharrell in my mind root