John Legend has released a music video for his new single “Preach,” and it’s gripping.
Before the release of the video, Legend explained on Instagram the song was inspired by his upbringing in church. “I grew up in the church and one of the things we talked about was loving our neighbors as we love ourselves,” he explained. “My preacher told me that our neighbor wasn’t just the person that lives next door to you but other people whom you might not even know.”
On YouTube, the video also encourages viewers to “practice what you preach” and donate to FreeAmerica, an organization that “exists to amplify the voices of individuals impacted by the criminal justice system and those who are working to change it.”
Legend has long been an advocate for criminal justice reform.
“If you look at the statistics and you look at the policies we’ve had in place for the last several decades, we’ve become the most incarcerated country in the world by far,” Legend told RELEVANT last year. “That massive scale of incarceration we have here has contributed, I think, to a lot of social problems and made life really difficult for not only the people who got locked up but for their families, their communities and for our society. I think we’ve spent so much money and energy on policing and locking people up that we’ve neglected all kinds of other ways we could edify our communities. We spend often tens of thousands of dollars a year on locking one person up. There’s an opportunity cost: We’re not investing in things that will prevent folks from getting in trouble in the first place and making our society more loving and more just.”
You can go here to learn more about FreeAmerica.
