Queer Eye's culture guy Karamo
Brown lost a former classmate in last month's mass shooting in a
Parkland, Florida high school.
Brown graduated from Marjory Stoneman
Douglas High School – where 17 people were killed by a shooter on
February 14 – in 1999. Aaron Feis, a football coach who died in
the shooting, was Brown's classmate.
Brown was among the hundreds of
thousands of people who marched in Saturday's March for Our Lives
protest in DC. Demonstrators called on state and federal lawmakers
to enact stricter gun control measures.
“Seeing people die at the hands of
guns as a black man is not new,” Brown
told Vox.
“But to see Students running through the same hallways I used to
walk through was really hard.”
Brown said that he hopes people will
continue to protest until laws are changed.
“What needs to happen is this can't
stop,” Brown said. “When a tragedy happens, we protest, we're
upset, and then we forget and another tragedy happens. … This
can't die.”
He added that the election of President
Donald Trump has helped fuel an environment for protest.
“This year of activism has been so
inspired. It's like the world woke up. Everyone got woke all of a
sudden. And sometimes it takes divisiveness from higher-ups to bring
the rest of us together,” Brown said.
“I don't want to say Trump is a
united enemy. But the policies – when he decided to ban trans
people from the military when he himself dodged the draft five times.
We need to go against what you are saying here,” he added.
(Related: Netflix
renews Queer Eye for second season.)