Sterling K. Brown recently opened up about a disturbing incident involving his teenage son, highlighting both the ugliness of racism and the maturity his child displayed in the moment.
The Emmy-winning actor revealed that his 14-year-old son was targeted during a soccer match. “My 14-year-old was in a soccer game where a young boy spat on him, and he saw the spit, and he walks up to the ref and he goes, ‘Ref, this dude just spat on me.’ And the ref was like, ‘I didn’t see it, so I can’t do anything about it,’” Brown recalled in an interview with PEOPLE.
Things escalated after the game when the same boy used a racist slur. “Then, afterwards, the young man came up to him and called him the N-word and just kind of kept it going. And my son didn’t tell me until after the game, and I was like, ‘Yo, man, how come we didn’t beat his a**?’ And he was like, ‘Because that wouldn’t have solved anything. He already did what he was going to do. The ref didn’t respond to it or whatnot. So I didn’t want to make you any more upset, which is why I didn’t tell you until after the game.’”
Brown admitted he was impressed by his son’s restraint, joking about how differently he might have reacted. “So he’s a more evolved person than me. I would’ve beat his a**!”
The This Is Us star has long emphasized family as his greatest priority. He and his wife, actress Ryan Michelle Bathé, first met while studying at Stanford University. The couple has two sons together, Andrew, born in 2011, and Amaré, born in 2015.
Reflecting on fatherhood, Brown told PEOPLE, “Being a father is the most important job that I have in my life right now. And so for the next nine years, if I can keep working in L.A. and be like the one dude who figured it out, I would be very, very excited about that, [because] I don’t want to miss too much of their growing up.”