'Grey's Anatomy's Jesse Williams delivers powerful speech about 'Black Lives' at BET Awards (video)

bet
Jesse Williams, who is best known for playing Dr. Jackson on the long-running hit show “Grey’s Anatomy,” electrified the BET Awards more than some of the musical performances when he accepted the annual Humanitarian Award on Sunday evening.
His acceptance speech inspired several rousing standing ovations as he chided the devaluing of black lives and the dichotomy of police coddling of whites and blatant mistreatment of blacks.
Williams also bitterly criticized senseless police killings of unarmed black citizens to the commodification of black culture and the “qualified freedom” that blacks have in America.

“Yesterday would’ve been young Tamir Rice’s 14th birthday, so I don’t want to hear anymore about how far we’ve come when paid public servants can pull a drive-by on a 12-year-old playing alone in a park in broad daylight, killing him on television then going home to make a sandwich,” Williams said. 

[ione_embed src=https://www.youtube.com/embed/alLTDT5JdAw service=youtube width=560 height=315 type=iframe]

“Tell Rekia Boyd how it’s so much better to live in 2012 than 1612 or 1712. Tell that to Eric Garner. Tell that to Sandra Bland. Tell that to Darrien Hunt,” Williams continued. 

“Now the thing is though, all of us in here getting money, that alone isn’t going to stop this. Now dedicating our lives, to get money, to give it right back for someone’s brand on our body, when we spent centuries praying with brands on our bodies, and now we pray to get paid, for brands on our bodies.”

“There has been no war we have not died in the front lines of. There has been no job we haven’t done. No tax they haven’t levied against us. And we’ve paid all of them. But freedom is somehow conditional here. ‘You’re free,’ they keep telling us. ‘She would’ve been alive if she hadn’t acted so… free.’”

“Freedom is always coming in the hereafter, but, you know what the hereafter is a hustle. We want it now. And let’s get a couple things straight—the burden of the brutalized is not to comfort the bystander. That’s not our job. Stop with all that,” Williams said. “If you have a critique for our resistance then you better have an establish record of your critique of our impression. If you have no interest, in equal rights for black people than do not make suggestions to those who do. Sit down.”

“We’ve been floating this country on credit for centuries, and we’re done watching and waiting while this invention called whiteness uses and abuses us, burying black people out of sight and out of mind, while extracting our culture, our dollars, our entertainment like oil. Ghettoizing and demeaning our creations and gentrifying our genius and then trying us on like costumes before discarding our bodies like rinds of strange fruit.”

“The thing is, just because we’re magic, doesn’t mean we’re not real.”

 

About Post Author

Comments

From the Web

Skip to content
Verified by MonsterInsights