Watch Jesse Williams’ Stirring BET Awards Speech About The Abuses Of Whiteness
"If you have no interest in equal rights for black people then do not make suggestions to those who do: sit down."
Today at the BET Awards, Grey’s Anatomy star Jesse Williams received the Humanitarian Award and gave a frank and moving acceptance speech about the “conditional freedom” that still restricts African American people.
Williams was honoured for his involvement in protests at Ferguson and his continued work in the Black Lives Matter movement, and he used his time on stage to thank black women who, “have spent their lives nurturing everyone before themselves” and called for a new social structure that afforded people of colour the same basic rights as white Americans.
“Now, what we’ve been doing is looking at the data and we know that police somehow manage to de-escalate, disarm and not kill white people every day,” he said, as the audience clapped. “So what’s going to happen is we’re going to have equal rights and justice in our own country, or we will restructure their function and ours.”
Jesse Williams Delivers Powerful Speech at the BET Awards
I’m so glad he addressed “get money” mentality. They… https://t.co/qplc76V928
— JMSHelpingJMS (@JMSHelpingJMS) June 27, 2016
In his speech, Williams mentioned victims of police brutality like Eric Garner, Sandra Bland and Tamir Rice and argued that little progress had been made in terms of civil rights if: “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, and then going home to make a sandwich”.
Interestingly, Williams also used the opportunity to interrogate the privilege of the people in the room, comparing the amassing of riches, wealth and designer brand signifiers to the branding used in slavery. “Dedicating our lives to getting money just to give it right back to put 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?” he said.
“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… demeaning our creations and stealing them, gentrifying our genius and then trying us on like costumes before discarding our bodies like rinds of strange fruit,” he said.
“Just because we’re magic doesn’t mean we’re not real.”
Jesse Williams should apologize for getting us all so hype this late before a Monday. pic.twitter.com/zhwCpoUwjg
— Akilah Hughes (@AkilahObviously) June 27, 2016