Jesse Williams (activist, teacher and actor) famous for his role on Grey’s Anatomy blessed the BET crowd with a powerful and inspiring message demanding equality and freedom.
Jesse Williams’ Acceptance Speech Transcribed from the BET Awards 2016
Peace, peace, peace. Thank you. Thank you Debbie. Thank you Nate Parker. Before we get into it. I just want to say I brought my parents tonight. I just want to thank them for being here. For teaching me. To focus on comprehension over career. That they make sure I learn what the schools were afraid to teach us. And also to thank my amazing wife.
This award is not for me. This is for the real organizers all over the country. The activists. The civil rights attorneys. The struggling parents, the families, the teachers, the students that are realizing that a system built to divide and impoverish and destroy us cannot stand if we do. Alright?
It’s kind of basic mathematics. The more we learn about how we are and how we got here, the more we will mobilize. Now, this is also in particular for the black women. In particular who have spent their lifetimes dedicated to nurturing everyone before themselves. We can and will be better for you.
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. So what’s gonna happen is we’re gonna have equal rights and justice in our own country or we will restructure their function in ours.
Now…yesterday would have been young Tamir Rice’ 14th birthday. So I don’t want to hear any more about how far we’ve come when paid public servants can pull a drive by on a 12 y/o playing alone in a park in broad daylight, killing him in on television and then going home to make a sandwich. Tell Rekia Boyd how it’s so much better it is to live in 2012 than it is to live in 1612 or 1712. Tell that to Eric Garner. Tell that to Sandra Bland. Tell that to Dorian Hunt.
Now, the thing is though…All of us in here getting money. That alone isn’t going to stop this. Alright. Now dedicating our lives to getting money just to give it right back for someone’s brand on our bodies. When we’ve 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 that we have not fought and died on the front lines of. There has been not job that we haven’t done. There has been no tax levied against us. And we’ve paid all of them. But freedom is somehow always conditional here. You’re free they keep telling us. But she would’ve been alive if she hadn’t acted so…free.
Now, freedom is always coming in the hereafter. But, you know what though? The hereafter is a hustle. We want it now. And let’s get a couple things straight. Just a little side note. The burden of the brutalized is not to comfort the bystander. That’s not our job. Alright. Stop with all that. If you have a critique for the resistance. For our resistance. Then you better have an established record for the critique for our oppression. If you have no interest in equal rights for black people, then do not make suggestions for those who do. Sit down.
We’ve been floating this country for centuries, Yo. 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. Black Gold. Ghettoizing and 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. The thing is though.
The thing is just because we’re magic doesn’t mean we’re not real.
Thank you.
Transcription via Akuba T (Beauty Culture Tech)
(Update)