Jesse Williams Delivers Powerful Speech on Racism at the BET Awards
Actor Jesse Williams was honored with the 2016 BET Humanitarian Award at the BET Awards Sunday. Williams, who is heavily involved in civil rights activism and the Black Lives Matter movement, delivered a powerful speech on racism in the United States. “If you have no interest in equal rights for black people then do not make suggestions to those who do,” said Williams during the speech, which received a standing ovation. “Sit down.”
Williams recently directed the documentary Stay Woke: The Black Lives Matter Movement. He addressed several issues that Black Lives Matter regularly speak out against, including police brutality. “Now, what we’ve been doing is looking at the data and we know that police somehow manage to deescalate, disarm, and not kill white people every day,” said Williams. “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, and then going home to make a sandwich.”
Williams also addressed African-Americans being marginalized in U.S. history, despite being an important part of the foundation of this country. “There has been no war that we have not fought and died on the front lines of. There has been no job we haven’t done, there’s been no tax they haven’t levied against us, and we’ve paid all of them,” Williams posited. “But freedom is somehow always conditional here.”
Williams concluded his speech with a powerful message against white oppression. “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,” Williams said. “While extracting our culture, our dollars, our entertainment like oil, black gold. Ghettoizing and demeaning our creations then stealing them, gentrifying our genius and then trying us on like costumes before discarding our bodies like rinds of strange fruit.”
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