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Jesse Williams accepted the BET Humanitarian Award for advocacy in the #BlackLivesMatter movement and commitment to social change at the 2016 BET Awards last night and he brought the house down with a speech that we’ll be quoting for years to come. You should read Williams’ dynamic speech and watch it below. We promise you’ll be inspired.
Thank you Debra, thank you BET, thank you Nate Parker, Harry, thank you Debbie Allen for participating in that. Before we get into it, I just want to say I brought my parents out tonight. I just want to thank them for being here, for teaching me to focus on comprehension over career and they made sure I learned what the schools were afraid to teach
This award; this 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 students that are realizing that a system built to divide and impoverish and destroy us cannot stand if we do. It’s kind of basic mathematics: the more we learn about who 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 do better for you. 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 everyday. So what’s gonna happen is we’re gonna have equal rights and justice in our country or we will restructure their function and ours.
Yesterday would have been a young Tamir Rice’s birthday so I don’t wanna hear any more 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. Tell Rekia Boyd how it’s so much better 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 gonna stop this. Dedicating our lives to getting money just to give it right back for someone 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 that we have not fought and died on the frontline of. There has been no job we haven’t done, there’s no tax they haven’t 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 have 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, and this is a little sidenote: the burden of the brutalized is not to comfort the bystander, that’s not our job. Stop with all that. If you have a critique for the resistance, for our resistance, then you better have an establish record of critique of 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 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, 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 just because we’re magic doesn’t mean we’re not real.
Watch Williams’ speech below.