Actor Jesse Williams, best known for his role on the TV series Grey’s Anatomy, accepted the Humanitarian Award at the 2016 BET awards on Sunday for his work raising awareness of the Black Lives Matter movement. After receiving the award, Williams gave a profound speech on black lives and human rights that brought the audience to its feet.
“This award, this is not for me,” he began. “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.”
Williams noted that Saturday would have been Tamir Rice’s 14th birthday, had he not been killed by police in 2014, and named several other victims of police brutality in recent years, including Rekia Boyd, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, and Darrien Hunt. He continued:
Now the thing is though, all of us in here getting money, that alone isn’t gonna stop this. Alright? Now dedicating our lives to getting money just 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 that we have not fought and died on the frontlines of, there has been no job that we haven’t done, there is 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’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 sidenote. 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 of critique of our oppression… If you have no interest in equal rights for black people, then do not make suggestions to those who do. Sit down.
We’ve been floating this country on credit 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, then 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, that just because we’re magic doesn’t mean we’re not real.