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I haven't blogged since March but the #JesseWilliams acceptance speech at the 2016 BET Awards gave me so much life I had to transcribe the speech and post it. Take the time to read it and please share.
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 that they make sure I learn what the schools were afraid to teach us. And also thank my amazing wife for changing my life. Now, 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 teachers, 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 is the more we will mobilize. This (award) is also in particular for the black women who have spent their lifetime dedicated to nurturing everyone but themselves we will be better for you.
What we've been doing is looking at the data and we know that police somehow manage to de-escalate, disarm & not kill white people everyday. So what will happen is we're gonna have equal rights and justice in our own country or we will restructure their function and ours.
Now yesterday (Saturday June 25,2016) was young Tamir Rice's 14th birthday. 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 the park in broad day light, killing him on live television and then going home to make a sandwhich. 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 Darrien Hunt.
The thing is though all of us in here getting money-that alone isn't going to stop this. Dedicating our lives to getting money just to give it right back for some ones brand our body when we spent centuries praying with brands our bodies and now we pray to get paid for brands our bodies.
There has been no wars that we haven't fought and died on the front lines of. There has been no job we haven't done, there has been 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 been 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 on a side note: the burden of the brutalized is not to comfort the bystander. That's not our job. Stop with all of that. If you have a critique for the rusistance, for our resistance then you better have an established record of critique of our opressors. 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... the thing is that just because we're magic doesn't mean we're not real. Thank you.