You turn to us for voices you won't hear anywhere else.

Sign up for Democracy Now!'s Daily Digest to get our latest headlines and stories delivered to your inbox every day.

Jesse Williams Gives Powerful Address on Racism at BET Awards

HeadlineJun 27, 2016

And actor Jesse Williams, known for his role on the TV show “Grey’s Anatomy,” earned a standing ovation Sunday night for his address at the BET Awards. As he accepted the Humanitarian Award, Williams paid homage to police shooting victims, including Rekia Boyd and Tamir Rice, who would have turned 14 on Saturday. Here’s how he concluded his speech.

Jesse Williams: “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.”

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

Non-commercial news needs your support

We rely on contributions from our viewers and listeners to do our work.
Please do your part today.
Make a donation
Top