Jesse Williams POWERFUL BET Awards Humanitarian Award Acceptance Speech

[Number23]

2. That brother is amazing. I have loved him forever. But you cannot -- and WILL not -- talk about

Jessie Williams without showing as many pics of that man as is humanly possible. Let me handle that for you right now:







LORD have mercy.

This speech is gold:

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.

Just... sigh.

yesterday would have been 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 12 year old playing alone in the park in broad daylight, killing him on television and then going home to make a sandwich.

...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.

You GO, honey. TELL THEM.