Jesse Williams Gives Moving Speech at 2016 BET Awards

After receiving the 2016 BET Awards’ Humanitarian Award earlier tonight, actor/social activist Jesse Williams took to the mic to speak his mind on a a number of issues affecting the African American community — issues affecting the world for that matter.

After the jump, watch Jesse let his heart do the talking for him.

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“We know that police somehow manage to deescalate, disarm, and not kill white people every day, so what’s going to happen is, we’re going to have equal rights and justice in our own country or we will restructure their function and ours.”

“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 a park in broad day light, killing him on television, and then going home to make a sandwich.”

“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 then stealing them, gentrifying our genius and then trying us on like costumes before discarding our bodies like rinds of strained fruit. The thing is though… the thing is that just because we’re magic doesn’t mean we’re not real.”

(via EW)

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