JESSE WILLIAMS’ BET SPEECH

“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.
 

All right? It’s kind of basic mathematics:, the more we learn about who we are and how we got here, the more we will mobilize. 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.

Now, what we’ve been doing is looking at the data and we know that police somehow manage to de-escalate, disarm and not kill white people every day. So what’s going to happen is we are going to have equal rights and justice in our own country or we will restructure their function and ours.

Now — I’ve got more, y’all. Yesterday would’ve 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 a 12-year-old playing alone in a park in broad daylight, killing him on television and then going home to make a sandwich. Tell Rekia Boyd how it’s so much better to live in 2012 than 1612 or 1712. Tell that to Eric Garner. Tell that to Sandra Bland. Tell that to Darrien Hunt.

Now the thing is though, all of us in here getting money, that alone isn’t going to stop this. All right? Now dedicating our lives to get 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 front lines of. There has been no job we haven’t done, there’s 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’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 of things straight, just a little side note: The burden of the brutalized is not to comfort the bystander. That’s not our job, all right, 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, the thing is that just because we’re magic, doesn’t mean we’re not real.”

Jesse Williams, receiving the BET Humanitarian Award, 2016

Real Tragedy Never Ends...Part 2

In Sanford, Florida, a seventeen-year-old black boy, Trayvon Martin, was visiting his dad when he decided to walk to a convenience store. He was sauntering down the street when the captain of the local neighborhood watch, a man named George Zimmerman, decided that Trayvon looked "suspicious." (No one has ever said what was suspicious about Trayvon, so I am assuming it was his African ancestry.)

Zimmerman called police to report the suspicious character soiling his neighborhood. The police instructed him to do nothing and wait until they could come and investigate. Apparently, Trayvon look so dangerous, Zimmerman couldn't wait for the police. In his car he followed the boy, confronted him, then killed him with the 9 mm concealed gun he had a permit to carry. When the police arrived, Zimmerman said he shot Trayvon in "self-defense."

Trayvon was not armed and probably didn't even understand that the color of his skin could get him killed. Zimmerman, who is white, was not arrested.

As soon as I heard this story, I knew immediately that the young man was black and the killer was white. How did I know this? Because it happens regularly somewhere in America and the white killer usually gets away with it.

These kinds of stories remind me of two things I find despicable: America's love affair with guns and America's refusal to acknowledge and confront racism. I am sick of both of these issues. How many people will have to die before the racist monster is satiated?

I am working hard to keep an open, loving heart, but stories like this infuriate me so that I know I have more work to do.

Random Thoughts

I just saw Man on Fire for the first time and loved it! Usually, I don't care for violent movies, but I found this one deeply satisfying to that dark side of me that likes revenge. Of course the fact that Denzel Washington was in practically every scene didn't hurt. He was at his Denzelian best as the cool, ruthless assassin.

Speaking of violence, the Philadelphia Eagles have signed Michael Vick, and PETA as well as many others are outraged. I certainly don't approve of Vick's treatment of his dogs, but I save my outrage for those many occasions when human beings are treated inhumanely. For example in cases of domestic violence when law enforcement officers, up to and including the U.S. Supreme Court, refuse to enforce restraining orders against men who often wind up killing or maiming women and children. I am also outraged that this country's leaders in the previous administration tortured and abused "enemy combatants" as if they were dogs. Perhaps I missed it, but I don't recall witnessing the kind of public and media outcry about that as about Vick.

SLAVERY AND HEALTH CARE
I've just finished reading a book entitled A Slave No More. It's the stories of two men who stopped accepting being enslaved during the Civil War, before President Lincoln had issued his Emancipation Proclamation. In reading once again about the dilemma Lincoln faced, it reminded me of the current situation with President Obama and his health care reform. Lincoln was caught between Southerners who didn't want blacks to be free, and Northerners who didn't care if they were free or not, so long as they didn't come up North. It recalls that old African American folk saying: "In the South they don't care how close you get so long as you don't get too high. In the North, they don't care how high you get, so long as you don't get too close."

Once again, the U.S. President is faced with making the best decision for the country in the face of an entrenched opposition whose interests are selfish. Justice prevailed in Lincoln's time, although he paid the ultimate price for that victory. And justice will prevail this time as well without Obama having to die for it. However, we must continue the fight because the opposition is just as determined to preserve their power and privilege today as the slaveholders were.

COMPROMISE
Without the Left and the Right, how would we know where the middle is?

Bending towards justice

In this Martin Luther King Jr. season, I want to share my favorite quotation of his.

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.

If, in fact, the people of the United States elect another business-as-usual politician, then that is what we deserve.

But my intuiton tells me that the time is ripe for a new idea. And there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.

We shall see.