BET Awards aftermath

[Cynique]

Fallout continues from what stole the show at the recently BET awards telecast.  The tributes to Prince by various artists were supposed to be the highlight of the night but their performances along with a surprise opening act appearance by Beyonce were all overshadowed when Jesse Williams, a featured actor on the hit TV show, "Greys Anatomy", was presented with a humanitarian award.  His acceptance speech turned out to be what I'd describe as a kind of spoken word lament about - you guessed it - race in America. It was a very articulate and dynamic, not to mention provocative indictment of the white power structure, and it brought down the house. 

Predictably, it was just a matter of time before Jesse's rant which also criticized certain blacks for being complicit in the plight of their race, spilled over into the social media.  While blacks were full of praise, whites were offended by the way Williams  excoriated them, and a post by superstar Justin Timberlake was the most notable response shot down on black twitter. As a result, a campaign presumably by whites to have Jesse fired from Grey's Anatomy got underway. Shondra Rhimes, however, the producer of this series was having no parts of it and defended Williams' right to his opinion. But the controversy continues as the question remains as to whether a black celebrity has a right to do what a white one would be branded as a racist for doing had he aired his grievances against blacks...    

The following is an excerpt from Jesse Williams' speech and is what he spat in bringing it to a close.  

"...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."

[Troy]

I've deliberately avoided consuming any material related to this "controversy," on social media.  As these things go viral on social media, they just strengthen the very structures and systems that we, and even Jesse, complain about.

So while Jesse's spoken word piece was moving, it will not change a thing.  Going viral on Twitter only enriches the owners of Twitter.  The only thing that will change anything is a change in our behavior.

White folks don't "extract" our culture we give it way, in many cases freely.  We boast about writing for the Huffington Post for free, while turning our noses up a payments deemed to small from a Black owned platform.  We even go as far as claiming ownership when none belongs, to the point when some people actually believe that "black Twitter" or BET are things that Black people own.

 

[Cynique]

Yep.  Talk is cheap.  That's why black folks do so much of it.