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The BET Awards promo efforts stated this year’s show was going to be “LIT” and they surely did not disappoint us.  EarHustle411’s highlight of the evening was the BET Humanitarian Award recipient actor Jesse Williams whose claim to fame was from the hit show Grey’s Anatomy.  Williams who many may have thought he was just a nice tall glass of water with these gorgeous eyes (yes they are gorgeous) but in reality his an extremely socially conscious activist.  While our black citizens male and female are being taken out by law enforcement like yesterday’s trash, Jesse has been using his status as a celebrity as a platform to keep the actions  of the “oppressors” and the legacy of the “oppressed” at the forefront of people minds.

His acceptance speech resounded louder than the “shot heard around the world” before Paul Revere took that legendary ride to alert the British were coming.  Williams said:

“Now, 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.”

In others words, he is saying Black people had better “wise up and rise up” because this home of the brave and land of the free isn’t free for everybody.

 

 

Williams also made a valid point in his speech, while striving for monetary success is all well and good but in reality for blacks it doesn’t matter how much money you have you’re really just a black person with a lot of money.  He said this:

“Now the thing is, though, all of us in here getting money – that alone isn’t gonna stop this. Alright, now dedicating our lives, dedicating our lives to getting 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 is 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 have 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.”

This is the United States of America (get it UNITED) and unfortunately we all are not experiencing the same unification.  No one should have to “hustle” for their freedom in a country that pride itself on being “Land of the Free and the Home of The Brave” whom by the way are not even being treated fairly (that’s a different post)  but Williams definitely said it best,

“Now, what we’ve been doing is looking at the data and we know that police somehow manage to deescalate, disarm and not kill white people everyday. 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.”

The time has come for black people to stop allowing those who think this land of the free would be that much more “free” without us here to wise up and rise up and demand the very same freedoms and justices given to those who are non black.  Jesse was right, this country has been working on “borrowed” funds for centuries and in this current century that has not changed but one thing that is true is black people are a hot commodity, they are talented, smart, inventors, innovators, all that and more.

“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.”

It’s no secret that blacks spending power is significant in the economy and of those funds were to ever be diverted elsewhere, total devastation may not be imminent but a deflation would be felt.  So Jesse YOU BETTER SAY THAT!! Burying the truth does nothing but make it difficult for when the floods of the cemeteries where the truth is buried is raised from the dead and it has to be faced head on and those who have witnessed the brutalization of blacks who wanted to do something but did nothing are equally responsible for the buried truth.

They say the game is to be sold not told but if Jesse Williams has it his way, the secrets of the game will be given away for FREE to those who would benefit the most!!

EarHustle411 Congratulates JESSE WILLIAMS the 2016 BET Awards Humanitarian Award Recipient!!