What would an awards show be without a black award recipient taking the time to energize the viewing audience by basking in the collective black identity of being the perennial victim of anti-black racism?
Possibly an awards show actually worth watching. Possibly.
Sunday night during the BET Awards, actor Jesse Williams received a “humanitarian award” presumably for being a self-styled blacktivist who parrots the racial and political lies and distortions of the #blacklivesmatter movement’s focus on racial injustice. After accepting his award, Williams gave what the New York Times called, “an impassioned speech” that called for the end of, “police killings, racial inequality and cultural appropriation.”
As is always the case with pious expressions of black rage and victimology, Williams simply regurgitated the case that blacks are still victims of nothing else but various forms of white supremacy. For Williams’, this white supremacy takes the form of a “system” that empowers and legitimizes out-of-control, racialized police officers always guilty of using excessive force against black suspects. It also includes the many uncreative and insincere white people who prey on black culture and who steal black style to appropriate and monetize for white consumption.
And of course, blacks- from the audience at the BET awards to various social media platforms- are demonstrating, again, a particular lack of collective awareness of how ungrateful and childish they look to wider audiences. The viewing public shake their heads as blacks pridefully engage in the self-gratification of racial victimization by continuing to blame whitey, even while ignoring and forfeiting all the opportunities given them, at whitey’s expense, as ongoing compensation for past racial sins.
It’s especially obnoxious that this speech was given in a room full of comfortable middle and upper class blacks- all of whom, including Williams- are pretending to be ‘down with the struggle’ against ‘whiteness’ even as the main “struggle” facing blacks emanates from the moral retardation that nurtures social pathologies so flagrant within black society, that no one but blacks can ignore.
Williams begins by saying,
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…
Williams is an actor, acting like an activist. What “system” is he referring to? America?
“Divide and impoverish?” “Destroy us?” What does that even mean?
Yet, there is a system that facilitates the destabilization of black society, and it’s heavily dependent on an agenda and a form of white privilege and supremacy, but not in the racialized way Williams intends. But the consequences of self-delusion and willful ignorance that he and other left-leaning blacks endure render them immune to its recognition. That system is Leftism, and it has methodically divided, undereducated and impoverished generations of black Americans, seeking their destruction through systemic and unyielding dependence on the agents and agenda of Leftism.
And blacks continue to support that system year after year after year. So in that respect, blacks are complicit in the very system they self-righteously and angrily condemn.
And considering Williams’ inability to recognize the system responsible for black destruction, or ‘basic mathematics’ as he calls it, what kind of mobilization is he calling for? Again, he’s naively calling for the continued support in word and deed of the very system responsible for the kind of black inertia that’s prohibited blacks from enjoying all the benefits that accompany freedom and opportunity. That strategy has worked so well up to this point, I can see why he and other blacks are so excited to continue it.
Williams continues, encouraged by the echo chamber in the audience-
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.
What data, specifically, can Williams point to that demonstrates police caution and self-control in “not kill[ing] white people every day?” According to the Marshall Project– using data compiled by the Washington Post- of the 987 victims of fatal police shootings in 2015, whites represented 50 percent of those deaths while blacks represented 26 percent. For perspective, whites represent 62 percent of the U.S. population, while blacks represent 13 percent.
Though “unarmed” blacks were more likely to die by police shootings than unarmed whites, six-to-one in fact, why this occurs is found in the details of each specific confrontation between black suspects and police officers. In other words, these cases reveal that “unarmed” shouldn’t be used as a euphemism for innocent.
Further, in an attempt to show just how racist American police are, data from the Guardian– an ideologically leftist newspaper in Britain- show that police in America killed more whites than blacks last year. Of the 1146 people killed by police in 2015, 581 were white, while 306 were black. The Guardian also reports that of the 525 people killed by police so far this year, 257 have been white and only 123 were black.
Williams, like so many racial activists and social justice warriors on the left, is deliberately lying about who these cops are targeting and killing simply to advance a morally bankrupt narrative about black victimization at the hands of racist thugs with badges.
Despite Williams’ pronouncements to the contrary, blacks do have equal rights and justice in America. Whether blacks have taken full advantage of both is another issue entirely and has more to do with black motivation and ambition than racialized prohibition of either equal rights or justice.
The police-involved shooting cases he mentions are all defined by the details relating to the particular incident. For example, the police who shot and killed Tamir Rice didn’t, “pull a drive-by” on him while he was, “playing alone in a park in broad daylight.”
But, what happened to Tamir Rice shouldn’t have happened. His death was the result of a breakdown in communication between the 911 dispatcher who received the initial call regarding Rice, and the police officer who responded to that call. Rice, who was much bigger and looked older than twelve years old, was playing with what appeared to be a gun while pointing it at people at a local recreation center. The man who called police estimated Rice was 20 years old and suspected the gun wasn’t real, but couldn’t be sure. The 911 dispatcher failed to communicate that specific but important bit of information to the officer who the responded- the possibility that the gun was fake- and it was a partial contributor to Rice’s death.
Eric Garner’s death probably shouldn’t have occurred either. Garner defiantly resisted arrest and was subdued by officers- his death ruled as the result of complications of bad health. But one could complain that excessive government that prohibited the sale of loose cigarettes, which undermines city and state tax revenue, was also a contributing factor.
But for Williams to include the controversial deaths of Rice and Garner with the death of Sandra Bland (who killed herself) or Darrien Hunt (who allegedly lunged at cops with a samurai sword before being shot and killed), is to tragically trivialize the lives of rice and Garner and undermines the already-specious though fundamental narrative of predatory police who specialize in the racialized brutality of black people, simply and only because they’re black.
Williams then digs deep into the well of black racial victimization saying,
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.”
…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.
Freedom necessarily is a huge responsibility. With freedom comes learning and knowing what actions to engage in and what actions should be avoided- on their own merits but also in certain situations. But personal responsibility isn’t racially relegated to blacks; it’s an inevitable obligation of all who desire to be and remain free, regardless of one’s racial identity or ethnic composition. To act as if black personal responsibility is akin to the effects of systemic anti-black racism is an ignorant, facile argument and shows how fundamentally unserious and intellectually disconnected black leftists are.
The cognitive dissonance that underlies being a black leftist is breathtaking. Williams suggests that he and an audience full of middle-class blacks and black millionaires are part of a racial cohort of ‘brutalized’ people? It’s so pathetic it’s laughable. And what are he and his fellow-brutalized black millionaires resisting, specifically- more fame, money, adulation and insulation from criticism for his pretentious “activism” by telling those who don’t agree with his contrived and racialized view of the world to shut up?
And what constitutes his call for “resistance,” or the “resistance” of his fellow middle and upper class blacks, specifically? He’s a very well paid but average actor. Specifically what “oppression” has he endured? People who’re oppressed aren’t paid the kind of money that Jesse Williams is paid. Nor are the oppressed allowed a platform on national television to perform a bad spoken-word poem- chock full of racial hatred and intellectual emptiness like he was on Sunday evening.
A black millionaire publicly bitching about his people not having equal rights, when the contrary is so obviously true, is something that can only happen and be taken seriously among the social and political Left.
He finishes by saying,
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…
What does, ‘invention called whiteness’ even mean? And can viewers, subjected to Williams’ racial absurdity, condemn the invention called blackness? Why not?
And without whiteness, yo, Jesse Williams wouldn’t be here seeing as he’s half-white. Since his mother is Swedish, is she guilty for perpetuating the invention called whiteness? Is Williams’ mother to him, the same as Barack Obama’s grandmother was to him- “a typical white person”- a product of whiteness that fears and abuses blacks? Williams is half-white and thus, a beneficiary of the whiteness he rebukes. He attended Moses Brown School– a Quaker institution similar to Sidwell Friends School where Obama’s daughters attend- where tuition for this past school year was over $32,000 for middle school and more than $33,000 for high school. That ‘system’ of ‘whiteness’ afforded him a very good but expensive academic foundation, so what is he hypocritically complaining about?
Further, white people have always appropriated appreciative aspects of black culture for further consumption. Not only is it not new, how racist can whites be for bringing attention to black talent? Rather than complaining, blacks should celebrate the fact that attractive elements of black entertainment are enthusiastically appropriated by white entertainers and dispersed to multiethnic audiences. It demonstrates a wider influence of black talent and ability. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and only black leftists posses the ability to complain about a completely missed point for which they should be grateful.
Additionally, to equate cultural appropriation of entertainment with lynching (strange fruit) irresponsibly diminishes the violence experienced by those who died as a result of being lynched. This is so full of stupidity it can only escape ridicule among others who’re equally divorced from reality.
As a friend said earlier, black leftists of this sort are truly lost and have a far too important view of themselves- a view totally out of proportion to how the rest of the world really views them, namely as insignificant forms of entertainment who have nothing of any value to say or add to the world.
This is made worse by the fact that Williams and his fellow black leftists predictably blame a ‘system’ of ‘whiteness’ for the problems of black society while completely- and again, predictably- ignoring the ongoing black contribution to the problems that are inimical to enjoying equality, freedom and justice. Jesse Williams is the embodiment of black racial resentment, condemning the very ‘system’ he’s profited so handsomely from.
It’s no wonder fewer and fewer people take blacks and black issues seriously.
Whiteness isn’t the problem; a distorted, ideological system of what constitutes blackness, facilitated by Leftism is. Blacks will, uninterruptedly, continue to be racially victimized for the sake of Leftism- by themselves- until they figure that out.
And there are very few signs of that happening anytime soon.