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Tuesday, June 28, 2016

Without Black Culture There Would Be No American Culture | gadflyonthewallblog

Without Black Culture There Would Be No American Culture | gadflyonthewallblog:

Without Black Culture There Would Be No American Culture

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“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 strange fruit.”
With these words, Jesse Williams absolutely floored the crowd at the BET Awards Sunday night.
His acceptance speech for the Humanitarian Award was jaw dropping.
Here was a black actor on “Grey’s Anatomy” just telling it like it is on national TV.
He wasn’t afraid a business dominated by white people would take offense (and some white people did). Or if he was, he wasn’t going to let it stop him.
The activist who recently produced a documentary “Stay Woke: the Black Lives Matter Movement” said, “The burden of the brutalized is not to comfort the bystander… If you have a critique for the resistance… then you better have an established record of critique of our oppression.”
No more tone policing. No white fragility. Just if you’re with us, stand up – otherwise, sit down and shut up.
It was beautiful. And it got me thinking.
There are so many obvious truths about our country’s relationship with race that Without Black Culture There Would Be No American Culture | gadflyonthewallblog: