After his speech at the BET Awards, over 11,000 signed a petition to have Jesse Williams removed from Grey’s Anatomy where he plays Dr. Jackson Avery.
If you haven’t heard the speech, here it is:
The woman who started the petition had this to say
“If this was a white person making the same speech about an African American, they would have been fired and globally chastised, as they should be, but there has been no consequences to Williams’ actions,” she wrote in the petition description. “Why was Burke’s character fired from Grey’s Anatomy after his inappropriate homophobic slur, but nothing for Jesse Williams? Why the one-way street? Why the support for a hater? Why the hypocrisy? #AllLivesMatter.”
The thing is white people can’t make this same speech because well….they don’t a reason to. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that all white people or all police officers are bad. That’s obviously not true but the mistreatment of African Americans is embedded into the history of this country. Racism is alive and well in America, as much that sucks it is a fact.
Jesse Williams isn’t wrong to speak out against racism and police brutality. It’s wrong to disagree with him for doing so because it could imply that you support racism and police brutality. I’m sure that someone will try to come along and twist my words but at this point I really don’t care. The #BlackLivesMatter movement isn’t to deny that other people are important. It’s to raise awareness about the struggles of the black community and to try to remind black people that they do matter despite the fact that history has told them repeatedly that they don’t.
And for the record, in case people were unaware, Jesse Williams is half white. He acknowledges that when he supports #BLM, he isn’t racist, and he doesn’t hate white people.
As for the “get him fired” nonsense, that’s not going to happen. Shonda Rhimes also supports #BLM (as she should because she is in fact a black woman). She did a whole episode on it in Scandal, are people gonna petition that too? I mean go ahead, it doesn’t matter. You not watching will not prevent Shonda Rhimes from being the queen of Thursday nights with her shows being braodcasted back to back.
Of course Tomi Lahren had something to say but she was shut down brilliantly!
Facts don’t lie.
bookmarkchronicles 
YES! Well said!!! I feel this is a Coalition post, too …
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Will do!
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Reblogged this on Coalition of the Brave.
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Okay. I’d just like to say that the reason this whole fiasco is garage is because his speech and his beliefs have NOTHING to do with what he does for a living or whom he is acting out on a show. They’re not related. Acting is his job. You’re going to take away a man’s livelihood because of his beliefs? Is that how far America has come? Well, if that’s the case, then I think we may have regressed from where we began and forgotten the Constitution. What happened to freedom of speech? He is not harming anyone physically or mentally with his words and if someone is perhaps ‘offended’ by it, then they lack the tolerance and acceptance required to overcome racism and sexism and religionism (is that a word yet?) and whatever other prejudices are left out there in the world.
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Thank you!! I do think that trying to get fired was a huge stretch. I don’t know if religionism is word but t definitely should be because it fits!
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Reblogged this on Bossadi and commented:
It’s just laughable that the people who signed and support this “petition” really think they’re onto something solid. I used to get angered by the ignorance of white people who would bite someone’s head off for calling out institutional racism (because, can’t they see how much they’re exposing they own asses?), but now I just laugh especially knowing that this call for Williams to be fired has been met with a “Boo don’t need a petition #shondalandrules” LMAO.
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Thank you!!
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Have you ever read the civil war era propaganda/essays that said slavery wasn’t actually slavery, but freedom was slavery? Have I transported you into the twilight zone? I’m not kidding, it’s a real thing. And it was widely quoted by the pro-slavery crowd.
It’s a classic technique. Someone denounces something and the counter-attack is to accuse them of what they’re denouncing.
Here’s Professor Agre from UCLA:
“… More importantly, conservative rhetors have been systematically mapping the language that has historically been used to describe the aristocracy and the traditional authorities that serve it, and have twisted those words into terms for liberals. This tactic has the dual advantage of both attacking the aristocracies’ opponents and depriving them of the words that they have used to attack aristocracy.
A simple example is the term “race-baiting”. In the Nexis database, uses of “race-baiting” undergo a sudden switch in the early 1990’s. Before then, “race-baiting” referred to racists. Afterward, it referred in twisted way to people who oppose racism. What happened is simple: conservative rhetors, tired of the political advantage that liberals had been getting from their use of that word, took it away from them.
A more complicated example is the word “racist”. Conservative rhetors have tried to take this word away as well by constantly coming up with new ways to stick the word onto liberals and their policies. For example they have referred to affirmative action as “racist”. This is false; it is an attempt to destroy language. Racism is the notion that one race is intrinsically better than another. Affirmative action is arguably discriminatory, as a means of partially offsetting discrimination in other places and times, but it is not racist. Many conservative rhetors have even stuck the word “racist” on people just because they oppose racism. The notion seems to be that these people addressed themselves to the topic of race, and the word “racist” is sort of an adjective relating somehow to race. In any event this too is an attack on language.
A recent example is the word “hate”. The civil rights movement had used the word “hate” to refer to terrorism and stereotyping against black people, and during the 1990’s some in the press had identified as “Clinton-haters” people who had made vast numbers of bizarre claims that the Clintons had participated in murder and drug-dealing. Beginning around 2003, conservative rhetors took control of this word as well by labeling a variety of perfectly ordinary types of democratic opposition to George Bush as “hate”. In addition, they have constructed a large number of messages of the form “liberals hate X” (e.g., X=America) and established within their media apparatus a sophistical pipeline of “facts” to support each one. This is also an example of the systematic breaking of associations.”
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Tell those 11,000 petitioners this is what we in America call “freedom of speech “.
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