“Peace, peace. Thank you, Debra, thank you, BET. Thank you Nate Parker, Harry (Belafonte), and Debbie Allen for participating in that. Before we get into it, I just wanna say…you know, I brought my parents out tonight. I just wanna thank them for being here, for teaching me to focus on comprehension over career. That uh, they make sure I learn what the schools were afraid to teach us. And also to thank my amazing wife for changing my life.
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. Alright?
It’s kind of basic mathematics. The more we learn about who we are and how we got here, the more we will mobilize. Now this is also in particular for the black women, in particular, who have spent their lifetimes dedicated to nurturing everyone before themselves. We can and will do better for you.
Now, what we have been doing is looking at the data and we know that police somehow managed to deescalate, disarm and not kill white people every day. So what’s gonna happen is we are gonna have equal rights and justice in our own country, or we will restructure their function and ours.
Now…I 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 much better it is to live in 2012 than it is to live in 1612 or 1712. Tell that to Eric Garner. Tell that to Sandra Bland. Tell that to Dorian Hunt.
Now the thing is though, all of us in here getting money, that alone isn’t gonna stop this, alright? Now 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’s no tax they haven’t levied against us and we’ve paid all of them. But freedom is somehow conditional here. “You’re free,” they keep telling us. “But see, she would’ve been alive if she hadn’t acted so…free.“
Now, freedom is always coming in the hereafter. You know what though, the hereafter is a hustle. We want it now. And let’s get it straight, a little sidenote:
The freedom of the brutalized is not to comfort the bystander. That’s not our job. Alright? 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 interests in equal rights for black people, do not make suggestions for those that do. Sit down.
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, just because we’re magic doesn’t meant we’re not real. Thank you.”
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