I did not watch the BET Awards. But I wish I had.

Why?

Because Jesse Williams gave a fiery, impassioned speech demanding justice for black people. It was incredible. And that’s why I’m sharing it here.

This is for all of us white people:

Shut up.

Listen.

Learn.

Transcript below the fold:

Peace, peace. Thank you, Debra. Thank you, BET. Thank you, Nate Parker, Harry and Debbie Allen for participating in that. Before we get into it, I just want to say I brought my parents out tonight. I just want to thank them for teaching me to focus on comprehension over career, that they made sure I learn what the schools were afraid to teach us. And also to 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, impoverish and destroy us cannot stand if we do. 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 who have spent their lifetimes dedicated to nurturing everyone before themselves. We can and will do better for you.

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 gonna have equal rights and justice in our own country or we will restructure their function and ours.

Now…

[Standing Ovation]

I got more, y’all.

Yesterday would’ve been young Tamir Rice’s 14th birthday, so I don’t want to hear any more 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.

There has been no war that we have not fought and died on the front lines of. There is 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 keeping telling us. “But she would be 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.

Tell Rekia Boyd how it’s so much better to live in 2012 than it is to live in 1612 or 1712. Tell that to Eric Garner, Sandra Bland. Tell that to Dorian Hunt.

The thing is, though, all of us here are getting money. That alone isn’t going to stop this. Alright? 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?

And, let’s get a couple of things straight. This is a little side note: the burden 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 our resistance, then you’d 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.

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 and 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, that… just because we’re magic doesn’t mean we’re not real. Thank you.