Responding To JESSE WILLIAMS’ BET AWARDS Speech Makes 2nd Time JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE Got Dragged + Know Exactly What The Culture Demands (If It’s Going To Be Appropriated)

the soulful, blue-eyed soul popstar swooped right down and bit the bait—like a vulture.

#JustinTimberlake by saying we are all the same dismissed Jesse Williams speech entirely and proved his point at the same time well done 👏🏾

— Christmas Ram Cunny Goat 🎄❄️☃️ 🇧🇧🇯🇲 (@skinglo_afro) June 27, 2016

This was all bad timing for the 4 Minutes singer considering the fact that the world wasn’t quite done with Timberlake who [if you remember, performed at the 2004 Super Bowl with Janet Jackson and believed to have played the “that black guy raped me!”
card-throwing  Jackson under the bus when it came to defending her). Given that, he walked right into Jesse’s speech with jolts and jabs he didn’t expect.

So does this mean you're going to stop appropriating our music and culture? And apologize to Janet too. #BETAwards https://t.co/0FwBOQR24D

— Ernest Owens (@MrErnestOwens) June 27, 2016

https://twitter.com/rgay/status/747279658853376000

As much as we at OSF love Timberlake, it’s unfortunate that this happened like such but that truth serum Jesse Williams shot off to the masses was long overdue, as pop culture’s popular culture on a daily basis is sprouting and blossoming from the deep rooted fascination with black culture in the arts in ways that if the world outside in other legal and social systems loved us as much; this world would be a much better place.

“What I’d like to see us do is return to a space where it’s OK for folks to be proud and outwardly Black in public and not have to feel like we have to be safe to live in white spaces, or to make everyone else comfortable when we’ve spent centuries being uncomfortable,” Williams said in the media room after the show. “People are getting more comfortable being political. We live here, we pay taxes, we should be able to talk about it.”-Jesse Williams

Williams’ speech (which I will post in its entirety at the end) was inarguably poignant but much too significant to go ignored, unread,  and ingested and regurgitated.

Even since times of slavery and oppression when the likes of Thomas Jefferson and many in his time could admit that black people were undeniably musically, athletically and artistically amiss, they still were regarded disregarded as nothing useful for anything other than cheap labor at the expense of years of emotional, mental, and physical abuse.

“Just because I can dunk or act doesn’t mean I have to shut the hell up about issues that actually affect me and my people. We cannot allow them to extract from the Black community the best and brightest in a particular genre of expression that makes money for white corporations, and then separate us from the rest of the people,” Williams said in the media room after the show. “People are out here suffering. People are out here poor, and abandoned, and unsupported, and just because we get to be here tonight doesn’t mean that we’ve made it. We ain’t made it.-Jesse Williams

Fast forward, belaboring the obvious is what it is to note that while black culture is accepted and revered as “magic,” once the curtain’s down and bows are taken, many are shot and lives are taken with no one who loves us in song, sing praises of oppression with us-to whom we’re all concerned. And that is pretty much what Jesse Williams’ speech was about: the necessary sanctioning of support of those who love us only when it’s convenient, profitable—and popular, to. Because after all the shucks and jives, we are real human beings, with real, (undervalued) lives hence why “Black Lives Matter.”

The more you realize that we are the same, the more we can have a conversation.-Justin Timberlake

Love the culture and see its artistic and creative inclinations as nothing short of ‘magic’ but the people nothing as less than human.

You use the culture but have no righteous and respectful use for the people of it.

Just because we’re magic doesn’t mean we are not real- Jesse Williams

Once we get USE of what we want out of a place, thing or person, it’s hard to see that place or person as anything other than a ‘thing.’ But rather than choosing to misunderstand, once we seek to UNDERSTAND that place, thing or person, only then can we unify and truly be “all the same.”

You see, Rachel Dolezal had the right idea, in that that…she was down for the cause and wanted to fight the good fight. She loved the culture so much that she studied and taught black studies…even worked for the NAACP. It don’t get no blacker than that. But the only problem was, it would have been nice for her to feel that cultured and connected by representing the culture from behind her own white face-rather than in full black face, costume and an imitation of life.

Given the hurt and pain black lives are experiencing in this day and time,

“When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression” –Chris Boeskool

with apathy on the rise and no solutions or change near and many meeting demise, “the more you realize that we are the same, the more we can have a conversation” is not exactly what black people want to hear. A line like that, to black lives trying to matter, is the basic fundamentals basic, not so fun to mental, of what white privilege is: the embedded, innate inability to empathize with black thought and black lives (whether it be derived from guilt or a subconsciously knowing to acknowledge it would cause you to lose a bit of your privilege).

Our thinking is: If you get pleasure from the culture so much, come share some of this pain. 

Instead of laying a blanket over the issue, black thought feels that if (on stage) you can dance likes us, then as well, you should dance for us and with us (in the streets).

Jesse’s full speech (transcribed) + speech’s entirety :

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