Read His Speech in Full:
“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.
All
right? 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’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 going to have equal rights and
justice in our own country or we will restructure their function and
ours.
Now
— I’ve 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 it’s so much better to live
in 2012 than 1612 or 1712. Tell that to Eric Garner. Tell that to
Sandra Bland. Tell that to Darrien Hunt.
Now
the thing is though, all of us in here getting money, that alone isn’t
going to stop this. All right? Now dedicating our lives to get 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 been 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 keep telling us. But she
would’ve been 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. And let’s get a couple of
things straight, just a little side note: The burden of the brutalized
is not to comfort the bystander. That’s not our job, all right, 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 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 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,
the thing is that just because we’re magic, doesn’t mean we’re not
real.”
