Pop singer Justin Timberlake found himself in the middle of an ugly Twitter argument involving the BET Awards and Grey’s Anatomy actor Jesse Williams on Sunday night.
While accepting the show’s Humanitarian Award, Williams delivered a nearly-six-minute speech about racial inequality in the U.S. and Hollywood, dedicating his statue to activists, teachers, civil rights lawyers, parents, students, families and, specifically, black women.
WATCH: Jesse Williams delivers powerful BET Awards speech about racism
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Here is the last part of his speech:
“The burden of the brutalized is not to comfort the bystander. That’s not our job, stop with all that. If you have a critique for the resistance, 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 than do not make suggestions to those who do. Sit down.
We’ve been floating this country on credit for centuries, 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, just because we’re magic, doesn’t mean we’re not real.”
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After the speech, Timberlake tweeted at Williams, meaning to commend him for his moving words.
“@iJesseWilliams tho…#Inspired #BET2016,” Timberlake wrote in a tweet, which has now been deleted. He also tweeted:
The backlash began afterwards, with people criticizing Timberlake for hypocrisy, accusing him of doing precisely what the speech referred to: benefiting from black culture without supporting causes like Black Lives Matter. Others lashed out at Timberlake for his non-reaction after the Janet Jackson Super Bowl “wardrobe malfunction” of 2004.
There were literally hundreds of replies to Timberlake, mostly vitriolic. He then tried to explain his words.
With that, Timberlake signed out of the conversation, which continued well into the early morning hours.
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