Wendy Williams is under fire from the black community after she made controversial remarks about Grey’s Anatomy star Jesse Williams‘s speech at the BET Awards last month.
During her BET show Wednesday, Williams was discussing the online petitions circulating to get Jesse fired from Grey’s, and how those only started up because people interpreted his speech as “racist against white people.”
“I must say to you, he was on BET and his speech was very poignant on the one hand, on the other hand, you know, I would be really offended if there was a school that was known as a historically white college. We have historically black colleges,” she said.
She also referred to the multiple national organizations in the U.S. specifically for black people (like the NAACP), and pointed out that white people don’t have the same thing.
“What if there was the National Organization for White People, only? There’s the NAACP,” she asked rhetorically.
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“Look, everybody’s quiet,” she said to the stunned audience. “You’re leaving me out here to dry by myself? One wrong word — I’m choosing my words carefully, but what I am saying is racism sucks and we can all do better in our own households, educating our children to make to make it better. National speeches like this will always rub people up the wrong way, just like, you know, white people might be offended because Spelman College is you know, a historically black college for women.”
Williams was subsequently lambasted on Twitter.
The Change.org petition calls for Jesse to be fired over the speech in which he criticized police in America, saying: “We know that police somehow manage to de-escalate, disarm and not kill white people every day.”
Started by a woman named Erin Smith, the petition takes issue with the fact that Williams, an African-American, was not punished in any way for his allegedly “racist” speech.