Those are fightin’ words. Stacey Dash didn’t just disagree with Jesse Williams’ impassioned speech at the BET Awards in a post she shared on her blog Wednesday, June 29 — she called him a “plantation slave” as well.
“You’ve just seen the perfect example of a HOLLYWOOD plantation slave!” the 49-year-old Clueless alum wrote, declaring the Grey’s Anatomy star’s powerful acceptance speech to be “racist.” “Sorry, Mr. Williams. But the fact that you were standing on that stage at THOSE awards tells people you really don’t know what you’re talking about. Just spewing hate and anger.”
On Sunday, June 26, Williams — who is the executive producer of the recent documentary Stay Woke: The Black Lives Matter Movement — delivered a poignant speech about the prevailing racism in today’s volatile society, citing examples of police brutality and invoking images of slavery to speak about the importance of activism and the Black Lives Matter movement.
“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 … 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 34-year-old father of two stated while accepting his humanitarian award. “The thing is, though, just because we’re magic, doesn’t mean we’re not real.”
Dash, however, saw Williams’ speech as just another way to keep America from coming together as a truly united nation.
“That chip on the shoulders of people like you will weigh you down and keep you from flying free,” she wrote. “But true freedom is never free. You have to know how to fly. If anyone is making you feel this way its you. Living in a psychological prison of your own making. If anyone is GHETTO-IZING anyone, it’s people like you letting the BETs and other media outlets portray us in stereotypes.”
This is not the first time that Dash has been outspoken about her disdain for the TV network. Earlier this year, amid the headline-making #OscarsSoWhite controversy, Dash declared on Fox & Friends that she didn’t understand why BET still existed.
“I think it’s ludicrous,” she told host Steve Doocy. “We have to make up our minds. Either we want to have segregation or integration, and if we don’t want segregation, then we have to get rid of channels like BET and the BET Awards and the Image Awards, where you’re only awarded if you’re black. If it were the other way around, we’d be up in arms. It’s a double standard.”
In response to Dash’s bold remarks at the time, BET took to Twitter with a post linking to a gallery titled “Every Time Stacey Dash Proved She Was Clueless.”
“She thinks there needs to be a white history month too, since, you know, our ancestors apparently fought for nothing,” BET’s caption read. “Clueless indeed.”
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