Bozell & Graham Column: When Actors Hate Racist America

July 2nd, 2016 7:39 AM

There are those boorish moments when the celebrity takes to the podium of an awards show to deliver leftist political drivel. We can’t decide which is worse: the predictable, America-hating garbage, or the journalistic hosannas that inevitably follow.
      
The other day, Grey’s Anatomy star Jesse Williams launched into a “Black Lives Matter” sermon at the BET Awards when he won an award for his “humanitarian” work. Accepting the honors, Williams broke out the radical-leftist claptrap about this “invention” of abusive whiteness, exploiting all the creative blackness.

“We've been floating this country on credit for centuries,” he lamented, “and we're done watching and waiting while this invention called whiteness uses and abuses us, burying black people out of sight, out of mind, while extracting our culture, our dollars, our entertainment like oil, like black gold, ghettoizing and demeaning our creations and stealing them, gentrifying our genius and trying us on like costumes before discarding our bodies like rinds of strange fruit.”

How has whiteness abused Williams? Maybe we should ask his mother – who is white.

Williams can also relate to the downtrodden. To think: his reported net worth is a mere $8 million.

Imagine for two seconds a white actor standing up at awards show and proclaiming “this invention called blackness uses and abuses us, burying white people out of sight...ghettoizing and demeaning our creations.” The press would metaphorically put a white hood on his head. His career would be kaput.

But with Williams, ABC hailed a “powerful speech about race.” On CBS, they called it “an impassioned call to action” as co-host Gayle King said “Jesse Williams, I thought, stole the night.” NBC quoted other valentines. Sheinelle Jones read, “Twitter reacted instantly. One person writing, ‘Jesse Williams. Genius. Polarizing. Political. BLACK. Greatest acceptance speech I ever heard.’” News anchor Tamron Hall proclaimed “Social media...across the board commenting and celebrating his words....a powerful speech. You should follow him on social media, he's always just a very engaged person.”

Williams isn’t the only lefty America-hater to draw media adulation. Comedian Aziz Ansari  was granted space in The New York Times to explain “Why Trump Makes Me Scared for My Family.” He began by recalling he told his mother “Don’t go anywhere near a mosque...Do all your prayer at home, okay?” She replied “We’re not going.” He then announced “I am the son of Muslim immigrants. As I sent that text, in the aftermath of the horrible attack in Orlando, Fla., I realized how awful it was to tell an American citizen to be careful about how she worshiped.”

He protested Trump’s remarks that Muslims aren’t doing enough to notify authorities about potential terrorists and claimed “By Mr. Trump’s logic, after the huge financial crisis of 2007-08, the best way to protect the American economy would have been to ban white males.”

This man would be better served not using the word “logic” in his commentary.

“A must-read for every American,” proclaimed the viral website Mashable. “It's filled with heart, common sense, and cold, hard facts.” CNN, Vanity Fair, and Entertainment Weekly all raptly quoted the piece. At Mediaite, Muslim comedian Dean Obeidallah hailed how Ansari isn’t religious at all, but “Trump has brought the Muslim out of Ansari.”

It doesn’t matter that no one can recall a Muslim being violently assaulted or shot inside a mosque in the years since 9/11. Wait, we stand corrected. It made The New York Times when a mosque in Tucson was apparently “assaulted” by nearby college students on party nights. “A shower of crushed peanuts rained down on the mosque.”

America is apparently such a horrendously racist place for black and brown people that everyone celebrates you when you announce how horrendously racist it is, especially when you’re free and very rich.