+
More

Jesse Williams' BET Awards speech brought down the house.

On June 26, 2016, Jesse Williams took home the BET Award for humanitarian of the year. It was well-deserved.

Photo by Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images.


Over the past few years, the "Grey's Anatomy" actor has gained a ton of acclaim for his work as a civil rights activist. He's become well-known for speaking out online with incredibly thoughtful and incisive arguments against police brutality.

He's also done excellent work with the Advancement Project, an organization designed to "strengthen social movements and achieve high impact policy change."

Williams wasn't in the celebrating mood at the BET Awards, though. Instead, he used the platform to get a few things about race in America off his chest.

After quickly thanking his parents and his wife, he gave a shoutout to the people he called "the real organizers": activists, civil rights attorneys, teachers, parents, and everyone around the country fighting for equal rights.

All GIFs via BET.

Then he got down to business. Every word of his acceptance speech was brilliant, but three points stood out:

1. He wanted to remind everyone of how much work there is left to do around racial justice.

He invoked memories of recent victims of police brutality Rekia Boyd, Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, and Darrien Hunt:

"What we've been doing is looking at the data and we know that police somehow manage to de-escalate and 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."

"Yesterday would have been young Tamir Rice's 14th birthday," he added. "So I don't want to hear any more about how far we've come."

2. He had some choice words for folks who criticize the Black Lives Matter movement.

A lot of folks want to chime in about when and how African-Americans should go about seeking justice and equality. But Williams says not everyone should get a say, and he's absolutely right.

"Let's get a couple of things straight. 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 of our resistance, 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 for those that do," he said.

3. He brought the crowd to its feet with a powerful call to action, asking everyone in the room to use their wealth and fame for something truly worthwhile.

Williams got real (and poetic) when he asked his celebrity peers to think about their own role in the equal rights movement.

"All of us in here getting money? That alone isn't going to stop this. Dedicating our lives to getting money, just to give it right back for someone's brand on our bodies, when we spent centuries praying with brands on our bodies, and now we pray to get paid for brands on our bodies?"

"We're done watching and waiting while this machine called whiteness uses and abuses us, burying black people out of sight and out of mind."

Williams' speech struck a nerve with people from all walks of life.



If you haven't yet, watch Williams' speech here in its entirety. It's absolutely worth your time.

By the end, it's crystal-clear why BET recognized him as such an important part of the equal rights movement. And his work is really just beginning.

Joy

Homeless man catches family's two children and dogs dropped from burning apartment building

"He was right underneath and he was like 'Yes, throw your daughters out, I'm going to catch them, I'm going to get them.'"

Man catches entire family as they jump from burning building.

House fires are devastating for families. In a matter of minutes, you could lose all of your belongings and a place to live, or worse, you could lose loved ones. A family in Phoenix, Arizona, recently found themselves facing the reality of their own home in flames. Claudia Jimenez told CBS News that she woke up trapped in her burning apartment with her two daughters, with nothing to do but yell for help in the hopes that someone would hear her.

The mom's screams were answered by Joe Hollins, a homeless man who was camping nearby with his wife. Hollins didn't hesitate to try to find a way to help. With no way out and the fire department still nowhere on the scene, Jimenez had to trust the stranger who was standing below.

"He was right underneath and he was like 'Yes, throw your daughters out, I'm going to catch them, I'm going to get them,'" Jimenez told CBS.

Keep ReadingShow less
Pop Culture

Man rewatches shows from his childhood and his recaps of the bonkers storylines are priceless

Rob Anderson's hilarious recaps of shows like "Mighty Ducks," "Beethoven," and "7th Heaven" might make you wonder how they got made in the first place.

@hearthrobert/TikTok

These plots makes zero sense.

While there are no doubt some timeless classics from our childhood that remain every bit as amazing as we remember, many are straight-up cringey upon a later viewing. Really, it’s to be expected as societal viewpoints change…sort of a marker of how far we’ve collectively come.

And so, what do we do with these problematic pieces of old-school pop culture? Well, we can certainly update them to better reflect a more modern attitude, but that also comes with a set of potential problems. Or we could simply never watch them again. Certainly an option given all the content out there. But then we might miss an opportunity to better understand what seemed to work for the mainstream then, and why it doesn’t work now.

And then there’s the third option—allow ourselves to be entertained by their cringiness.

That’s certainly the route taken by Rob Anderson. Over on TikTok, Anderson has taken ultra-popular movies and television shows from his childhood and given them hilarious recaps capturing how absurd some of the storylines are.
Keep ReadingShow less

Karlie Smith shows the meal she's bringing to the restaurant for her son.

A mom who admitted she packs her 2-year-old a meal when they go out to dinner has started an interesting debate on TikTok about restaurant etiquette and how it applies to young children.

The video posted by Ohio mom, Karlie Smith (unbreakablemomma on TikTok), has received nearly 600,000 views and has over 1,850 comments.

“Call me cheap, call me whatever, but if we’re going out to a restaurant, I’m packing my kid a meal," Smith, 21, said in her post. "I do this for many reasons. On Friday nights, my family and I get together, and tonight, we’re getting food out. My son is not getting food out.”

Keep ReadingShow less
Joy

Woman decides that she is the love of her life and marries herself at her retirement home

“I said, you know what, I’ve done everything else. Why not?”

77-year-old woman decides she's the love of her life and marries herself.

We joke about marrying ourselves or a platonic friend if some arbitrary amount of time has passed without a proposal from an imaginary suitor. And sure, some people do wind up marrying a friend in more of a business arrangement, but it's not very common that someone follows through with marrying themselves.

Dorothy "Dottie" Fideli, decided that she was going to break the mold. The 77-year-old sat down and thought about all of the things she had done in life and who was with her the entire time cheering her on. It was an easy answer: herself. She was her biggest cheerleader, the person who always showed up and the love of her life, so Fideli made the plan to marry herself.

On a beautiful May day, friends and family gathered in the O’Bannon Terrace Retirement Community, where Fideli is a resident, to witness the ceremony.

Keep ReadingShow less
Joy

12-year-old Texas girl saves her family from carbon monoxide poisoning

She knew something was wrong with her mom and brother, which wound up saving her whole family.

Fort Worth 12-year-old helps save family from carbon monoxide poisoning.

Carbon monoxide is called a silent killer for a reason. Many people don't realize they're experiencing carbon monoxide poisoning before it's too late. The gas is colorless and odorless and tends to have a sedating effect that causes people to sleep through the fatal poisoning. Having carbon monoxide detectors is one of the most effective ways to identify the gas before it's too late to get out of the house, but not every home has one.

A little girl in Fort Worth, Texas, experienced a terrifying encounter with the deadly gas, but her quick actions saved her entire family. Jaziyah Parker is being held up as a hero after she realized something was wrong with her family members and called for help.

The girl called 911 after she noticed her mom pass out. On the call with the dispatcher, Jaziyah says she thinks her mother has died before explaining that there was something now wrong with her baby brother, who was just 5-months-old.

Keep ReadingShow less

Drew Barrymore speaks during the FLOWER Beauty launch at Westfield Parramatta on April 13, 2019, in Sydney, Australia.

Drew Barrymore, 48, has been in the public consciousness since she starred as Gertie in 1982’s mega-blockbuster, “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial,” a performance that earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. So, it makes sense that many people of a certain age feel as if they’ve grown up with her.

Now, she’s an even more significant part of people’s lives as the host of “The Drew Barrymore Show,” which runs every weekday on CBS.

On May 25, the show’s Instagram page posted a touching video of an off-the-cuff moment between Barrymore and a fan during a taping of her show. In the clip, Barrymore realizes that someone in the audience is crying. So, instead of ignoring the fan, she jumps to action to see what is the matter.

Keep ReadingShow less