*Outspoken activist Jesse Williams is slamming Hollywood — again — this time for its historic need to whitewash ethic characters.
In a recent interview with Hunger Magazine, the “Grey’s Anatomy” actor spoke about recent controversial castings and noted that ALL WHITE EVERYTHING is totally unnecessary in 2017.
“People thought that they had to whitewash every movie to make people go and see it, but that’s statistically bulls–t. The more diverse a movie is the more money it makes — statistically,” he said, according to Entertainment Tonight.
“No one is doing us any favors by putting up a poster of Martin Luther King Jr. People need to realize that we’re directly connected to the invention of civilization.”
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Several recent movies have caused controversy in casting white actors in minority roles, including “Ghost in the Shell,” “The Great Wall,” and “Dr. Strange.”
Politically outspoken Williams is the youngest member of the board of directors at The Advancement Project, a civil rights think tank and advocacy group. During his chat with Hunger, he explains how he found his political voice.
“I dedicated my life to doing (civil rights activism) anyway and now I’ve just added another job to that, which is being on television and in films,” he told Hunger magazine. “I didn’t wake up one day and think, ‘Hey, I’ve got this platform now, what can I do with it?’”
“My parents were politically active. (They) made sure to always speak to me about a general sense of self-respect and awareness, and an understanding of oppression, systematic discrimination and abuses.”
Williams won the humanitarian award at the 2016 BET Awards, delivering a speech highlighting racial injustice and police brutality.
“This is for the real organizers all over the country — the activists, the civil rights attorneys, the struggling parents, the families, the teachers, the students that are realizing that a system built to divide and impoverish and destroy us cannot stand if we do,” he said.
“There has been no war that we have not fought and died on the front lines of. There has been no job we haven’t done. There is no tax they haven’t levied against us — and we’ve paid all of them. But freedom is somehow always conditional here. “You’re free,” they keep telling us. But she would have been alive if she hadn’t acted so… free.
“Now, freedom is always coming in the hereafter, but you know what, though, the hereafter is a hustle. We want it now.”
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