Music

Justin Timberlake feeling it after tone deaf tweet on race issues

by Jesse Locke

Actor/activist Jesse Williams delivered a powerful acceptance speech at this weekend’s BET Awards after taking home the 2016 Humanitarian title. Justin Timberlake was #inspired to sing Williams’ praises, but when he was called out for cultural appropriation (and his part in Janet Jackson’s Superbowl “wardrobe malfunction”), JT’s response was decidedly out of sync:

This ignited the predictable social media shistorm, with responses taking Timberlake to task while urging him to “speak up on issues that affect the cultures you’re appropriating.” Others asked him to acknowledge his privilege alongside the black artists who “struggle to sell” while he succeeds in a similar style:

The Trolls star apologized, but even his “misunderstood” responses had an unfortunate air of “All Lives Matter”:

We’ll leave the last words here to Jesse Williams’ speech.

“We’ve been floating this country on credit for centuries, and 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, like oil, black gold, 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 thing is, though, just because we’re magic doesn’t mean we’re not real.”

[h/t People]