Jackson Avery isn't going anywhere.
An online petition calling for actor and activist Jesse Williams to get fired from "Grey's Anatomy" garnered more than 5,000 signatures since it was posted over the weekend.
The petition was started by Change.org user Erin Smith, who calls Williams' 2016 BET Awards speech "racist, hate speech against law enforcement and white people," and concludes by using the controversial hashtag #AllLivesMatter. "All humans bleed the same color. #EqualConsequences4RacistBehavior," Smith writes.
Williams' powerful BET Awards speech was applauded for its no-holds-barred approach to calling out racism, police violence towards people of colour and cultural appropriation.
"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,'' Williams said to the audience in the Microsoft Theater on June 26.
Even Williams' boss, Shonda Rhimes, tweeted her approval.
But Smith says she plans to deliver the petition to ABC when she has 7, 500 signatures.
Fortunately, Rhimes put our fears to rest that Dr. Avery would be let go from Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital.
First, she retweeted Williams' response to the petition:
Then, she shut it down with this fist-pumping tweet:
And she got tons of support.
You tell 'em, Shonda.
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