Actor and comedian Anthony Anderson delivered a pro-Black Lives Matter speech during the Emmys, including starting a chant.
“Say it with me, Jimmy. Louder, Jimmy. Say it so that my kids could hear it,” Anderson said, encouraging a “Black Lives Matter” chant. “And because black lives matter, black people will stay at home tonight to be safe, which is fine, because guess what? Because y’all don’t know how to light us anyway.”
Anderson, the star of ABC show Black-ish, joined late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel in presenting the award for outstanding limited series during the 72nd Emmy Awards on Sunday evening.
“We have a record of black Emmy nominees this year, which is great,” he said. “This is the part where the white people start to applaud and nod. Thank you, Jimmy.”
“This was supposed to be the blackest Emmys ever. Y’all wouldn’t have been able to handle how black it was gonna be, but because of COVID, we can’t even get in the damn building,” he said. “These Emmys would have been so black, it would have been like hot sauce in your purse black. It would have been Howard University homecoming black. It would have been ‘you fit the description’ black.”
Kimmel, at one point, corrected Anderson on the differences between a llama and alpaca when the latter said he was “alone in a sterilized green room trying not to sneeze on a llama.”
“Don’t ‘whitesplain’ it to me, Jimmy,” Anderson retorted. “This isn’t what it should have been, Jimmy, but you know what? I’m still rooting for everybody black because black stories, black performances, and black lives matter.”
Kimmel came under fire earlier this year for old footage of him wearing blackface and repeatedly using the N-word during a comedy routine.
