Rhimes Responded To That Jesse Williams Petition

Shonda Rhimes is a very busy mogul, but she's got time to shut down absurd petitions, like the one against Jesse Williams following his brilliant, impassioned acceptance speech for his Humanitarian Award at the BET Awards. After the speech, most people were rightly in awe of his four minute oration on Black Lives Matter, police brutality, gentrification, in addition to his condemnation of those that stand silent while anti-black violence runs rampant, yet have critiques about the way that black people protest. But then, of course, there was the racist backlash. On Friday, a petition was started on Change.org titled, grossly, "Sign the petition to fire Jesse Williams from Grey's Anatomy for racist rant." But the Grey's Anatomy creator was not here for that, and she responded on Twitter on Monday.

The petition, started by an Erin Smith, addresses Williams and accuses that the actor "spewed a racist, hate speech against law enforcement and white people at the BET award." Even worse, it ends by signing off with #AllLivesMatter. I am not making this up. It's a classic case of missing the point by a thousand miles, and circling back around to proving Williams' point. Williams tweeted about it himself, encouraging people not to feed the trolls, saying:

But Rhimes wasn't going to let them get off that easy. The Grey's creator shut the whole situation down in just a few words:

Clearly, even if the petition got the necessary ten thousand signatures it needed to be passed on to ABC, the whole process is an exercise in futility, and as Williams said, a temper tantrum. Some people just can't stand powerful voices of people of color calling out oppression, but I suppose Smith and the Grey's fans that signed the petition are going to have to defect to another show, because Rhimes is keeping Williams around, of course. And in case anyone forgot, she loved the acceptance speech at the center of this petition:

In other words: Hi, haters; bye, haters. Shondaland makes the rules.