Porsha Williams Urges Protesters To Keep Fighting Against Racial Inequality: ‘They Can’t Stop Us’
Though Porsha Williams was tear-gassed while protesting the death of George Floyd, the ‘RHOA’ star isn’t giving up the fight against police brutality – and she tells others to ‘stay focused on your mission.’
“Keep going,” Porsha Williams, 38, said to protesters during the June 9 episode of Watch What Happens Live. Host Andy Cohen, 52, asked The Real Housewives of Atlanta star if she had anything to say to protesters who, after seeing recent peaceful protests turn violent at the hands of the police, might be intimidated to demonstrate again. Porsha herself was hit by teargas in a protest a week before. Despite this, she remained committed to bringing justice for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, Atatiana Jefferson, and the countless other Black victims of systemic racism in America.
“They can’t stop us. I know, listen – that’s one of the reasons I wanted to be out there on the frontline, firsthand,” she said. The RHOA star has been a fixture in the Atlanta protests, and she said she wanted to “know what [protesters] feel before” she weighed in on the demonstrations. “And yeah, I got tear-gassed. And yeah, I had to have milk poured in my face to relieve my eyes from that insane burning but keep going. What they’re trying to do is silence you once again. We have the National Guard here, the APD – the crowds can be peaceful, and they’re trying to provoke the crowds, and make them angry, and make them act out, so they can then turn on the camera and say, ‘oh, look what happened. The peaceful protest has turned awry.'”
“Don’t do that. Be militant like our people – like people before us. [Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.], my grandfather, Rev. Hosea Williams. They had dogs biting them. They were tased. They were gassed. They were killed in the streets from the police batons. We have not received that just yet, on that level, but it could possibly be going there. So, if you are out there to protest, it’s not for the picture, it’s not just to be out there. You are out there to fight. Stay focused on your mission, and that is to be heard and to be seen.
“Don’t let them intimidate us. Period. Don’t let the media intimidate you, either. The media is trying to only focus on the rioters, the – what they call ‘looting’ – and that’s taken the complete focus away from what the protesters are doing. Don’t listen to the media. Keep marching forward.”
In the first half of the two-part Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen, Porsha spoke on how, when she was six-years-old, she attended a civil rights march in George with her grandfather. “We came across the Ku Klux Klan, who decided they were going to protest our protest. They threw rocks at us — I actually got hit with one. They chased us all the way back to the buses.” Porsha said that the lesson she got from that experience was “to keep on, regardless.”
She also recently said that she’s demonstrating to ensure that her daughter, 14-month old Pilar Jhena, never has to experience what she did. “My child’s future is on the line. … I fear for her future. I fear for her life and living in her black skin. I fear for my other future children,” she said during an appearance on Us Weekly’s Hot Hollywood podcast. “At this moment we all, everyone across the world, we’re fighting for humanity. We want injustice to come to an end now.”