JUST in case you thought that our world hadn’t yet gone completely nuts, Bill Cosby, last week, was criticized by the NAACP and other African-American spokespersons for stating some significant, long-standing and self-evident truths.
Speaking at Constitution Hall in Washington on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Brown vs. Board of Education desegregation ruling, Cosby said that unless the values of many poor American blacks are improved, there will always be too many poor American blacks.
Cosby cited several examples, from obscene rap music, to the great regard poor black youth hold for expensive sneakers, to the disinclination poor blacks have shown to speak utilitarian English – while “standing on the corner.”
He also rejected the notion that the preponderance of blacks who inhabit penitentiaries are political prisoners. Cosby suggested that people who commit senselessly violent crimes belong in prison. He said that poor blacks are too often disinterested in serving their children as parents. And he said that since the 1954 Brown ruling, “the lower economic people are not holding up their end in this deal.” Of course, he’s right.
And, of course, he was criticized. He didn’t blame racist, white America for the sustained plight of black America – thus, he said the wrong things. He spoke about a race, once subjected to slavery, that now, to a large degree, – practices self-enslavement.
And if one wishes to witness African American selfen-slavement at work, one need only to turn to the BET – Black Entertainment TV – cable network at virtually any time of any day.
BET was founded by Robert Johnson, an African-American, in 1980. He sold the network to Viacom in 2000, but he remains BET’s CEO. And the programming on BET remains much as it was: Pathetic. BET is likely the most racist, federally licensed enterprise in the United States.
Johnson, who last year purchased an NBA franchise, is widely hailed as a model of African-American enterprise and virtue. After all, he’s rich. What else is there to know?
But his TV business success was largely predicated on making suckers out of black people, on perpetuating and exploiting negative stereotypes.
Certainly, no commercial TV network is today in the business of promoting redeeming social values. Some, at the end of the day, might break even – they show some good stuff, some bad stuff and some in-between.
But BET is in the business of targeting a black audience that it plays for fools and worse. BET has long been loaded with three kinds of programming:
1) Violent and profane rap and gangsta rap videos that celebrate jewelry-crazed, crotch-grabbing young black men as criminals and young black women as booty-shaking sex objects who are to be used, abused and then discarded.
2) Fire and brimstone religious sessions. The final message from the screaming preachers, both black and white, is almost always the same: Send money. You can’t submit unless you remit.
3) Smoke-in-a-bucket infomercials. BET, for the longest time, was a steady home to psychic hotline scams, including those that, in exchange for a fee, promised advice in choosing lottery numbers.
It’s woefully incongruous that black social activists have so quietly indulged BET, yet Bill Cosby takes heat for telling important truths.
One race-minded fellow who has attacked BET is Spike Lee. Lee, last year, told an audience in Bermuda, “I was told BET is big here, and I shook my head. If you get everything from BET you are getting the wrong message.”
Agreed. Lee, however, has appeared in several Nike TV commercials, often talking “street” while encouraging young black men to go get themselves some ildly overpriced sneakers.