Longstanding black discontent with the character and content of BET, MTV and much of commercial black radio is giving way to open protest. African American protesters are regularly showing up outside the homes of corporate execs, including the black ones who have made billions beaming degraded and degrading images of African into black homes and around the planet, demanding something better. Will they abandon the old C. Delores Tucker stance of blaming artists and consumers for an approach that questions corporate decision making power over the media universe? BAR talks to Rev. Delman Coates of the Enough is Enough Campaign.
Outraged Activists Revoke “Free Black Passes” for BET and the Minstrel Show Industry
by BAR Managing Editor Bruce Dixon
When 500 community activists in the DC area picketed the home of BET CEO Deborah Lee last Saturday they delivered an important message. The era of the “free Black pass” extended to corporate media which aim their programming at Black audiences is definitely over. It's about time.
In 19th and early 20th century America, degrading depictions of Black people served the larger society's cultural, commercial and political ends. The images echoed and reinforced white supremacist notions which underlay the social order, and they moved products off the shelves too.
Today's 21st century minstrel circuit -- BET, MTV and a large slice of commercial Black radio and the so-called hip-hop industry, serve much the same ends, with a few new wrinkles.
Corporate marketers have become adept at appropriating elements of urban youth culture for use in selling products and "lifestyles" and combining these with violence, gratuitous sex, homophobia and misogyny.
The fantasy world they depict extols conspicuous consumption at the same time that it degrades black humanity and justifies the larger society's resort to mass imprisonment as the social policy of choice for dealing with black and brown youth. This being the age of "diversity", a layer of Black execs and entertainers are involved at every level, and entitled to a substantial cut. The best known of these, BET founder Bob Johnson may be worth a billion dollars. Hundreds of other black fortunes have been made off the vicious, clownish caricatures of African America depicted on BET and similar places.
Black popular discontent with the kind of entertainment programming offered by BET, MTV and much of black commercial radio is nothing new.
But the public critiques of rap and hiphop music by figures like C. Delores Tucker could never empower black communities to force the media regime to change. They focused the blame exclusively upon rap musicians and music consumers for selling and buying the degrading stuff.
This useless frame of reference sucks all the oxygen out of rooms before any productive discussion can begin. It diverts attention away from the corporate executives who decide which artists get airtime on the public broadcast spectrum, or which ones have access to the big privately owned but universally bond and tax-supported concert venues in every city and town in the nation. It completely lets off the hook legislators and the regulators of federal broadcast and local cable regimes, whose negligence and complicity with the billion dollar minstrel show industry ensure that it's the only "black" content reaching the ears of the young. Instead, the young are blamed for consuming the only images and buying the only music corporate execs and regulators allow them to hear.
This disempowering critique, which blames the relatively weak while leaving the powerful undisturbed has long been the default conversation among blacks dissatisfied with media.
But the current wave of black grassroots media activists are wiser, and begin from a very different place. Their beef starts not with the artists and consumers of commercial hiphop and degrading "entertainment", but with the billion dollar corporations, execs and advertisers that push it on the public. Hence their first picket line wasn't at a rap concert. It was at the home of a corporate CEO.
"This isn't about one corporate executive, or even about one corporation," declared Rev. Delman Coates, pastor of Virginia's Mt. Ennon Baptist church. "It's about holding corporations, their executives, their investors and their advertisers responsible for the product they issue and the lasting harm it does to our people."
"Everywhere I go" said one young black man who took part in the demonstration "people think I'm a thug because of what they see. (on BET)"
"BET and I are the same age, 27." declared Carla Brooks. "It's high time for BET to grow up and start acting its age. We demand that BET become responsible, be accountable to the black community, and that it offer unique and varied perspectives on issues relevant to the black community."
This is a heavy and significant demand, one that corporate media will stubbornly resist until forces in our communities raise the price of business as usual to unacceptable levels. Picket lines at the homes of corporate execs are just a start. Rev. Coates is a spokesperson for the Enough Is Enough Campaign. He said they began by asking for a meeting with Lee, and had been rebuffed, till he announced the demonstration in front of Lee's home.
"Several people, intermediaries reached out to us. We got a calls from our congressman, Stenny Hoyer and others." Eventually Bob Johnson himself called. "He was worried," Rev. Coates said, "that a rally in front of Lee's home would make us look bad in front of white people."
Given what we see on BET every day, that should be the least of Bob Johnson's worries.
What should keep him, and the rest of the black entertainment/minstrel show industry up late at night is the prospect that grassroots black activists is beginning to find common cause with the growing movement for a just, fair and democratic media. When that happens their demands will expand to the inclusion of locally driven black-oriented news programming on BET and black radio stations in hundreds of markets, and the opening up of the airwaves to low power and other noncommercial broadcasters that carry local artists and quality content to compete with the minstrel show garbage.
Bob Johnson's worst nightmare would be for a black movement for media justice to capture the creativity and energy of the urban youth that corporate culture so viciously caricatures and for those black activists to recall their almost forgotten spirit of impolite local initiative and civil disobedience. If that happened, protesters demanding a wholesale reshuffling of the media deck would suborn relations between advertisers on black radio, on MTV and BET by convincing them that buying time on stations and outlets that don't do news but manage to air plenty of disrespect is bad business. They might routinely picket "live remotes" and other out-of-studio public appearances of broadcast personalities.
BET is set to hold its annual star-studded and blinged-out 2007 Hip Hop Awards in Atlanta on October 13, for airing on the 17th. We asked Rev. Coates of Enough is Enough whether he and thousands of concerned citizens planned to show up at the Atlanta Civic Center that day uninvited.
"We're in touch with a lot of people, including some in Atlanta who might like to do just that," he said. "Se we expect to make a major announcement on our plans for that within the next week. Meanwhile we expect to be back at (BET CEO) Lee's house next Saturday afternoon. Those who want to join us, or just to be informed should check us out online at www.enoughisenoughcampaign.com."
We think it's time for Bob Johnson, Deborah Lee, MTV, Radio One, Clear Channel and the rest of the minstrel show industrial complex to be afraid. Very afraid. And for the rest of us, it's time to be hopeful.
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