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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.
