BET & It's Deal With the Devil (Repost Revisted)

People have been bugging with Boyce Watkins' commentary about BET; unfortunately, BET has been on a fast track downhill to hell in gasoline thongs even before Viacom got a hold of it. 

Matter of face, founder and former owner, Robert Johnson could've done a lot with it, if he had a heart, a conscience, and a little concern regarding his own folk.

Anywho, here is a blog I did after the 2010 BET awards. I was not at all interested in seeing 2011, or Free's fake ass, or five stars make ten appearances on the same night because BET can only book folk who's careers are dwindling, or they are trying to get some exposure.

BET's Deal With the Devil
Have you noticed the plethora of shitty awards shows lately? Let's take MTV, the Oscars, the Espy, the annual porn awards (uhh maybe not that), and we can go down the list.

But the one that I'm going in on today is my all time favorite failure, BET's annual F-list celebs, cooch fest and fake-thug fuckery known as the BET Awards.

Between the BET Awards, Soul Train Music Awards and the Brandy/Ray J reality show and now the Basketball Wives, I shake my head and think, "What a waste of airtime space."

You know what is scarier, the fact that there aren't any shows starring black folk on television. And I am not talking about "Tiny & Toya" or any Reality TV series, that is just a cheap way for networks to deal with heavy financial losses in the era of Internet while they figure out the next gigantic exploitative financial scheme other than overpriced advertising.

With that said, some people view BET as the only time to watch diversity other than the token black, Latino, or Asian that appears on CSI, House or Grey's Anatomy. Yes, please be afraid.

What has been even more of a squander is BET the network, also known to me as Bullshit Entertainment TV. The only shows carrying that half-ass cable channel are "106 & Park" and the Sunday gospel shows that feature pastors with 1983 gherri curls and thousand dollar suits sweating and preaching religious feel-good lies to half of a congregation living in upper-class poverty.

And my all-time unfavorite, "106 & Park" is a prime environment and training site for pedophiles. You have two hosts in their mid-to-late 30s, playing videos of soon-be-grandfathers such as P-Diddy who is making like his 10th comeback, in crowd full of tweens and hot-booty adolescents who are ready to pop, lock and drop it for the first star to blow them a kiss.

All you need is a fake east-coast accent like Rocsi (from NOLA) and Terrence (from N. Carolina), a little music, some brand named clothes, and you have at least three teens on your team.

And if I channel surf to this cable station and see the film, Diary of a Mad Black Woman, or a horribly-written homo-erotic Christian-zealous stage play one more time, I'm going to come out of my skin. And if there is another Baby Boy replay, I think me and my mama will get pregnant by Jodie or get ripped from asshole to vagina by one of Ving Rhames' jump-fucking scenes.

With the ongoing financial depression, it has been shown through government documents that the overexpsure of highly-hyped, low-production shows and professional athletics such as FIFA, NBA Finals, Wimbeldon, French Open, the Golf Master's, and the list of other sports, is often used to quell the savage beast of the masses. Check out the baseball frenzy on the radio during the 1920s Depression.

Nevertheless, BET was not always this way. There were actually some pretty good, original shows, news, and black political thought up until the late 1990s. In fact, BET was in many ways, a social-political-and cultural hub for black folk who could not break into a very whitewashed entertainment or news industry.

Once upon a time, being on BET meant something.

Lets not forget, MTV did not to show Michael Jackson's videos when it launched in the 1980s. Back in the day, BET, was all black folks had as far as cable television was concerned.

But let me tell you a little about one of BET's deals with the Devil that has led to its . I remember it well, I was an entertainment reporter then.

I will start with a BET press junket that I went to in the late 90s or early 2000s. Since BET supplied the publication I worked for with lots of entertainment material and advertisement, I was damn near obliged to go. Yup, that's how the press works, the newsroom is always darkened by an advert-man.

Well, I went to this junket and Robert L. Johnson was there to introduce BET's latest channel. The reporters were thinking, "Finally, a political station or one that focused on more than videos." We were so stupid, it was the exact opposite, it turned out to be a soft porn channel with a name I cannot remember.

After Johnson gave his warm and fuzzy speech in front of black and white sleazy investors, a black male reporter asked Johnson why he chose a soft-porn station out of all the things he could have launched. Then the reporter added to his inquiry that Johnson alreardy received heavy criticism for cutting socio-cultural political shows and even the news from the already existing BET.

And that is when the coon came out.

Johnson said something to the fact that BET was about entertainment and if he wanted to do something on entertainment then that was what he would do. Of course he said it with a fuck you tone and a couple of F-bombs to the reporter. It was quite nasty, and I was frankly disgusted.

Here I must mention that Johnson's former wife (who now openly talks about his gazillion affairs and domestic abuse) didn't even let their children watch BET because of its content! Also, I must mention that Johnson was the guy who insinuated Obama to be a common criminal in his support with Clinton back in the presidential campaign.

Okay, now back to the story...

Porn & Hip Hop

A scene from the video "Tip Drill"

Well, the soft-porn venture did not work out well, but something else happened. BET became a breeding ground for the merger of porn and hip-hop.

It was around the 90s when porn companies began to invest heavily in hip-hop. Larry Flint, the owner of Hustler Magazine had experimented with a hip-hop magazine called, Rap Pages, a West-Coast version of The Source.

Though Rap Pages could not mess with The Source, there was something to be said about over-sexualized themes and frequent messages of materialism and consumerism in 1990s rap. Plus there was a trend with the hip-hop video models---most came from the porn world located in NOHO, or North Hollywood, Sherman Oaks, and the Valley right outside of city of the Los Angeles.

Logistically, this was perfect because BET has production sets in Burbank and corporate housing the Valley, not far from porn industry headquarters. In fact, this goes for all of the entertainment industry who often preyed on artists via lots of drugs and freaky sex.

As hip-hop became heavily infused with drugs, strippers, sex, money and murder, the porn industry banked on the destructive lifestyles of artists and their entourages. Plus in black strip clubs, the music of hip-hop and its latest uncut songs became the preferred music of choice.

Simultaneously, hip-hop became BET's bread-and-butter, especially after Donnie Simpson, the former host of Video Soul left. After the failure of the soft-porn station, and the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that loosened content regulations, BET put on a late-night show called "BET Uncut" a video showcase that featured strip-club hip-hop or videos that were sexually explicit.

The most popular video was "Tip Drill" from Nelly, noted for displaying a mansion full of bikini-clad or naked-black women dancing for money.


With hip-hop being bankrolled by the porn-industry, videos and songs that magnified sex, money, drugs, violence, and misogyny were a BET staple. Silently, Bob Johnson who profitted from ill-gotten gains and brought a once politically powerful network to its knees by giving blow jobs better than Superhead to corporatists, sold BET to Viacom in 2003. And the network has been falling ever since.

BET Awarding Who?
And so I shake my head at an awards show that is totally constructed through money and power players about who is the new urban-it person. You know when a black star has fallen from white graces when they appear on BET, a la Kanye West and Chris Brown.

But one thing remains the same in BET that was apparent years ago. Light-skinned folks get all the glory. Copycat Nikki Minja, Wannebe Lauryn Hill in the body of Drake, and the new white token, Justin Timberlake aka Justin Bieber are reifying the bleached side of Black.

Wombs for Hire

In Aba, Nigeria, Dr. Hyacinth Orikara is being detained for running a clinic that housed pregnant teens and eventually purchased the children to be sold throughout the world for various reasons.

There have been claims of the babies entering into a world of underground sex slavery, to illegal international adoptions. This sordid trade of babies is not new in a world that has traded and sold flesh for thousands of years.

Do you remember when the Tsunami in Indonesia and Sumatra also revealed a large child sex trafficking trade? Or the prostitution ring that is alive and well in the US, and is fueled by foster-care and neglected children?

More specifically, in Enugu, Nigeria in 2008, a baby farm was raided and the teenage mothers reported that they were repeatedly raped by the doctor of the clinic and local youth.

The Nigerian baby farms raise more awareness with the gross exploitation of women in developing countries who have extreme difficulty in generating income and taking care of the families. It also brings up the painful past of breeding farms during US slavery and the disruption of families in general in the slave trade.

In breeding farms, women and men who were seen as "good breeders" were housed and forced to copulate. Revered historian, John Henrik Clarke's grandfather was enslaved on a breeding farm, forced to bear numerous children, only for them to be sold. Clarke re-tells that his fore-father walked from the East Coast to the West, looking for his progeny and other family members.

Now lets slightly re-direct the billion-dollar trade of families in developing areas paying women to have babies for $26-a-day in countries like India. The "trend" is called "Wombs for Rent" and are exchanges between wealthy or upper middle class people from all over the globe, but highly concentrated in the UK and USA. These people create inequitable contracts with poor women who breed babies as a way to make money.

Somehow, this type of baby trade gets lost in baby trafficking.

I guess if Madonna or Angelina Jolie scoop up a couple of African babies, they are exempt? Hunh, but what is the difference. It is legal baby trading?

As the Water Turns to Blood: Don't Eat the Fish, Don't Clean Up the Spill & Forget the Essence Fest

The other day, my sister called me and told me her husband might be going to Louisiana to clean up BP's shit pile. Like most of America, they are struggling. I calmly told her to read he reports about the toxicity in the air and the possibility of clean up crews dying.

What I really wanted to yell, was, "Don't you clean up the workings of the devil!"

And just like 9-11 and the Valdez Oil Spill, the clean-up workers with flimsy masks are getting sick, and sicker. Of course these are desperate men and women who have run out of options and will probably still work, even if given the precautions that they probably will die within 10 years.
But it gets better, FEMA is preparing to evacuate Gulf cities in what they say will be precautions against a "controlled surface burn" which is burning the top layer of the oily-water.

That is just a cover up for the nauseating, lethal fumes of the methane that the petroleum is giving. The biggest concern is not the oil itself, but the gas that it gives off. That is why you see people with masks.

Just imagine living, eating and sleeping at a gas station with the underground tankers open. Now maximize the smell 100 times and that's what you get in the Gulf.

And I know this friendly PSA may piss off those who saved their income tax return to go to ths Year's Essence Fest. Sorry, the festival does not recycle black dollars, but is owned by a corporation that exploits Mardi Gras, Voodoo, and everything in black culture that we so quickly have thrown away.

These man-made disasters are something like the man-written religions. Concocted and designed to control the minds of the masses.

Invisible Lives of Caribbean Nannies

On any given Sunday in Central Park, upscale Washington D.C. parks, or in the parking lots of frou-frou stores in Livingston, NJ you become aware that many upper class white women do not raise their children.

Often times, it is a Caribbean woman who must take care of other peoples' children six or seven days out of the week, while leaving her children behind or at home to be cared for by extended family.

Caribbean nannies are invisible women that have replaced African-American domestics. There are of course Latinas, especially from Mexico and Central America, but it seems to be something about a black nanny that soothes childhood memories of the rich, white soul.

These diligent women cannot be forgotten. It was one from Guyana who blessed me one day when I was on the train job-hunting in West Orange. She sat next to me and we began to talk about our lives. She told me that she worked 5-6 days a week in West Orange. Usually, she went home to Queens on Friday evenings or Saturday mornings. She told me she did this to put her children through school.

When I told her I was in school for my PhD, she beamed in pride and began to whisper, "You know it is hard for us." She rubbed the skin on the back of her hand signaling her blackness and mine as well. I smiled and said, "Yes ma'am, you are right. It is very hard."

She asked me where I was going. I told her I was reluctantly going back to Newark. I was trying to follow-up on a job and spent my last money taking the train to trek down a professor at a conference. You see I really wanted to go to this conference at CUNY on Blackness (this was a year or so ago), but did not have the money.

Without thinking, she pulled out a $20 bill and told me to go to New York and keep the change. She gave me blessings and said if we never saw each other again, she prayed to the Lord that I finished. Now that was some deep love I need and wasn't expecting on a cold Northeastern day.

To me, this is one of the reasons why I persevere on the hardest days, because this doctoral thing is not just for me, but for the people's whose shoulders I stand.

When we got off of the train, I saw her gait had a little limp. Maybe arthritis, maybe years of picking up other peoples' kids and tending to the them when her back and hip did not permit.

I can never forget the Guyanese woman who helped me that day. It was on a Friday and she was coming from work and had given me some of her work money she just got from her "employer" who paid her in cash and under the table. That woman and all the women who clean stinky booties, scrub nasty floors, and go grocery shopping for people who pay them pennies, but have millions stashed, are the invisible we really need to see.

I thought of both of my grandmothers who were domestics in the South and the reality of the past hit me in the face. Where you had extended families of the South often rearing the children of family members, these Caribbean women may have limited support systems, or newly inducted kinship ties to make it through.

Rarely anyone addresses the high numbers of black Caribbean women tending to wealthy women's babies. A juxtaposed irony, one privileged white woman and one working-class black immigrant woman. One who exploits, but is ever so dependent on the emotional and physical labor of the very person that is exploited.

Especially in the celebrity world where women fashionably have technologically implanted embryos, show off baby bumps to paparazzi, only to dump them onto nannies who silently rear the children as if they are their own mammy.

Or you have the other scenario of the celebs who adopt babies from brown and black countries as if they are socially conscious accessories. They show these children off in public with hair sticking up all over the place. Then they have Little Azziz smile for the camera on the way to Kabbalah class without a clue that they are being pimped.

These celebs who poorly immitate the work of humanitarians like Josephine Baker who adopted twelve children from around the world in the 50s and 60s. After she worked as a spy helping the US and France in WWII where she received full French military honors upon her death, she reached further into herself and adopted. Furthermore, she used all of her money from years of performing in France and throughout the globe to rear her children.

An unwavering supporter of Civil Rights, Baker was asked by Coretta Scott King to take the place of her husband after he was assassinated. You see, in the midst of adopting babies, she helped desegregate Las Vegas, Miami and upscale New York restaurants, march on Washington DC, and fundraise for the NAACP. To Coretta's dismay, Baker declined stating she could not do it because she did not want her children to lose their mother at a young age.

Another thing, Josephine Baker was sensitive to orphan children because her own mother, Carrie, who eventually helped her daughter rear the children until she died, was adopted in Arkansas in the late 1800s by a recently Emancipated couple.

Baker herself knew what it was like to be claimed by someone who was not kin. Her mother mysteriously got pregnant with Josephine while she was a domestic for a German family in the South. A local musician named Eddie Carson, accepted the responsiblity (well, he claimed her).

Unfortunately, Baker spent all her fortunes rearing her children (her white American husand left her because she wanted more) and ended up homeless. She was kicked out of her chataeu in France and onto the street, living similar to a bag lady. Actress-turned-princess consort, Grace Kelly, offered her a home in another part of Europe. Kelly befriended Baker years back when Baker was refused service in a New York socialite supperclub.

Baker, a woman deemed as the most beautiful by Poet Hemmingway, was innately pristine---to the point that she gave her last dime to her children. Something Madonna or Angelina Jolie WOULD NOT.

Moreover, it was Baker's children that were reasons why she went back to performing. She needed to make money to support her household, although she was of failing health. She died after her first night being back on the stage.