Dear BET, Why Do You Hate Us?

Alvah J. Lambert

Date: Monday, August 24, 2009, 9:32 PM

Ms. Janitra Patrcik: Dear BET, Why Do You Hate Us?

Dear Debra Lee,

I’m Janita Patrick, a 15-year-old African-American female from Cincinnati. Recently, I watched the 2009 BET Awards and felt the strongest urge to reach out to the program. My family is of the typical middle-class variety; both parents and four brothers. See, I’m a junior in high school (got skipped), so naturally EVERYBODY in my age group watches BET. I’m used to seeing the sagging pants, tattoos, lack of emphasis on reading and respecting women that makes up your videos. People in my class live this out everyday, while teachers tell us that we’re acting just like the people in your shows.

In your shows. That struck me as odd, because I would think that with your show being the primary outlet for black entertainers and musicians, and considering the context of blacks in this country, there’s a social responsibility factor to consider. I would never blame BET alone for the way a great deal of my classmates act and talk and dress. Everybody makes their own choices. However, if anybody is aware the power of television on impressionable minds, it’s the people running the television operations. If you are not aware, then perhaps you shouldn’t be running the operations.

Guess who watches your network the most? Not those who are intelligent enough to discern foolishness from substance, but those who are barely teenagers, impressionable and believing. It’s awfully cruel to plant seeds of ignorance in fertile minds. You know it’s really bad when the co-founder of BET, Sheila Johnson, said that she “really doesn’t watch it” anymore.

I am constantly fighting against the images and messages put forth on your program. What made you think that it’s okay to bring my classmates on stage to dance behind Lil Wayne and Drake to a song talking about boffing “every girl in the world”? Why does reality train wrecks have to be thrown in our faces? Are you aware of the achievement gap going in inner-city African-American communities? A report from America’s Promise Alliance, a non-profit group started by Colin Powell, recently stated that 47 percent of high school students in the nation’s top 50 cities don’t graduate. (Fifty-four percent of males of color in Ingham County graduated from high school, compared to 74 percent of white males). This isn’t because of BET per se, but I don’t see any episodes on your show doing anything to counteract this disturbing trend. In fact, your show is a part of this cycle of media depicting us at our worst.

My older brother told me something about profit being the number one goal for every business. I’m not sure I understand what that means, but I do know that your shows have to be entertaining enough to generate viewers, which is how you make your money. But surely our culture is rich enough to entertain without anything extra to “boost” ratings; why the over-the-top foolery? I listen to classmates talk about Baldwin Hills like it’s the Manhattan Project. It doesn’t take much effort to produce a throng of degenerative reality shows, nor does it take much to eliminate socially conscious shows off the air. MTV isn’t much better, but since when does two wrongs ever make a right? It’s one thing for white television shows to depict us in a particular way, but for black television shows to do it is baffling.

Why do you hate us?

All of the values that my parents seek to instill in me and my brothers seems to be contradicted by a more powerful force from the media, and your show is at the forefront. Your network is the only network that features rap videos and shows exclusively to children of my color. I know that you have no control over the music that the artists put out, but you do have influence as to how you air these videos. I’m sure if a stand was taken to use the talent in your organization to actually crank out thought-provoking entertaining shows and videos, then artists will follow suit. Being that they need you as much as you need them.

There was one awkward segment in the BET Awards when Jamie Foxx singled out three black doctors-turned-authors, but the introduction was so powerless that many of the viewers had no idea who they were. Had they been introduced as Sampson Davis, Rameck Hunt and George Jenkins, three brothers who overcame major obstacles to become a success without the use of lyrics that berate women, the sell of substance that destroy communities or through raps about loose gunplay, then maybe my classmates would have come to school talking about more than Beyonce, T-Pain’s BIG ASS CHAIN and Soulja Boy Tell Em’s hopping out the bed.

But they weren’t introduced like that. It seemed like a throwaway obligatory tribute to appease some irritated fans. It missed the mark. Big time. Ask Michelle Obama if she watches BET or encourages Sasha and Malia to do so. Ask President Obama. It’s a reason he is the leader of the free world, and it isn’t because of Buffoonery Exists Today.

You’d be surprised how smart young black children can be with the absence of Blacks Embarrassing Themselves. If your goal is to deter engaged, forward-thinking articulate black minds, then consider your goal fulfilled. It’s hard-pressed to think that your shows are working to promote cultural betterment. However, it’s quite easy to conclude that the destruction of black children through the glorification of immoral behavior and rushed production is by design. Poison is being swallowed by every viewer who adores your network, and the worse thing is, these viewers - my classmates - are not even aware what they’re swallowing.

There is nothing edifying for black women on your show. I don’t judge people who do throng to your programs though; I mean if a jet crashes right in front of me, I’d atch it too. That’s why I don’t flip by your channel…I don’t even want to be sucked in.

I have aspirations of acquiring a law degree and possibly entering the public sphere, so I can counteract conditions in my community perpetuated by the images on your channel. So I should thank you, because in a weird sense, your shoddy programming is the wind behind my back. And it is my hope that I can accomplish my dreams despite BET’s pictorial messages, because Lord knows it won’t be because of them.

Sincerely,

Janita Patrick

THE NINE LIVES OF MARION BARRY JR.

Marion Barry is the subject of a documentary on HBO
DAVID CARR Published: August 9, 2009

View Video - THE NINE LIVES OF MARION BARRY JR.
http://florfilms.com/TRAILER.html
Marion S. Barry Jr.
The Washington Post

Marion Barry in front of the White House during a parade in an undated photo. He now serves on the Washington City Council.

A career that has spanned five decades and included four terms as mayor of Washington, a trip to federal prison for possession of cocaine, and his current position as a City Council member in the capital. Throughout it all he has displayed an almost feral gift for retail politics: a quiet sidebar conversation here, a big-clap hug there and always, always, even now at 73, lavishing attention on the women in the room.

After a youth of extreme poverty (which included picking cotton) in Itta Bena, Miss. — “dirt, dirt, dirt poor” he says in the documentary — Mr. Barry became an Eagle Scout and earned a master’s degree in chemistry at Fisk University in Nashville. But his head was turned by the civil rights movement after he got involved in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and he quit a doctoral program in chemistry at the University of Tennessee. In 1965 he moved to Washington and commenced an enduring affair with a city that was then a ward of the federal government.

Mr. Barry has the reputation of being a less than scintillating interview, and a conversation on Thursday evening did little to change that view. He tends to lean on platitudes and civil rights movement aphorisms to describe his “50 years of public service that served as a blueprint for those who came later” while continuing to blame most of his legal problems on his opponents.

The news media have generally not been friends to Mr. Barry, nor has the federal government, a persistent antagonist throughout his career. He maintains that the United States Attorney’s Office, in enticing him to a hotel room where drugs were present back in 1990, was trying to kill him.

In the documentary directed and produced by Dana Flor and Toby Oppenheimer, it is clear that age has caught up to Mr. Barry. Afflicted with high blood pressure and diabetes, and having had his prostate removed, he often moves slowly and cat-naps between appearances. Watching him in the documentary is a little like witnessing Willie Mays no longer able to run down a fly ball, but he was completely on his game for the premiere.

Mr. Barry has never been especially enlightening on the subject of himself or his contretemps, and the documentary reflects his absence of self-awareness. But Mr. Barry’s ex-wife, Effi Barry, an elegant and eloquent woman who divorced him in 1993, is a steady and telling presence throughout the documentary. (Effi Barry, who died in 2007, was his third wife. He has been married four times.)Mr. Barry initially had little interest in the project. “He wasn’t friendly, he wasn’t receptive, but eventually, I wore him down.” (Mr. Barry said, “I figured it would be the one time when the whole story could be told.”)
Mr. Oppenheimer, whose credits include co-producing “Devil’s Playground” (about Amish teenagers), said there were protests and counter-protests at the film’s premiere in June at the Silverdocs festival in Washington, with people shouting and arguing about whether Mr. Barry was worthy of a film.“We both watched and said to each other, ‘This is what our film is about,’ ” he said. “The passions that this man’s career has generated continue to this day.”

Mr. Barry’s credentials as an early and effective warrior in the civil rights movement receive significant attention in the 78-minute documentary. A leader of the Free D.C. Movement, Mr. Barry founded a jobs program called Pride Inc. for unemployed black men. He was elected to the school board in 1972 and when the city achieved home rule in 1974 was elected as an at-large council member. He was shot when Hanafi Muslims took over the District Building in 1977 but survived, cementing a reputation for both fearlessness and durability.

With the sought-after endorsement of The Washington Post in 1978, he became the city’s second mayor and was re-elected twice. During the third term rumors began to circulate that he was using cocaine even as the city he ran was tipping over under the weight of a crack epidemic. On Jan. 18, 1990, Mr. Barry went to the Vista Hotel to visit a former girlfriend, Rasheeda Moore, who was working as a government informant. He was caught on tape by the F.B.I. and city police using crack cocaine.

Most political careers would have ended there, but Mr. Barry is not any politician, and Washington’s voters and juries have a complicated relationship with authority. The jury deadlocked on the multiple felony counts stemming from the Vista arrest; Mr. Barry was convicted on a single count of possession for an earlier incident. After serving a six-month sentence he ran for City Council using the slogan “He may not be perfect, but he’s perfect for D.C.” In 1994 he ran for a fourth term as mayor and won.

His successful campaign to return to the City Council in 2004 on behalf of Ward 8 — one of the city’s chronically impoverished areas — serves as a centerpiece of the documentary. Mr. Barry’s public life continued to suffer from steady brushes with the law, including failed drug tests, a conviction for failure to pay taxes, probation violation, traffic offenses and, last month, a charge that he was stalking an ex-girlfriend. (That charge has since been dropped.)“Those are all just distractions, efforts by the government and the media to distract me, to discombobulate me and separate me from the community,” he said. “I was re-elected with more than 90 percent of the vote in 2008, so that stuff isn’t going to keep me down. They know who I am.”

Thank You Kitty