Quote:
Originally posted by Kimmie1913
Another difference between the music featured on BET and country music is that country music is not pop music for white people. Hip hop in its most negative variety is black pop music. The first image that people conjure up of white people does not automatically invoke country music images. With us, it is a different story.
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Kimmie, you bring up a very important point. BET isn't just isolated to the United States anymore. It airs here in Canada, in a country where we make up less than 3% of the TOTAL population. It airs around the world in countries where folks may not have any other images of African Americans to counterbalance the degrading images that are perpetuated by BET. Even the name -- BLACK Entertainment Television -- seems to suggest that this network is the definitive representation of Blackness in America. What BET says to the world is that we're all about cash, girls, and guns (and ocassionally drifting into "Black folks are like this but white folks are like that" humour). I'm not comfortable with that being the predominant perception that people have of me or of my people worldwide.
Johnson and his media empire are a business, so anything they do is driven by the dollar. They ultimately don't have any responsibility to us. However, you'd think that BET would have a teensy weensy shred of conscience and try to elevate us rather than tear us down.
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