Not everyone was impressed with last night’s program that BET put together for its 2011 BET Awards. After watching the awards show, Dr. Boyce Watkins, who calls himself a hip hop insider, sat down at his keyboard and pounded out a post titled “BET Has Officially Become the New and Improved KKK“.
In his post, he compared BET — which is run by the white-owned media conglomerate Viacom — to the Ku Klux Klan, and he accused Viacom of using BET’s powerful reach to cause and affect a holocaust within black America today.
“The Ku Klux Klan has been regularly criticized for encouraging violence against African Americans and terrorizing our community. But the truth is that the Klan doesn’t have much power anymore,” he writes. Dr. Boyce suggests that Lil Wayne and other hip hop artists who don’t know their history are “encouraging black men to shoot one another, to abuse or murder women, to consume suicidal amounts of drugs and alcohol and to engage in irresponsible, deadly sexual behavior.”
Dr. Boyce was most particularly disturbed that BET chose to heap accolades upon ex-con Lil Wayne, as opposed to, say, Kelly Rowland who rode the charts to international fame with her smash hit “Motivation”:
…the executive committee for the BET Awards made the interesting decision to give the greatest number of award nominations to Lil Wayne, the man who said that he would (among other things) love to turn a woman out, murder her and send her dead body back to her boyfriend. Oh yea, he also that he would kill little babies, have sex with every girl in the world, carry a gun on his hip and “leave a nigga’s brains on the street.”
As a result of the platform given to Lil Wayne and other hip hop artists who form the “corporate armies” producing “weaponized genocide” against black people — BET, he writes, has succeeded in killing “more black people than the KKK ever could.”
Dr. Boyce writes that by publicly rewarding Weezy’s behavior, BET and Viacom are
“encouraging every record company executive and Lil Wayne wannabe to go to the lab and manufacture more musical poison. As a result, there is some 10-year old boy putting down his textbook to watch the BET Awards, and effectively attending the Lil Wayne School of Black Male behavior.” Source
Those may seem like strong words, but the statistics back him up.
Just this weekend, a local rap artist named Devonta Stembridge and a 16-year-old rapper named Dion “Jaybee” Davis, were both shot to death by unknown gunmen who may have been sitting in the back seat of their car.
A loyal reader posted this link to a recent performance of Dion’s group, Wild Money Boyz, at a local nightclub. While the group’s tune “I Just Wanna Have Fun” is catchy, the group’s lyrics are fraught with the violent misogyny and displaced male aggression that they learned from their idols, such as Lil Wayne and Jay Z.
We have to do better.
Photos by Kevin Winter/ Getty Images
