Christopher Holmes Smith

"Popular Discrimination in the Obama Era: The Case of BET"

"This paper argues that Black Entertainment Television (BET) serves as a productive locus through which to gauge the “post-racial” argument’s resonance in contemporary black cultural production and black pop’s political engagement with the broader question of American business’ need for a reinvigorated moral code. On the one hand, over the past decade and a half, BET has been a central catalyst for the commercial circulation of the “bling” aesthetic of hyper-consumption through which hip-hop creative practitioners have garnered increasing mainstream cultural clout. BET’s identity as an iconographic brand also generated the consistent return-on-investment track record that eventually made the network an attractive take-over target for the Viacom Corporation in 2000, a symbolic and material cachet that it has successfully parlayed in its subsequent decade of operation. While the network’s success as a purveyor of the most ribald forms of conspicuous consumption made its founder and CEO, Robert L. Johnson, and his hand-picked successor, Debra Lee, considerable fortunes—positioning them accordingly as exemplars of the millennial age’s new black corporate, political, and cultural elite—it has also rendered the network’s senior executive leadership as figures of pronounced discursive contestation within the black pop imagination. The ensuing analysis suggests that this intra-racial debate over BET’s cultural relevance has not ebbed in the wake of Barack Obama’s rise to the presidency—in defiance of the post-racial discourse’s hegemonic truth-claim—and has only expanded in scope in accordance with the elaborate media eco-system of Web 2.0.