(ThyBlackMan.com) Last week, TJ Holmes, host of the new BET show “Don’t Sleep!” took a trip to Power 105.1 in New York City to speak about his new show and the challenges of developing a new audience. Charlamagne Tha God, one of the hosts of the show (“The Breakfast Club”), sent me a copy of the interview (which you can see below), for he shares my concern with what BET has chosen to become.
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I’ve respected Charlamagne since I met him in 2006, when I appeared a few times on the Wendy Williams Experience. He treated me with tremendous decency long before anyone knew or cared who I was. He’s also an honest advocate for the challenges of the black male in America, which makes him an important ally in the struggle for black liberation and advancement.
I watched the interview curiously, impressed by the honesty with which TJ Holmes went about sharing his challenges with the new show, and how his network is both supporting him and fighting with him. His courageous decision to speak so honestly about the difficulty of developing quality content and a good audience for BET gives an inside look at how hard it can be to rise from the gutter once you’ve become committed to making it into your home. Sadly enough, BET has defined itself to be the White Trash of Black America, appealing to the worst in us, lowering IQs and killing dreams like a KKK firing squad in front of the house of Malcolm X.
Someone needs to take on BET, and it needs to be all of us. BET is owned by people who care almost nothing for our community, for their only goal is to maximize the bottom line. The problem is that it’s difficult for TJ Holmes to compete with Lil Wayne, 2 Chainz (author of the song with the brilliant chorus, “All I want for my birthday is a big booty hoe”) or any other form of buffoonery the network could be putting on the air. So, the good folks at both BET and Viacom (their economic plantation owners) must be compelled to consider a double bottom line, where they are reminded of the value of inspiring young black people with positive role models and a reclamation of black intellectualism on mainstream TV.
BET is the psychological drug dealer, standing on the corner, “BET,” with the “Big booty hoe” in the front seat of his Mercedes. He may not be bothering you, but he’s got his eye on your children when they get out of school. He’s showing them flashy cars and handfuls of money, to convince them to skip college so they can become drug dealers or drug addicts. Largely due to the existence of BET, we’ve got an entire generation of black youth who’ve become addicted to the drug of counter productive buffoonery, and TJ Holmes is part of the rehabilitation process. If BET really wants to improve, they need to let this brother breathe.
Even Adolph Hitler understood that he who controls the media, also controls the mind. So Hitler would surely be applauding the achievements of BET, for the network has contributed to black psychological and actual genocide through the rejection of education, increased drug/alcohol consumption, higher HIV rates and the glorification of handgun violence among young black men.
Even BET founder Sheila Johnson has admitted that the network has played a role in harming our children, so if we love our children, we will fight to the death to protect their well-being. In black America, we must go to the corner and kill, incarcerate or control our psychological drug dealers. If we do not, our community’s demise is imminent.
Good look Mack you already know I know about that game right there….these people have no clue how enslaved they really are
Mr. TJ Holmes needs to jump ship and go on a show that is a true representative of what a Black network should be. BET lost it’s credibility a long time ago. This started under Bob Johnson’s watch and now that it’s in the hands of people outside our community, do you really think it will get any better with one show against the rest of the garbage? If we stop supporting BET and stop spending every dime we have to make everybody outside our community wealthy, we would have the money to create many Black networks and anything else we needed. We are still slaves, we just don’t know it, and this is yet another example of it.
Black Unity means financial independence and happiness
the struggle always continues folks it’s a part of the natural process of life and a MUST, post civil rights/black power movement, generation was fed a false hood, that if u just assimulated you would be fine. We are seeing that without continued organization a group or community will become easy pickens to be exploited and marginialized. organizing for presidential elections are fine but localized elections in the community you live in is paramount, one of the things that also hurts black america today is this continued dumbing down force feeding of symbols being defining moments of substance, symbols are just that not substance, and that is what BET and most commercial media in america geard to black audiences present from the ringmasters like steve harvey, tom joyner etc. or bossip fronting itself off as today’s journalism. Imagines are important, but if you don’t control and define them say hello to a marginal group of people.
This is the same problem Oprah said she had with black audiences. When her show became decidedly geared towards a white female viewership, black women in particular protested. So she produced movies like Beloved and the Great Debaters. Negroes and negresses didn’t support it. They went out and supported Soul Plane instead.
The first thing people need to realize is there IS a conspiracy. You’re not crazy; and this isn’t all about making money for the networks. A great book to check out is one called Who’s Running America by Thomas R. Dye. When you understand the agenda of groups like the Bilderbergers, Trilateral Commission, Council on Foreign Affairs, The Tavistock Institute of Human Relationships…you’ll see clearly why networks like BET put out the bullcrap they do for ‘our’ kids. Its no mystery.
@ Ramses: if you’re anywhere near GA State University, you can find the book mentioned above in their main library.
If we really want to defeat BET, then we should actually giving them niggerish content to broadcast in the first place. A lot of these kids are selling their souls because the integration genration left them with no institutions (banks, schools, education, healthcare) to protect them. So they sell their bodies and souls to media who is all to ready to mentally molest their undeveloped minds like the pagan god Pan (look it up). They could have offered good content through their programming when it was owned by Bob Johnson but they didn’t do that. So as much as we want to blame whitey, as usual, there’s always a coon nigga staring us in the face in terms of being just as culpable in the mess that exist. Blacks have created the mess their in and they better figure out real fast on how to get out of it.
I think that if we want BET to change then we must support shows like “Don’t sleep” and sign petitions to remove shows with buffonery or counterproductive things from the network. But on the other hand in the past black audiences never support postivie shows that bet had like “teen summit” “bet news” ” My two cents” and other sunday mornign shows. Spike lee said it best you vote with your wallets, pocket book and time in front of the tv.