Pimpin' Ain't Easy

Selling Black Entertainment Television

Beretta E. Smith-Shomade

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415976787
• eBook ISBN: 9781135869489
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Launched in 1980, cable network Black Entertainment Television (BET) has helped make blackness visible and profitable at levels never seen prior in the TV industry. In 2000, BET was sold by founder Robert L. Johnson, a former cable lobbyist, to media giant Viacom for 2.33 billion dollars.

This book explores the legacy of BET: what the network has provided to the larger US television economy, and, more specifically, to its target African-American demographic. The book examines whether the company has fulfilled its stated goals and implied obligation to African-American communities. Has it changed the way African-Americans see themselves and the way others see them? Does the financial success of the network - secured in large part via the proliferation of images deemed offensive and problematic by many black communities - come at the expense of its African-American audience?

This book fills a major gap in black television scholarship and should find a sizeable audience in both media studies and African-American studies.

Chapter 1
Eyes Wide Shut

Capitalism, Class, and the Promise of Black Media

Capitalism—the system of pimps and hoes
I’m sorry that’s the way it goes
In this particular system everyone’s a slave
Racist is how they want us to behave
White Johnny be fighting black Michael
Both are blind to the system’s sick cycle
In a circle psychotically they slay each other
With a grin because of color of a skin
Pick up that money hoe!

—“Who Are the Pimps?” Boogie Down Productions (1992)

Why talk about capitalism in a book ostensibly about Black Entertainment Television? One of the foundational conundrums raised in this book is the work and understanding of capitalism by and for African-Americans. The capitalist system undergirds all media, image making, and ideas of prosperity in the U.S., and BET, in many ways, represents the quintessential example of black television success. Yet for African-Americans, both the implementation and articulation of capitalism has posed the greatest divisions and hardships. Thus, it is necessary to begin with a discussion of capitalism as an increasingly global system and one in which the commodification of African-American blackness makes it available to all.

The intellectual father of capitalism, economist Adam Smith, theorized the nature of capital and its variant uses in his 1776 tome An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. The modern textbook The Capitalist System gives flesh to his theoretical framework. In this work, economic scholars Richard C. Edwards, Michael Reich, and Thomas E. Weisskopf defined capitalism and its operation this way:

Capitalist relations of production are characterized by the complete separation of the producers (wage-workers) from the means of production. Capitalists as a class have a monopoly on the means of production while workers have only their labor-power, which they must sell to the capitalists for a wage if they are to subsist … In respect to control of the work process and ownership of the means of production, capitalism resembles slavery and differs from feudalism and petty commodity production. The objective of the capitalists is to expand their initial capital by combining labor and means of production and selling the resultant commodities, which are their property, for a profit. Hence, capitalist production is for exchange, not for use (Edwards et al.: 41).¹

Phrased in a more contemporary vernacular, sociologist James Fulcher wrote that capitalism “involves the investment of money to make more money … [It] depends on the exploitation of wage labour, which also fuels the consumption of the goods and services produced by capitalist enterprises” (Fulcher: 18). Beyond strict definitions, different types of capitalism enjoy ideological currency and influence the way citizens process the system.

For example, the pro-capitalist writings of philosopher Ayn Rand linked capitalism to free markets, individual rights, and most especially, liberty. Her work claimed capitalism as a progressive, ethical, and objective ideal because it allows “men” the freedom to pursue their own happiness and be moral. Natural capitalism is a system based on strategies that help “enable countries, companies, and communities to operate by behaving as if all forms of capital were valuable” (www.smartcommunities.ncat.org). The off-shoot crony capitalism poses the idea of business success as heavily dependent on friendships and family rather than on market forces and open competition. When asking my focus groups of young people (junior high schoolers through collegiate) for their definition of capitalism, responses ranged from “trying to get money as profit” to “supply and demand” to “I dunno.” It seems their definitions, when they could articulate them, hinged strictly on the ability to acquire capital—and spend it excessively at will.

All of these definitions—academic and everyday—treat profit, exploitation, and satisfaction as mutually exclusive entities, thereby ignoring the invisible hand of economics that links them together. Thinking through these viable, (though certainly not all-inclusive), definitions of capitalism and applying them to daily living experiences in the U.S. allows for a fuller appreciation of Boogie Down’s employment of the pimps-and-hoes metaphor in this chapter’s epi-graph, especially insofar as it concerns American capitalism and its adherents. The lyrics are an especially apt observation with regard to African-Americans and their introduction to the capitalistic means of production. Most African-Americans’ preamble to America’s capital system is as manual laborers and as property. While definitions of capitalism are extensive and continually expanding, this book uses the definition that situates capitalism as a system that privileges and demands accumulation of capital (money) for the sake of the individual. For the media industry, it rewards producers, creates and requires consumers, and mandates the existence of poor folks in order to operate successfully. As this chapter will show, this definition works well in connecting the bling, banter, and Black Star Power of BET. However, it is first necessary to work through the ways capitalism has evolved with and resonated in the lives of African-Americans.

Capitalism Manifest

From approximately 1550 to 1850, the Atlantic slave trade existed as one of the most lucrative and successful business ventures in world history. Many scholars who study the founding of the U.S. agree that the presence and work of enslaved Africans “made the flowering of capitalism possible …” (Frazier: 15). One of the earliest ways that capitalism circulated was through the missionary impulse. England, Spain, and Portugal (later the Dutch, Arabs, and French) all sent traders and Christian and Islamic missionaries to the African continent—to do business and to proselytize about the wonders of Jesus and Muhammad. Thus alongside their admonition of these deities they introduced the practices of monopoly capitalism—first looking at the continent as a treasure of raw materials, later as a market.² Slavery and later the mantra of Manifest Destiny allowed the U.S. to establish a solid economic foundation by exploiting free labor, usurping occupied lands, and murdering its prior inhabitants, aka the natives who didn’t work out as laborers. Furthermore, as business scholar Juliet E.K. Walker so persuasively argued, the U.S. government partnered with business to create success—in direct contradiction to the principles of laissez-faire (Walker 1998: xix).

The slave trade’s commercial imperatives made the Negro an “article of commerce” or an “animate tool.”³ Enslaved Africans, who later became Americans, were actively involved in the slave trade. However, for the most part, they failed to benefit from its profits or have any say in the direction of slavery as a business. The enterprise operated alongside the developing mythology that defined the American Dream as democracy, freedom, and capitalism. The flourishing practice of enslaving Africans and ideologies of the American Dream shaped capitalism’s growth and dictated how African-Americans interpreted their place and participation in this system—an interpretation that called for blacks to engage in said system wholeheartedly, despite the seeming contradiction of this move given their history with capitalism.

As president of the Freedmen’s Savings Bank (1874), Frederick Douglass suggested:

[t]he history of civilization shows that no people can well rise to a high degree of mental or even moral excellence without wealth. A people uniformly poor and compelled to struggle for barely a physical existence will be dependent and despised by their neighbors and will finally despise themselves. While it is impossible that every individual of any race shall be rich—and no man may be despised for merely being poor—yet no people can be respected which does not produce a wealthy class.⁴

Ideas such as these circulated through nineteenth century America. Thus, the mantra to “toil and save” flowed through the teachings to newly emancipated slaves.

Freed black folks were focused on respectability. This idea of respectability, grounded in the economics of individual thrift, enterprise, and savings, existed in the surrounding dominant community. Prior to emancipation, it already manifested itself in the life of the free Negro, as in that of the white working class. And as has been asserted by scholars, “white philanthropists sought to indoctrinate the freedmen with this ideal through the missionary schools and the Freedmen’s Bank” (Harris: 46). Making way for progress, the capitalist system transformed African-Americans from the consumed to consumers, at least at that point in history. For many, engaging capitalism appeared to be the only way up and out of poverty.

Resultantly, in the short history of the U.S., the racist system of capitalism has triumphed. This triumph seems clear with the continued perpetuation and inundation of global capitalism—touted by the U.S. across the globe—and implemented by trade agreements, the IMF, the World Bank, and waged war. Conflated with the mythology of the American Dream, capitalists exploit the economic systems’ underpinnings to keep power confined to certain racialized (and gendered) groups. Philosopher Karl Marx critiqued this system in his Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, (more commonly known as Das Kapital), with a theory of exploitation of the proletariat, an exposition of the labor theory. He criticized Adam Smith (and others) for not realizing that their economic concepts reflected capitalist institutions, not innate natural properties of mankind. And while black (mostly male) leaders and scholars such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Elijah Muhammad, Angela Davis, and the Black Panthers have offered ways to append capitalism, no serious attempt has ever been made to undermine capitalism’s flawed foundation by any U.S. marginalized or mainstream group. However, the value of capitalism for black folks has not proceeded completely uncontested either.

Debate of this system came from many black activists and scholars who considered (and still talk about) themselves as either socialist or communist—in some ways, fighting the evils of capitalism by denying it. Revolutionary psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, economist Abram L. Harris, political theorist Manning Marable, and cultural scholar bell hooks, all provided powerful critiques of capitalism and the need for African-Americans to consider alternative means of progress. The socialism piece in particular reverberated quite acutely in black discourses due to the communal legacy of African ways of being—still manifested in most African-American communities. In other words, capitalism calls for an individualist state of being—a state that has traditionally been foreign to communities of color. These communities are organized around the family—with everything else, economics and politics, flowing from that foundation.⁵ However, agreeing with hooks, desegregation has altered the way African-Americans think about community. She argued:

Desegregation was the way to weaken the collective radicalization of black people that had been generated by militant civil rights and black power movement … After years of collective struggle … liberal individualism [has become] more the norm for black folks, particularly the black bourgeoisie, more so than the previous politics of communalism, which emphasized racial uplift and sharing resources. (hooks 2000: 92)

Moreover, cultural critic Paul Gilroy argued that even beyond critical cynicism, in the past people like Toni Cade Bambara and Amiri Baraka possessed a righteous anger “about the violence of [capitalism] and the way it delimits people’s choices” (Gilroy, interviewed by hooks April 1996). Many of these same scholars and others acknowledge that even the minimal serious critiques of capitalism that once existed have virtually disappeared in favor of the global economy, especially in the United States. From the World Bank and the war on Iraq to the functioning of the Internet and Coca-Cola, capitalism reigns as the virtually uncontested authority of the new world order.

Capitalism does not value extended family support, collective engagement, or community gardens. Psychologist Na’im Akbar argued that at least a part of African-American attitudes toward capital comes from a slave mentality. Specifically, he maintained “… material objects or dregs of property became equated in the African-Americans’ thinking with the full power of freedom and self-determination which the master enjoyed” (Akbar 1984: 13). Thinking about the impact of a slave mindset alone makes clear that a more crucial conflict emerges at the very outset of African-Americans relationship with capitalism. And whether or not one agrees with the assessment, one must concede that for whatever reason, African-Americans and capitalism make awkward dance partners. Beyond this observation, some scholars have suggested that the debate of blacks and capitalism is the wrong one anyway.

In his seminal text, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, political theorist Manning Marable argued that people forget (or choose to ignore) the racist nature of capitalism. As I maintain, whether talking about capitalism for the masses or black capitalism, the structure retains a hierarchy and fixity that allows only a few to accumulate capital or “make it”—not altering in the least its built-in inequalities. In revisiting his work some years later, Marable remained firm in saying that the “U.S. capitalist state, in the final analysis, will never be cajoled or persuaded to reform itself through appeals of moral suasion. Fundamental change will require a massive democratic resistance movement largely from below and anchored in the working class and among oppressed minority groups” (Marable 2000: xxxviii)—what he called “non-reformist reform.”

Historian John Henrik Clarke suggested that investment in any economic or political system was not as crucial as survival and progression of African people. While espousing socialism himself, Clarke believed in black ownership of black communities as an “economic means to effect social change in our favor” (Clarke 1991: 10). Activist Malcolm X concurred with Clarke’s position stating: “Our economic philosophy is that we should gain economic control over the economy of our own community, the businesses and the other things which create employment so that we can provide jobs for our own people instead of having to picket and boycott and beg someone else for a job” (X 1964: 272−273). Mantras such as these continue to encourage and hold sway over black entrepreneurial efforts.

Yet others such as historian Chancellor Williams suggest that blacks need not “wholly accept [capitalism], but they should reject ‘black capitalism’ as a solution of the economic bondage problems of the masses … [instead, they should focus] on a system that directly benefits the people lower down, the great common people, and not just the further enrichment of Blacks who are already well-off and far ahead” (Williams 1971: 332). He argued further that both capitalism and communism were here to stay despite groups shouting ‘destroy the system.’ Economist Julianne Malveaux constantly indicts the U.S. government for its misuse of capitalists’ tools. And lest we forget, capitalism is intimately linked to most other ridiculous operating isms—sexism, racism, and classism—isms that are taken to task regularly in academic communities, even if the capitalist elephant in the room often gets a pass. Regardless of the stance, in many areas of A...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Eyes Wide Shut: Capitalism, Class, and the Promise of Black Media
• Chapter 2 Now That’s Black! BET Business
• Chapter 3 I’m Rick James, BitchHHHH! BET Programming
• Chapter 4 The Impossibility of Us: BET Impact
• Chapter 5 It’s Your Turn: Black to the Future
• Endnotes
• Bibliography
• Index