What Stacey Dash gets very wrong when she calls for ending BET and Black History Month
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Dash's comments -- part and parcel of a set of widely deployed but utterly false equivalencies -- are essentially repeated, with some modifications, somewhere in America every day. They form a portion of almost any discussion of race on and in conservative media outlets. They come up at public events as if they are really novel and grave philosophical questions. And, because this pseudo-intellectual gobbledygook is so widely believed, they are ideas that really shape our politics and all too often linger in the background of horrible news events.
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In that list of nearly two dozen non-black people nominated for BET Awards are people like Justin Timberlake, Iggy Azalea and others. Singer Sam Smith won a BET Award last year (that story is interesting for other reasons too). Latina actresses America Ferrera and Sophia Vergara have each been nominated for NAACP Image awards four times. White actresses Dakota Fanning and Sandra Bullock have also been nominated. Angelina Jolie has also received more than one Image award nomination. And, little people like Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Carlos Santana, Bono, Al Gore and Smith have all won NAACP Image Awards too. That's all true.
BET exists in part because networks like MTV refused to air music videos created by black artists. Something similar can be said about the still-apparent reluctance of the Academy -- the trade group behind the Oscars -- to meaningfully diversify, and the many studios, producers and directors in control of content or the performances ultimately considered for a golden statue. And we can look to Oscar's long history, its nominee list and a rundown of past winners to prove that too.
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To put this really simply, the NAACP and the KKK are not the same. Black History Month and a white nationalist celebrations are quite different. They don't do the same things. They don't have the same goals, and they have not shaped America in the same ways. To pretend that such a thing is even close to true is to tell oneself a mighty set of mind-warping lies. It insults the bravery of the men and women -- black and white, Latino, Asian and Native American -- who did the work to secure hard-won bits of equality. It ultimately gives those who engage in this line of thinking cover to avoid truths about this country's racial past and present. But that does not make it accurate.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/01/21/what-stacey-dash-neglects-when-she-calls-for-ending-bet-and-black-history-month/
= new reply since forum marked as read
...to fire everyone that works for him in the BET station division...
And the Centric station division...
And Tr3s division, because that is for "the Hispanics" as Donald would say.
I'm sure Viacom shareholders would be cool with that.
