Johnson goes on to admit that BET may be contributing to the spread of AIDS in the black community by promoting raunchy, unprotected sex in rap music videos.

"When we started BET, it was going to be the Ebony magazine on television," Johnson told The Daily Beast. "We had public affairs programming. We had news... I had a show called Teen Summit, we had a large variety of programming, but the problem is that then the video revolution started up... And then something started happening, and I didn't like it at all. And I remember during those days we would sit up and watch these videos and decide which ones were going on and which ones were not. We got a lot of backlash from recording artists... and we had to start showing them. I didn't like the way women were being portrayed in these videos."

I'm not happy with Sheila Johnson's sudden change of heart, and to be honest, I don't believe her. I honestly believe that if Sheila were to go back in time and re-earn her billion-dollar empire, she wouldn't change much of anything. The truth is that money makes us do things that cause us to be ashamed, but we keep doing those things because we feel that our financial success can be a source of validation.


One of the great concerns I have with the Johnson family is that they earned a billion dollars in personal revenue, while costing black America at least $15 billion in lost productivity by creating an entire generation of booty-shaking zombies who don't give a damn about education. One of our challenges as a people is that we praise those who have wealth without taking a second to think about how that wealth was obtained. A person could earn a billion dollars by selling newborn babies, and we'd still praise the person for being rich. The truth is that some methods of wealth building are not worthy of praise, only criticism.

We all have to sell something in today's marketplace, whether it is our time, our labor or even our love. But there is a huge difference between selling something and selling out completely. The Johnson family could have allowed BET to be a productive yet entertaining entity without turning it into one of the most disappointing and humiliating forms of television known to man. The Johnsons would have still been wealthy if BET were healthy. Sure, healthy television is not the most profitable, but they still would have been rich. Instead of allowing their integrity to stop their hunger for profit maximization, the Johnsons traded in the collective conscience of our children in exchange for a billion-dollar personal war chest. They got rich, and the black community ended up in the depths of social bankruptcy.

Sorry, Sheila. In order to fully convince me that you are seriously remorseful of your work with BET, you'd have to give back the fortune you earned by trading in the futures of our children. Yes, you are right that the promotion of promiscuous sex has probably led to the spread of HIV among our youth, so the proliferation of toxic behavior has led to quite a few early deaths. BET has been as shameful for the rest of us, and it breaks my heart because the network could have been so much more.

Money should not be our reason for being.


Dr. Boyce Watkins is the founder of the Your Black World Coalition and the author of the new book, -'Black American Money.' To have Dr. Boyce's commentary delivered to your e-mail, please click here.