Reader Mail: Where Are The Black Women?
Last week I got an e-mail from someone named “Fed Up”, who wrote to me, and several other websites, to complain about the lack of Black women hosts on BET. Because I haven’t watched the channel in years I wasn’t sure what shows the channel had on or who the hosts were. I knew both AJ and Free were replaced, AJ by another Black male and Free by a Hispanic female. What I didn’t know was that the other two hosts BET has that are women are also not Black. Julissa, host of the now defunct College Center, was a Latina and Sharon Carpenter who has a news show on the channel, is half White and East Indian. Even after finding this out I found it hard to care and I definitely wasn’t surprised. I have been saying for years that there has been a movement to remove Black women from all things Black and replace them with multi-ethnic women, who oftentimes are just accepted as Black simply because they are of color. So the question is, does anyone care? As more and more people start to take notice of this, and they have, what will BET do? What will we as Black women do? Will we demand to see our own image represented on a channel with the name “Black” in it, or will we just fall back and disappear into oblivion?
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