BTR News: Properly Leveraging Black Dollars and Social Capital

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Social media and Black media platforms have been weighing in on the comedian/actress Mo’Nique who called on Black people to cancel their Netflix subscriptions claiming racism and gender discrimination. However, because Netflix has paid Black comedians and actors and actresses, and one of the few networks shows that have Black series that are seen as a bunch of stereotypical trash, Mo’Nique is having a hard time making a case so she is saying that Netflix doesn’t “value” Black women. She did not make this claim when she was angry about BET canceling her show Mrs. Parker because she was dealing with a black woman executive but she did attempt to ignite a class war between Black people when she got angry with Oprah Winfrey, Tyler Perry and Lee Daniels whom she publicly told to suck her “d*ck”.

Regardless of if you think she should have been offered more money by Netflix, to call on the Black community to boycott anything requires them to spend social capital and if we are to spend social capital on someone, we must be sure they are worthy of the expense. And as Dr. Rick Wallace Ph.D., PsyD said about the situation, if we are going to invest social capital in a celebrity, they need to have a consistent track record of investing in the community they rely on for support and it has to be more than giving us some sound bytes.

Mo’Nique does not have that track record and has in fact thrown Black people rising up in Baltimore against system police violence under the bus and publicly supported Black mothers “buck breaking” their Black sons when a Black woman was celebrated by white media for physically abusing her black son for joining in the Baltimore uprising. Dr. King never threw so-called Black rioters under the bus but said: “I think that we’ve got to see that a riot is the language of the unheard.” We could not find a reference to Mo’Nique funding an after-school program or recreation center in Baltimore to follow up on her comments to BET that the reason for the Baltimore uprising was the result of those things shutting down. She also has not done anything to address the current situation in Baltimore where they just built a multi-million dollar youth prison while school children are freezing in the underfunded schools.

Lastly, I feel it is time for the Black community to stop allowing celebrities without a track record or connection to our most vulnerable communities to emotionally leverage us to get something for themselves. I would like to see celebrities and their fans divest from the six banks that are underwriting the private prison slavery business.

I also wish that Black people who low ball black businesses stop talking about white people exploiting the Black community or Black people until they stop doing the same.

Tune in for two hours of social/political news, commentary, and music. BTR News is hosted by Black Talk Media Project founder Scotty Reid who has been hosting and producing news talk radio since 2007 and has interviewed hundreds of guests on various topics. He discusses the issues in a way that your mainstream black radio hosts would never dare and the corporate media would never allow.