The BET Hip Hop Awards cut the cord as DEI dies The show has been suspended as cultural history more broadly faces erasure at the institutional level. What should be built in its place?

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Death is so common in hip-hop now that we don't even take time to mourn the deceased. The sudden departure of the BET Hip Hop Awards (HHA) from cable television was announced last month and it garnered nary a hashtag nor R.I.P trending topic anywhere on Elon Musk's internet. Maybe rap is feeling so revitalized, with the likes of the Clipse, Freddie Gibbs, JID and Chance the Rapper competing this year for top billing, that we no longer need awards and industry accolades to measure the culture's worth?

Or maybe rap is no longer pop enough to pay the bills?

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Apparently, the show's TV ratings had been on the decline. The year after celebrating hip-hop's golden anniversary in 2023, the show's annual viewership fell off a steep cliff — down nearly 50% in 2024. The network hasn't pulled the plug outright; "suspended" is how BET's CEO Scott Mills described the current state of both its hip-hop and Soul Train award show franchises in an interview with Billboard. Yet, the announcement couldn't have come at a more precarious time. The shelving of the show just so happens to coincide with the sale of Paramount Global, BET's parent company, to Skydance Media — a merger cleared by the Federal Communications Commission after Paramount agreed to pony up $16 million to settle President Trump's lawsuit against CBS' 60 Minutes. Skydance also made a few concessions in the run-up to sealing that FCC deal, including a pledge to eliminate all of Paramount's DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) initiatives: No more Office of Global Inclusion. No more aspirational goals "related to hiring female employees and employees of color." No more annual bonus incentives for meeting said DEI goals.

Now, Black Entertainment Television existed long before diversity, equity and inclusion became, or inspired, all the rage.