The show has been suspended as cultural history more broadly faces erasure at the institutional level. What should be built in its place?

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.

Truthfully, the BET HHAs were never hip-hop’s holy grail. The Source Awards had a legendary crack at that in the ‘90s; the Vibe Awards also gave it a respectable go. Both ultimately met the ill fate of print media. But BET’s 18-year run is deserving of some sort of recognition. It consistently beat all the so-called industry arbiters when it came to crowning rap’s up-and-coming. Now that it’s shelved, there’s a conversation worth having about why hip-hop has not been able to sustain a longer-running award show and why more public institutions haven’t flourished in its honor.