Stephen A Smith Blasts The BET Awards For Honoring OJ Simpson

Stephen A Smith gets mad. It’s what he does for a living. He’s an overreactor. That being said, he does provide some fair insights. SAS correctly called out Diddy for deleting the Cassie apology video. And he was understandably thrown by the fact that the BET Awards chose to pay tribute to O.J. Simpson. O.J. is about as controversial a pop culture figure as there is, and Smith felt there a BET tribute was not a fitting place to bring him up.

Stephen A Smith hashed all of this out on his self-titled podcast. He described the BET Awards as a celebration of Black culture, and Black excellence, in particular. As such, O.J. Simpson, a disgraced former NFL star, doesn’t fit Smith’s checklist. Worst, the analyst feels like it casts the rest of the Black entertainers in a negative light. “When you do something like this,” he told BET. “You got folks outside saying ‘see that.’ TMZ talking about it. NBC talking about it… When that kind of stuff happens, how do you think that benefits us?”

Stephen A Smith used the O.J. tribute to make a broader point. “That’s a story we don’t get into nearly as much as we should,” he posited. “Did it ever occur to anybody?” Smith clarified that he does place blame on anybody in the audience, but rather the network. “Even though BET is owned by Paramount, there’s Black folks everywhere. All up in there. And that’s what we celebrate?” The analyst stated that the Black community is going to be held accountable for lionizing O.J. Simpson, whether it’s subliminally or not. “People are going to look at us with raised eyebrows,” he opined. “And think as a community, ‘oh you down with that.'”

This is not the first time Smith has given his opinion on O.J. Simpson. When the Hall of Fame athlete died in April, Smith criticized him for, well, getting away with murder. “Most people believe that he committed those murders,” he proclaimed. “If I was on the jury, he would’ve been under the damn jail. I know that much. I believe he was guilty, but I don’t know.” Given this aggressive stance, it should come as no surprise that the analyst does not want to be associated with Simpson anytime soon.