Black Guys, Crooks + Black Guy Crooks
I keep trying to get away from bullshit artist extraordinaire Carlos Watson, but he keeps pulling me BACK in. This time by pimping the suffering of real victims of systemic racism.
My mother loves former CNN contributor Roland Martin. But my mother, a former guidance counselor, as well as a former cop, loves the hard cases. She loved Al Sharpton when I was still just making fun of his process (re: straightened hair for those that need a reminder). And, at present, she’s a tentative fan of New York Mayor Eric Adams.
The thread between these three is, according to her, not only their willingness to, for example, not lower their voices when talking about “white people” but also to say the uncomfortable thing out loud, and when it’s not at all convenient. On the flip side of this she completely disdains Jay Z, along with Barack Obama (he of 2023, not Obama of Christmas past), for a wealth of reasons I’d guess but I’d also guess it’s for being, by a measure, too slick, glib and practiced in the arts of deception, to borrow a Jagger-ism.
So when Martin launched a broadside at the “con man” Carlos Watson, so-called by the Justice Department, it caught her eye. The occasion? The release of a video, the launch of a website and a press release that claims that the Eastern District of New York is, in prosecuting Watson for three federal criminal counts, and a possible 37 year sentence, acting in bad faith and prejudicially.
It seemed like it took Martin exactly 1.7 seconds to bang out a response to the Watson Weep, which for those of us that are time limited amounted to this: “BULLSHIT!”
Watson aligns himself with white media executives who have line stepped and raises the question: why am I going to court for what they’ve also done? And he answers: it’s because I’m Black, Brooklyn is being gentrified, and three of the people in the Justice Department investigating him are white. The video then features pictures of Watson and his Black family, all ignoring that Breon Peace, United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, is Black.
Watson, who proclaims his innocence at video start, goes on to talk about how difficult it was for him to raise the $83 mil he did raise. He makes no mention of the $7 million in PPP money he got to not cut salaries or lay people off while he cut salaries and laid people off. He goes watery in the eyes and segues to invoking G-d and expressing a hope that we will rise up and in a burst of keen feelings regarding racial injustice, ride a swell that will harrow the halls of justice.
It seemed like it took Martin exactly 1.7 seconds to bang out a response to the Watson Weep, which for those of us that are time limited amounted to this: “BULLSHIT!”
Incidentally this is one of the words Watson most liked to throw around when reprimanding me for some such thing or another during my 9.5 years working for him— having a flight delay, taking a vacation day — and he did so specifically because he knew it annoyed me most. Liars are motivated by fear and I’ve lived my life as a testament to pushing beyond that type of fear. I don’t have to lie because I don’t have to be concerned for whatever ramifications would arise from telling the truth.
Ramifications Watson is looking at dead on now that 37 years of possible prison time are exactly what he’s looking at. Considering Watson is 53 years old, that’s not just a virtual life sentence. That is, a life sentence. So, perhaps, it is understandable for him to be Hail Mary’ing over something he’s not ever seemed to give a shit about: racial equity.
Watson…was exactly where he wanted to be: being magically Negro whilst grooming white folks of means who dig on magical Negroes.
In fact, Martin hones in on this when he asks the very simple question: where were you, Mr. Racial Justice Warrior, when you were raising $83 million and we were struggling to convince Madison Avenue that “Black media” was a thing?
I can answer that since Watson, Harvard, Stanford, and Goldman Sachs pedigree intact was exactly where he wanted to be: being magically Negro whilst grooming white folks of means who dig on magical Negroes.
Martin was not having it though, not even a little bit. He compares the Watson grift to the OJ two step: ignore Black folks until you get in trouble, then…cloak yourself in Black until you get out of it. Clarence Thomas did that shit. Michael Jackson implied it. In any case Chuck D. put a finer point on it when he said “The bigger the Blacks get
the bigger the feds want a piece of that ... booty” and so why not CYA like your ass depended on it, because it does?
Mostly because when it doesn’t dawn on you that you are always Black it’s easy to glide right by the fact that you must be beyond reproach if you don’t have booty to spare. That is, not falsifying signatures on bank loans, masquerading as Youtube executives, or raising funds on fantastical and mythical revenue makes more sense than not.
Watson, for his part and if Twitter is to be believed, has culled a few Black academics who seem to welcome his stance, if not the man. But what they most need to know is that his racial injustice grift does not do justice to those, like Martin maintained, who are really suffering and really deserving of precisely that kind of consideration. Those that Watson slid right on by when he was on his way to dinner with Silicon Valley’s best and brightest VC folks.
Then the textbook definition of chutzpah: at website end Watson attempting to raise money for his legal defense. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me 37 times, well, shame on anyone tempted to reach for their wallet here.
But weird over the transom stuff. After my Alta Magazine article on OZY came out, I got a DM from someone asking if I couldn’t find a little Christian charity in my heart and forgive Watson while moving into a future of not hectoring him with such obvious relish and I responded thusly…
“In the end you just may see, that what you receive is what you gave to me.” A lyric by Bad Brains. But more importantly in this man named Watson that cried wolf scenario it’s actually less about me, and my grievance, and more about all of the Black folks in The National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) who are driving media on next to nothing, with no hope of getting any more. It’s about the promising young folks of color who got OZY Genius Awards who he has not paid. It’s about the crocodile tears shed for one person and one person only: the narcissist Watson who, charitably, is getting precisely what he deserves.
Until that debt is paid though? I’m just glad there are real ones like Martin willing to call not a spade, not a spade. Which is why my mother loves him. And, if truth be told, he’s growing on me too.
Of course the irony is that you recorded five albums as lead singer of a rock band but nobody can hear any lyric except “i’m not the only crook in the crowd”