BET denies that its hit documentary series American Gangster venerates villains. "The show will explore without glorifying, and investigate without celebrating these criminal-minded men and women," pledges BET's online mission statement. "During each episode, the crimes of infamous Black figures will be put in the context of Black history as we see how their actions both reflected and corrupted the values of their community. While exploring the lives of drug dealers, murderers and thieves, each episode will have a strong moral dimension. The Black victims of these criminals will be heard. Judgment will be passed, and amoral behavior censured."
If this reeks too much of the Old Testament for you, not to worry. American Gangster passes judgment mainly on white people, while giving drug dealers, murderers, and thieves the benefit of every doubt — and the series much prefers to raise doubts on their behalf than to, God forbid, censure any infamous black figures. 
This pro-criminal stance inevitably results from BET's goal of putting lawlessness in the context of black history. Through such a prism, individuals cannot be held responsible for their transgressions, which flow from past oppression as inexorably as Ol' Man River.
This tone of extenuation is established in American Gangster's maiden episode (first aired in November 2006), chronicling convicted murderer Stanley "Tookie" Williams, co-founder of L.A.'s violent street gang, the Crips, who was executed by the State of California in 2005. "Gangs have been part of South Central since the Second World War," announces series narrator Ving Rhames. "They formed in large part to fend off white vigilantes who terrorized an expanding black community."
Over the next two decades, white vigilantes took to carrying badges and the gangs became politicized. "Following the Watts riots in 1965, the emergence of politically active groups like the Black Panthers," says Rhames, "provided hopeful options for those at the bottom of the social ladder. From 1965 to 1970, gang killings came to a standstill. But in the late '60s, the Panthers and much of the civil rights movement came undone, in part through a campaign of murder and subversion sanctioned by the FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover."
To some, Hoover was a faithful public servant for over half a century until his death in 1972. To BET, he's a coldblooded murderer, indicted by American Gangster for his approval of a COINTELPRO (COunter INTELligence PROgram) to neutralize the activities of radical black nationalists. According to the dictionary, to neutralize is to render ineffective. This term of art was used in that sense in the FBI's 1967 COINTELPRO against black hate groups, just as it had been in the FBI's 1964 COINTELPRO against white hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and American Nazi Party. The Bureau's separate directives, spaced three years apart, employ virtually identical language: "to expose, disrupt, and otherwise neutralize the activities" of targeted groups. In neither case did Director Hoover sanction murder.
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