Reclaim your vote. That’s the message of BET’s 2020 voting initiative, encouraging African-Americans to vote in the 2020 election and use their agency and power to make a difference at the polls.

Beginning in February, the Reclaim Your Vote initiative has featured a number of PSAs, educational voting panels, and partnerships with Michelle Obama's initiative “When We All Vote” and LeBron James' “More Than A Vote” to encourage early voting. Over the years, BET has actively informed its audience of issues that affect Black Americans, giving screentime to the candidates and their platforms. In 2010, BET and MTV partnered on a Youth Town Hall with President Barack Obama. The network also aired interviews with Michelle and Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. During the last election, BET News landed key interviews with Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. This year, the COVID-19 pandemic and multiple murders of Black men and women by police have only amplified the importance for the Black community to get out and vote, according to BET President Scott Mills. BET updated its campaign strategy to promote a sense of urgency surrounding the issues that Black Americans face every day, especially in recent months when race and social justice have been at the forefront.

“There are forces, both explicit and implicit, that are actively trying to suppress the Black vote and suppress Black participation. It was incumbent upon us to take a very strong position to effectively counter those messages that were being aggressively distributed against the African-American community and really encourage our community to participate in the upcoming election,” Mills said.  “Part of what resonates for me around Reclaim Your Vote is that concept of agency. It's yours, you own it and you have to take action with it, right? Someone has taken it from you and you have to take action. You have to exercise your agency. That's such a critical message.”

This year, the network is hopeful to land BET News interviews with the Democratic candidates, Joe Biden and Senator Kamala Harris, just in time for the election. On Oct. 27, the network will air the 2020 Hip Hop Awards—a ceremony that Mills suggests will feature multiple encouragements to get involved in the community and, of course, vote. Mills spoke to the ViacomCBS Newsroom about the importance of “reclaiming your vote” and how BET has been involved in encouraging voter participation and educating its audience on the issues.

Nicole Bitette: What are some of the most pressing issues facing African-American voters in this election?

Scott Mills: Broadly speaking, the inequities with respect to African-Americans in this country. There are financial inequities, or economic inequities. There are opportunity inequities and educational inequities. It really is the persistent and pernicious presence of these inequities and the efforts of so many folks to perpetuate and amplify those inequities.

When the spate of killings occurred this summer, what struck me was not, “This is reflective of where the country is today. Here we go again.” We had the same spate of killings under Barack Obama: Eric Garner in New York, Ferguson, Missouri, and more. What struck me was that changing the president is not going to get to this issue. The president handled it horrifically, and that's in fact why I believe we had these mass protests in 2020. We didn't see this level of protesting prior, because people said, “Look, bad things happen, and there are bad people and bad actors.” But when people perceive that those actions are being condoned by the highest office in the country, then people see that as a different thing. For some people, they're going to say the importance of voting is criminal justice reform, police reform, etc., but criminal justice reform, police reform doesn't sit in the White House—it's a local thing.

However, addressing the disparities and the challenges and the deficiencies in the educational system in this country is just as important as addressing criminal justice reform. What we're saying to our community is we recognize that, depending on where you sit, you may have a different perspective on one of the two, three, four most important things everybody's motivated by. But the common denominator is this idea of these persistent inequities and people wanting a government that is committed to addressing them, not perpetuating them.

NB: BET has always highlighted the issues that matter to the Black community and encouraged people to vote.

Can you talk about how BET's stance over the years helps them be a trusted source?

SM: It is so terribly important right now that everyone participates in this election, because I think what's unique about 2020 and 2016 is the degree to which people have used technology to create misinformation to inhibit the African-American vote. Historically, people have used force, people use threats, but in 2016 we really saw a rise in people using technology to try to suppress the vote.

What we've really learned is that BET’s magic, our super power, is our ability to be a connector and a convener. Our COVID relief special really evidenced that. We're not a fundraising organization, we're not an aid-providing organization, but because of our position, we can access an array of like-minded entities that bring the specific capabilities required to address a need, and we can use our unique role as a convening platform to accomplish that. We take a similar perspective around this call to action around voting.

While we have a giant footprint in our community, it really is also about amplifying the messages of all the other people out there. Michelle Obama’s “When We All Vote,” LeBron James’ “More Than A Vote,” everything The Color Collective is doing, everything that the NAACP, the Urban League, etc., does is about reach and frequency. We're not proprietary about our Get Out The Vote campaign. What we're really invested in is supporting all of the efforts designed to get our community to vote. And that's really in our DNA and in our mission around and ultimately empowering our community. And we think this year is particularly important because what we've ultimately tried to do is build upon the momentum from the summer and create what I liked to call a “march to the polls.”

We're trying to harness the idea that there wasn't antipathy around what was happening this summer: there was extraordinary emotion, there was extraordinary momentum. Let's use that same emotion and that same momentum to get you to the polls. That's critically important. There are going to be so many people trying to suppress that passion.

NB: If there's one message (beyond the act of voting) that you hope people get from Reclaim The Vote, what would that be?

SM: I think the second message is agency. Through history, and through contemporary efforts, a portion of the Black American population has been disenfranchised and people have exploited that disenfranchisement, trying to convince people not to vote by saying “your vote doesn't matter.” That's exploitative. Whether it's “your vote doesn't matter,” “getting educated doesn't matter,” any of those things, people have worked hard to deny a particular portion of the African-American community of its agency. People have worked so hard to disenfranchise a portion of the African-American community because they just want them to forfeit all these extraordinarily important events. Part of what resonates for me around Reclaim Your Vote is that concept of agency. It's yours, you own it and you have to take action with it. Someone has taken it from you and you have to take action. You have to exercise your agency. That's such a critical message.

NB: What are you hopeful for in this election and in the coming months?

SM:  This has been an extraordinarily ugly four years. If you look at how we as a country have comported ourselves, it's been extraordinarily unflattering. I really believe that as a country and a population, we're far better. We're far better as a collective, we're far better as people, we have far better values than our actions would suggest over the last four years. I have nine-year-old boy/girl twins and I have to explain to them that the things that you see happening are not reflective of the values of the country, not reflective of your values. My aspiration would be that when we get to the other side of November, that we go back to comporting ourselves in a way that's reflective of our values as a country and the perspective of the amazing people who populate this country. I say that in a non-partisan way. Whatever it takes for us to get there, that's just where I want us to get to.