For those of you who weren’t glued to BET this past Tuesday (and that should include all of my melatonin-challenged friends, because BET is off-limits to the likes of you), the news agencies carried the summary of the evening. Will and Jada Pinkett Smith arrive onstage in a horse-drawn carriage with spinners… the BET Awards should be on par with “the white ones”… Let’s skip on down a little here.

Alicia Keys wins the award for female R&B artist, and gracefully leaves us with these words:

“This is for all my people who are really trying to dream big dreams.”

“Let’s do it,” she said. “Let’s think big. Let’s think beyond what these people are trying to hold us down to. Doctors, lawyers, engineers, musicians.”

You, like I, are probably confused about the exact identity of “these people.” I have formulated two theories on this.

1) Clandestine, otherworldly shadow-beings from elsewhere in the galaxy who greatly fear humanity’s capacity to generate alarming numbers of doctors, lawyers, engineers, and musicians, and as a result steal quietly into our bedrooms at night to confiscate — and probably destroy — our fiddles, scientific calculators, and textbooks. These beings are clearly “people” only in the highly metaphorical manner that Keys was invoking as a “wink wink, nudge nudge” to her audience, who solemnly acknowledged our shared fears.

2) Whities.

Now, look — I don’t want to be accused of saying that Alicia Keys is a ranting know-nothing performer with a head full of crazy ideas and wacked-out conspiracy theories that sound as if they were formulated in the mind of a five-year-old. So I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt and state with total conviction that she can’t possibly be suggesting anything as patently stupid as #2 above.

After all, we’ve had two successive black Secretaries of State (Condoleezza Rice having first served as national security advisor). Billboard’s Hot 100 shows that 5 of the top 10 (and 10 of the top 20) tracks are by black performers (this is, of course, much higher than blacks’ percentage of the overall population). There are two entire Billboard charts dominated by blacks (you probably guessed Rap and R&B, and you are absolutely right). The most books I own by a single economist (4) were written by Thomas Sowell, who is highly prolific, very well known, and black. Oh yeah — my doctor (GP)? He’s black. I don’t associate with engineers, so I have no numbers for that category. (This is all to say nothing of blacks’ representation in athletics, advertising, and street culture.)

And of course, why perpetuate nonsensical conspiracy theories that themselves invoke racism by accusing an entire race of harboring sinister plans to thwart the success, in all walks of life, of a huge group of people, evidently for kicks? Keys clearly wouldn’t be quite so clueless and locked into decades-old superstitions to the extent that she widens the racial divide with flippant comments, further teaching young blacks to depend on the state to “level the playing field,” and not to feel too bad if you fail, since the crackers were out to get ya.

Conclusion: Alicia Keys is terrified of extra-galactic shadow-beings stealing her scientific calculator while she sleeps.