Willis Smith, a former Time-Warner executive and now president of the media consultant company W.G. Smith & Associates, was insistent that Johnson deserved some praise.

He pointed out that Johnson, founder of what I consider the worst thing to happen to black girls since the straightening comb and hair weave, had created several black millionaires.

So has your average enterprising crack cocaine supplier, I pointed out.

Smith, one of a couple hundred people at UNC's Kenan-Flagler Business School last week to hear Johnson, threw up his hands and walked away, but the analogy is not farfetched. Some people -- OK, maybe just me -- compare the insidious effects of Johnson's "Booties Every Time" (as cartoonist Aaron McGruder so aptly dubbed it) network to electronic crack.

The only difference is, the crack kingpin won't be knowingly invited to speak at UNC.

I've tried vainly to get an interview with ol' Beelzebob since he started the Charlotte Bobcats NBA franchise. I figured attending his lecture would be one way to question Soul-less Bro. No. 1. Alas, during the question-and-answer period, he never acknowledged my furiously waving hand.

The students, business people and educators in the audience were way more deferential than Johnson deserved, considering the product upon which he made his billions.

It is understandable that a fledgling entrepreneur with an opportunity to question a billionaire businessman isn't going to waste the chance by asking "How the hell do you sleep at night?" as I would have.

That is why most of the queries, broken down to their essence, went like this: Gee, Bob. How do I become like you?

That is also why, at the end of the evening when idolatrous audience members streamed forward to have their picture taken with him or to simply touch the hem of his garment, I thought "Where is a Spelman sister when you need one?"

A couple of years ago, students from the all-girls, historically black college in Atlanta practically ran the rapper Nelly off campus because of his demeaning video depictions of women, especially in a video called "Tip Drill" in which a man runs a credit card down a nekkid woman's backside.

Such degradation was daily fare when the bilious billionaire Johnson owned BET.

Johnson might someday redeem himself and create more black millionaires. Until he does, though, we should shun that chump the way a vegetarian shuns an uncovered plateful of eight-day-old chitlins.

His critics have been accused of jealousy and playa' hatin' --who doesn't wish they had a billion dollars and a team named after them? -- but Johnson truly is black people's enemy.

An overstatement? OK, ask yourself this: If the KKK had started BET 30 years ago and aired the same black-butt-wiggling, pornographic programming as Johnson -- with black dudes rapping about the joys of killing other black dudes -- would we have sat still for it?

Well, would we?

Even though no one asked, I still wonder how he sleeps at night.