Barbara Elaine Smith, professionally known as B. Smith, is an American restaurateur, model, author, businesswoman and television host. Her weekly half-hour syndicated television show, B. Smith With Style, debuted in 1997. It featured home decor and cooking segments. She is a national icon to many. B. Smith now has Alzheimer’s disease. Her “husband” Dan Gasby, recently announced that while he remains “devoted” to his wife, he is also in a deeply committed relationship with another woman, who is white. He has since moved the woman into their home with a room of her own to help “care for” B. Smith, while her health and memory are deteriorating and now Bravo would like to capitalize off of the black iconic figure by making this a reality tv series!

The idea of a reality tv show about B. Smith, her husband and white mistress is voyeurism at its most perverse. It is appalling, harmful and hurtful to a majority of the black community who feel that B. Smith’s legacy should not be subjected to this grotesque spectacle of blatant disregard and disrespect by her husband who took vows of “in sickness and in health” and is not only moving his mistress into the home that B. Smith purchased, is wanting to make the ordeal as public as possible. This is scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of its desperation for ratings for any respectable network. This is not the time for her “husband,” his new lover and the networks to use the failing health of a black icon for its own titillation, entertainment and personal gain. We demand that Bravo cancel the production of this racist mockery of someone deserving of basic human respect and dignity!