The Grammys Have Always Dismissed Black Artists, and We Shouldn’t Expect Better This Year

The Grammys are tonight, and almost certainly a Black artist who is deserving will not win a major award. Many will jump online and voice their consternation, but they should not. This happens every year.

Since they started giving out these awards in 1959, only 11 Black artists have won Album of The Year. That’s 11 out of 65 awards shows. To add insult to injury, Lauryn Hill was the last Black woman to win the award when she won damn near everything in 1999 with “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.” So, the people who vote for these awards have a history of overlooking Black talent…and it’s not just the Grammys.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (the body that gives out the Oscars) has a similar problem. In 2015, the Academy only nominated white performers for all 20 acting nominations for two consecutive years. This led April Reign to create the infamous hashtag #OscarsSoWhite. The body that votes for that award changed up its voting practices and added more Black folks, but it took advocacy from Black Twitter to make that happen. Then there are the times when white artists are celebrated for appropriating Black culture.

Remember the Grammys in 2014 when Macklemore’s “The Heist” won rap album of the year instead of Kendrick Lamar’s beautiful, polyvalent “Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City?” There was outrage online, but it didn’t surprise any of us who follow these awards closely. All you need to do is peruse music history to see that things like that have has always happened.

That’s why Elvis Presley is honored and not Big Mamma Thornton. Or why Led Zeppelin is celebrated while Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon are largely forgotten. Most white Americans want a black sound without having to deal with actual black people.

Too often we sit at the door of white America asking them to recognize us. We perpetually celebrate the first Black person that white folks allowed to hold any position of significance in their institutions. We are consistently outraged when those white institutions turn around and do what they were created to do: marginalize Black folks. We have a bad habit of demeaning and ghettoizing the NAACP Image Awards, the BET Awards, and other spaces that have historically made room for and celebrated Black brilliance.

When you convey more worth to white access and recognition than you do to black affirmation, you participate in your own oppression. We need to support, protect, and prioritize those spaces that celebrate our Blackness, not award shows that tokenize our culture.

I am reminded of the words W.E.B. Du Bois wrote to eulogize the brilliant scientist Carter G. Woodson: “No white university ever recognized his work; no white scientific society ever honored him. Perhaps this was his greatest honor.”

This weekend, when the Grammys inevitably fail to appreciate the work of Black artists, we should not be outraged. We should heed the words of DuBois and consider it an honor.