This essay is co-written by Calvin Eaton (CEO/Founder) and Julia Monica (DEAI Educator & Consultant)
If you follow pop culture then you by now are more than likely aware that the 65th annual Grammy Awards were held on Sunday, February 5, 2023. The ceremony is hailed as “music’s biggest night,” and the biggest story of this year’s show was Beyonce. The multi-hyphenate recording artist went into the ceremony with nine nominations (the most of any act) and left winning four awards making her the artist with the most Grammy wins in the history of the award. This historic feat would be headline-grabbing by itself, but the bigger story of the night shows her critically acclaimed album Renaissance losing the coveted Album of the Year (AOTY) Award to Harry’s House by Harry Styles.
In honor of Women’s History Month, we wanted to explore some of the interconnected themes that came up for us as we processed this moment in pop culture history. Let’s get the basics out of the way right at the beginning. Yes, Beyonce losing Album of the Year (AOTY) to Harry Styles is about racism. It’s also about misogynoir, sexism, feminism, intersectionality and the erasure of Black women from our most prolific and important historical and sociocultural narratives. Almost nothing that happens in American (aka the United States) society and culture is immune to the virus that is racism, patriarchy, and white supremacy; therefore is deserving of a keen look and critical race analysis.
Yes, it’s about racism. The proof is in the pudding so let’s start with some statistics…
Here is the complete list of artists who have won AOTY in the last 10 years (the timeline from 2013, the year during which Harry Styles won X Factor jump-starting his career, to 2023 revealing Beyonce’s album Renaissance losing to Styles’s Harry’s House.).
- 2013 Mumford & Sons
- 2014: Daft Punk
- 2015: Beck
- 2016: Taylor Swift
- 2017: Adele
- 2018: Bruno Mars
- 2019: Kacey Musgraves
- 2020: Billie Eilish
- 2021: Taylor Swift
- 2022: Jon Batiste
- 2023: Harry Styles
Here are a few observations to note:
- In the last ten years, only 1 Black person has won AOTY making that a total of 10% of the year range seeing a Black winner in 2022 with Jon Batiste – also the only year that saw a 50-50% split between black and white artist representation in the nominee pool. 10% in the POC winner category is represented by Bruno Mars in 2018. 80% of AOTY category winners have been white artists.
- From 2013 – 2023, there was never a nominee pool where Black women stood without Black male nominees in the same category. In 2022 (AOTY: Jon Batiste), only 20% of the artists were Black women.
- 2018 – 2019 saw Black or POC-majority nominee pools with 2018 showing a ratio of 80:20% POC/white artists and 2019 showing a ratio of 62:38% black/white artists.
- 2023 Harry Styles wins AOTY beating out Lizzo and Beyonce who are contending with Kendrick Lamar, Bad Bunny, and 6 other white artists.
- It’s worth noting that only 11 Black artists have won AOTY in the 65-year history of the GRAMMYs. Only three of them have been Black women.
*To read more about the GRAMMY voting process and how it informs racial bias and practice in the academy, read here.*
What we can see from these metrics is that the Academy’s supposed efforts at inclusion and diversity continues to subvert Black women. 50% of the winners in the last ten years have been white women, contributing to an ongoing history of championing white feminism at the expense of erasuring Black women — or at least, not giving them their dues.
Take Adele’s win in 2017 for instance. This year she beat out Beyonce (Lemonade) with her album 25. Adele herself is a white soul singer who began her education listening to Destiny’s Child, Beyoncé’s former group, at age 11. Recall Adele’s remarks in her speech: “My artist of my life is Beyoncé. The Lemonade album was so monumental and so well thought-out and soul-bearing.” Beyoncé, who demurely smiled in the audience, surrounded by her actual family who are cited in her own speech, said that the reason she made Lemonade was “so that these Black children would have images and words that reflected themselves, and not through a whitened mirror.” “Often, we become inaudible,” she’d said of the “deep Southern culture” Lemonade expressed. Sadly, her loss at least momentarily rendered her inaudible again by the Academy.
Allegedly, Adele continued to protest backstage: “I thought it was her year. What the fuck does she (Beyonce) have to do to win?”. Although her anger isn’t misplaced, Adele’s protests behind curtains do not feel disruptive. She could have refused the GRAMMY, or demanded the Academy award Beyonce over her. Publicly accepting the award with a teary-eyed nod to Beyonce is not the same as protesting or relinquishing her privilege as a white female artist.
This highlights a larger and chronic erasure of Black women in American entertainment.
White supremacy culture and racism would have us believe that art, media, and entertainment exist in a vacuum – devoid of politics, history, and of ongoing historiography while simultaneously working to revise and erase the innumerous contributions of Black people that are the architects of almost all the art, music, and internet culture that is considered en vogue, trendy, and mainstream. These patterns are nothing new.
Systemic racism and misogynoir has always been rampant and prolific in American culture in society. This racist history predates Beyonce by many decades. We have to look no further than Hattie McDaniel, the first Black woman to win an Academy Award for her portrayal of a subservient maid to a white protagonist in Gone with The Wind (1939). Gone with the Wind, a film that romanticizes the plantation slave-holding South, maintains the record as the highest-grossing film of all time. Ms. McDaniel’s win was historic as it came at a time when Hollywood’s portrayal of Black people and Black women was reduced to racist tropes, side characters, and subservient players to pale white protagonists. Ms. McDaniel’s win was against a backdrop of blackface and minstrel shows where white people painted their faces with black paint to portray racist caricatures of Black people with big red lips, exaggerated grins, and bulging eyes, further reinforcing the notion that to be Black means to be dumb, dimwitted, unintelligent, and less than white people. Ms. McDanel is famously quoted as saying “I’d rather play a maid than be one,” according to Seth Abramovitch for Hollywood Reporter. It was the good racist white people, fellow white actors, agents, and producers that forced Ms. McDaniel to enter the Ambassador’s Cocoanut Grove nightclub with its “no Blacks policy” to accept her award. Special favors had to be called in for Ms. McDaniel who at the time was one of the biggest stars in Hollywood to accept her Best Supporting Actress award in 1940. It would take another 82 years for a Black actress to win Best Actress — the 2002 win of Black biracial actor Halle Berry for her work in the film Monsters Ball. Twenty-one years later no other Black woman has won the Best Actress award.
Recall Adele asking the very pregnant Beyoncé at the 2017 GRAMMYS if she would be her “mummy.” These inappropriate remarks (for one thing, Beyoncé is only eight years older than Adele) inadvertently perpetuate this long and problematic history of Black women being asked to serve as “mothers” to white women — as domestics, as often unacknowledged mentors, and as uncredited artistic sources. The stereotype of the “black friend,” like that of the benevolent black mother figure, runs throughout American popular culture as an inadequate balm used to soothe the realities of racism – good feeling among individual white and black characters is often presented in films, for examples, as a provisional solution to systematic oppression.
Fast forward to 2023 and Beyonce’s critically acclaimed Renaissance album; a body of work that celebrates the intersections and complex-oft-erased history, and contributions of the Black, queer, LGBTQ, ballroom, and drag, communities to the American musical cannon was the most nominated album of the night going into the 65th annual Grammy awards. It comes at a time when Hollywood and the music industry continue to espouse equity and inclusion while continuing to overlook the works and art of Black, non-binary, trans, Indigenous, Asian, South Asia, and other people and women of color.
The Grammys like the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Oscars) Hollywood Foreign Press (Golden Globes), and Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (Emmy) continue to promote this historical pattern of nominating and acknowledging the work of Black women but completely shutting them out of major awards. As I briefly alluded to before, the Grammys have only awarded three Black women AOTY in the 65-year history of the awards; Natalie Cole (Unforgettable…With Love) in 1992, Whitney Houston (“The Bodyguard” Soundtrack) in 1994, and Lauryn Hill in 1999 (The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill). All of this history is interconnected and intertwined making Beyonce’s 2023 loss so much bigger than her as an artist and so much bigger than one award.
It’s bigger than Beyoncé: the perpetuation of systemic racism in America
Hopefully, you too see the pattern of racism and hypocrisy. The contributions of Black women and artists both old and contemporary to pop music, American radio, and popular culture are too numerous to list. Despite this, Black artists and most notably Black women artists like Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, Diana Ross, Eartha Kitt, Josephine Baker, and Tina Turner have had experiences of trauma and assault mocked, belittled, and exploited in efforts to discredit their messages and their pain. Their contributions to American history have been whitewashed, erased, and relegated to the sidelines. It was these courageous women that dared to eschew the status quo and break the mold of what a pop star should be. The latter two; Josephine and left the U.S. entirely to Paris and Switzerland respectively because the rampant and overbearing systemic racism, sexism, and misogynoir from U.S. society was too much to bear. All of these women and many more spoke on record extensively about the racism that they faced for no other reason than them being Black women.
What I hate most about our pop culture and the 24-hour news cycle is that any coverage about racism is disparaged as “identity politics” and the media is woefully unequipped and unwilling to have serious, nuanced conversations. Social media has made everyone at best, an “armchair expert” whether or not they have the range or qualifications to weigh in with an informed opinion, and at worst a racist troll doling out accusations of reverse racism and gaslighting all BIPOC people as deliberately making everything about race. For better or worse, the handling of intersectional conversations that live at the intersections of race, gender, and class is that they never leave the surface. Black pundits and people call something “racist” and many well-meaning (and racist) white people and commenters immediately retort with “What does race have to do with this.” A nuanced, genuine, and important dialogue never comes to pass, and everyone screams in their respective echo chambers giving misinformed critiques and opinions on Tiktok, Twitter, and Instagram that lack historical and contemporary context.
If you are a white person reading this essay, reading the numerous op-eds, articles, and commentary about the 2023 Grammys; instead of asking yourself “why do we always make it about race” you should instead be asking yourself why you don’t see the connections and don’t immediately understand why racism is indeed a part of the equation without needing to be taught by a Black person. Ask yourself how and why in 2023 Black people — namely Black femmes, Black queer people, and Black women continually are forced to bear the labor of teaching you about the American history that Black people have no choice but to know. Ask yourself why white people continue to be willfully oblivious to the interconnectedness of everything everywhere all at once while every one that isn’t white or white-passing has to always have the micro and macro view of the world and of history, while simultaneously being victimized by micro/macroaggressions, interpersonal, institutional and systemic racism. Ask yourself why Governors like Rob Desantis and pundits like Tucker Carlson work tirelessly to disparage facts, limit freedom of speech, and the ability for everyone to have equal access to the American history that I was able to write in this essay with little to no research. Why do I know this history and you don’t? Why do I see the racism and understand why it’s about race, and you choose to be obtuse?
The United States is built on a system of white supremacy that quite literally indoctrinates its inhabitants that people have a hierarchical value based on the color of their skin, their phenotype, their gender, and their socially constructed race. Every single system that has been created including our politics, our art, our education, our science, and our healthcare is rooted in the false, toxic, and insidious notion that the “white race” is the superior race. It has told us and shown us that white men are better equipped to govern, lead, rule, and win. For over 400 years this system has reinforced the belief that every one that isn’t white, male, and cisgender, is deviant, other, marginalized, and/or lesser than others. I didn’t make these rules and you don’t get to pretend that these rules don’t continue to exist and be reinforced in entertainment, art, literature, and everything else that makes up our culture and belief system. It’s white patriarchal supremacy culture that reinforces the ideals of “rugged individualism,” and meritocracy at the expense of mutual aid and community. It’s what tells us that everyone has equal access to the “American Dream” no matter where they come from, what they look like, or what religion they believe in, and has equal and unfettered access to safety, security, bodily autonomy, and freedom. It’s white supremacy culture, and those that willfully or unintentionally subscribe to it that tell us that the present is separate and independent from the past, that “slavery was a long time ago so you people need to get over it”, and that Dr. Martin Luther King just wanted everyone to get along.
As of this writing, this same system is working overtime to ban books that teach children about the horrors of chattel slavery, create bills that say AP African American studies courses are lacking academic rigor, that whitewashed Rosa Parks as a tired old woman that did want to move from her seat on the bus instead of as a radical revolutionary and decry and vilify critical race theory as indoctrination that tells white children that they should be guilty of being white (it does no such thing).
All this said Beyonce losing AOTY is about the erasure of Black women. It’s about Black women according to Malcolm X being: “The most disrespected persons in America. The most unprotected person in America. The most neglected persons in America.” Beyonce’s career stands on this legacy — this Black American history, and therefore HERstory and cannon are inextricably linked to all of these aforementioned greats, as well as those that aren’t listed. Her loss is about Black women being told to wait their turn, stay in their place, play a maid so they won’t be one, and be happy with what they do have. This loss is about Dr. Kimberle Crenshaw, Nikole Hannah Jones, intersectionality, Hattie McDaniel, and all the Black women and girls that continue to do the work, be exceptional, and show greatness while simultaneously being erased, degraded, adultified, abused, assaulted, questioned, sidelined, and not listened to. It’s bigger than Beyonce.
Resources
- Oscar’s First Black Winner Accepted Her Honor in a Segregated ‘No Blacks’ Hotel in L.A. | Seth Abramovitch, The Hollywood Reporter
- The American Dream Myth | Blessed Kusi, 540WMain
- The College Board Strips Down Its A.P. Curriculum for African American Studies | Anemona Hartocollis and Eliza Fawcett, The New York Times
- A More Beautiful & Terrible History: The Whitewashing & Distortion of Rosa Parks and MLK’s Legacies | Democracy Now
- ‘A political football’: NYU faculty grapple with nationwide vilification of critical race theory | Rachel Cohen, Washington Square News
- Blackface: The Birth of An American Stereotype | National Museum of African American History and Culture
- Only 11 Black Artists Have Won Album of the Year at the Grammys | Callie Ahlgrim, Insider
- What Hattie McDaniel Said About Her Oscar-Winning Career Playing Racial Stereotypes | Kat Eschner, Smithsonian
- Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop by Danyel Smith
- A Little Devil in America Notes In Praise of Black Performance by Hanif Abdurraqib
- AOTY, Grammy Award | Wikipedia
- Accusations of Racial Bias | Wikipedia
- The Grammy Voting Process is Completely Ridiculous | Vox
- GRAMMYs 2017: Adele Wins Album of the Year, Says it Should Have Been Beyoncé | Pitchfork
- The Problem with the Grammys is Not a Problem We Can Fix | NPR
- Grammy Voting Process | Grammy Official Site
- What is misogynoir? | Blackburn Center
- What is Intersectionality | Intersectional Justice
- The Gaps of White Feminism and the Women of Color who Fall Through | New America
About Calvin and Julia
(she/they) is an Afro-Latina adoptee from Colombia, South America. In her graduate studies, she engaged with processes of transglobal colonization and decolonization processes. As an activist and scholar, she is passionate about the topic of how Whiteness and White supremacy mentally and socially impact people of color not just in the United States but all over the globe.
(he/his/him) Calvin Eaton is a disabled community educator, content creator, and social entrepreneur, whose area of expertise includes antiracism, equity, justice, instructional design, and program development. In 2016 Mr. Eaton founded 540WMain, Inc. a virtual non-profit organization and antiracist education brand that promotes justice for
