On February 12, 2017, the 59th annual Grammy Awards ceremony was held in Los Angeles, California.
Many amazing things happened at the Grammys this year, such as Bruno Mars paying tribute to the late Prince with a phenomenal performance, Lil Yachty, whom was just a Sound Cloud artist last year, was present at the Grammys, and Chance the Rapper broke Grammy history by being the first unsigned artist to win a Grammy award.
What was the real climax of the show? Beyoncé lost “Best Album of the Year” to Adele.
Like every year at the Grammys and Oscars, when an artist does not win the biggest award of the night that everybody felt they so rightfully deserved, black people cry out their favorite excuse which is racism.
Solange Knowles stated her opinion on her sister losing “Album of the Year” via twitter stating, “There have only been two black winners in the last 20 years for Album of the year, there have been over 200 black artist who have performed.” She also posted a follow up tweet which said, “create your own committees, build your own institutions, give your friends awards, award yourself, and be the gold you wanna hold my g’s”. The irony of these tweets was that Solange won a Grammy for her album A Seat at the Table. The Grammy CEO and president Neil Portnow, responded by denying any rumors of racism saying,
“ I don’t think there’s a race problem at all, remember, this is a peer-voted award. So, when we say the Grammys, it’s not a corporate entity, it’s the 14,000 members of the academy. They have to qualify in order to be members, which means they have to have recorded and released music, and so they are sort of the experts and the highest level of professionals in the industry.”
Portnow also used Chance the Rapper’s win as proof the Grammys are diverse stating “You don’t get Chance the Rapper as the Best New Artist of the Year if you have a membership that isn’t diverse and isn’t open-minded and isn’t really listening to the music, and not really considering other elements beyond how great the music is.”
There have been rumors of racially biased people involved with the Grammys and the Oscars for a while now.
Many black celebrities have labeled these award shows as racist and rant about how we as the black community should start building our own; however, these same celebrities rarely show support for black owned award shows that were created to uplift and celebrate black celebrities, such as the BET awards, the Soul Train awards, the NAACP awards and the Image awards.
Back in 2015, Omarion vented about his single “Post to Be” not being nominated for a Grammy but that same year didn’t show up at the Soul Train awards to accept his award for Best Collaboration for that same song.
African Americans create award shows to honor black people but black people tend to not hold it to the same standards as they would for the other award shows that were created by white people.
It is almost funny how many people were quick to call the Grammys racist because they felt as though Beyoncé was snubbed for Best Album of the Year for Lemonade, but failed to speak up for Rihanna who didn’t win a Grammy at all that night, and she was nominated for seven in comparison to Beyoncé who won two.
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Tell the truth::Are black award shows being held to same expectations as the Grammys and Oscars?
March 8, 2017
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