All White Everything: A New Study Has Discovered A Startling Trend In Grammy Winners

Respect the artistry.

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Image via Complex Original
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After the dust settled from Sunday's Grammy Awards, all the attention wasn't on Beck or Sam Smith's impressive wins but the role of black artists in the scope of the Academy's voting process. Kanye West and Snoop Dogg have been very vocal about the perceived injustice in the Grammy's selection process and have already pledged to boycott the award show. The "us vs them" feeling between black artists and the Grammys is well documented and goes back to 1989 when the first recipients of the Rap category Will Smith and DJ Jazzy Jeff gave the event the cold shoulder. However, a study has found that the split of diversity on the charts and with the Grammys is as large as it's been since 1981.

According to data compiled by Vocativ, the Grammys have been getting whiter for a long time now, as witnessed by the graph below:

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The schism in diversity doesn't stop with the seemingly out of touch voters in the Recording Academy. The site also created a separate graph for the Billboard Hot 100, and the results are even more disturbing:

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One trend to look at is the sharp decline in black artists who are nominated or Billboard charting in the 2000's after a fairly equal period in the 90's. Black artists represented less than a quarter of the Billboard Hot 100 last year, one year removed from a complete lack of any charting with a No. 1 single in 2013. No black artist has won one of the four major awards at the Grammys since 2010. There is a legitimate concern to be had in not only the Billboard charts but the Recording Academy as well, and with the industry's most brilliant minds speaking out about it, hopefully this sparks a much needed push to change things from the status quo.

[via Vocativ]

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