On December 12, 2019, the Recording Academy Task Force on Diversity and Inclusion released its year-end final report. Just one year ago, in 2018, the Recording Academy established this task force to address criticisms against the organization with regards to diversity and inclusion. The task force’s mission, as stated in the 2019 report, is to “review and identify barriers and unconscious biases faced by underrepresented communities across Academy operations and policies, as well as throughout the music industry.”
In a 47 page document, the task force highlighted diversity-related issues observed in the Recording Academy and general music industry and proposed improvement initiatives for the future. However, despite the promises outlined in the document, one critical component of diversity seems to be missing: race.
The Recording Academy is no stranger to controversies about race—in 2015, every Best New Artist nominee and every Record of the Year nominee was white. In 2016, Kendrick Lamar’s sociopolitical expression of black identity, To Pimp a Butterfly, shockingly lost the Album of the Year GRAMMY to Taylor Swift’s 1989. Similarly, in 2017, Beyoncé’s Lemonade, an intimate narrative of black female power, lost Album of the Year to Adele, who herself admitted the award should have gone to Beyoncé.
So, how much has changed? The development of a diversity task force was a long-overdue but necessary step in the right direction. However, rather upsettingly, the report has hardly any mention of racial and ethnic disparities in music—in fact, in the entire 47-page document, the terms “black” or “African-American” and “Asian-American” are mentioned only twice; “Hispanic" is stated once; while “Caucasian,” most discussed racial group in the report, is referred to three times. No other races and ethnicities are mentioned at all.
The bulk of the diversity report deals with gender disparities, another pressing and important issue that the Recording Academy has historically struggled with. The report mentions that in mid-2018, the task force found that only 29% of the GRAMMY nominations review committee was female. Accordingly, the “demographic disparities were addressed almost immediately,” and the percentage of female reviewers on the committee is currently up to 51%. This improvement is no small feat, but the fundamental issue is that there is no mention of the racial breakdown of the female members. The treatment of women as a homogenous minority suggests a significant shortcoming in the Recording Academy’s approach to diversifying. Black women, Hispanic women, Asian women, Asian-American women, white women—the list goes on—all have strikingly different experiences from one another in the music industry.
Furthermore, the report mentions that from 2017-2018, 68% of the Recording Academy board were white, and the current board is now 63% white. Again, an improvement—but any specifics about the racial demographics of the board seem to be conveniently left out of the document.
These statistics, and the overall statements in the task force report, reveal three things about the Recording Academy: they have been slow to adopt change, they focus their efforts primarily on gender disparity, and they seem to be lacking any discussions about race. This diversity initiative may have achieved certain goals and contributed to a slightly more diverse music community in terms of gender—yet the overarching issue observed through this report is that the Western industry has a particular definition of diversity; one that includes mainly the male and female genders, a superficial understanding of the LGBTQ+ community, and a small handful of racial groups. Consequently, this very internalized, restrictive definition of diversity has dictated what kind of music can be accepted by the West and what kind of music must be “othered.”
The 2020 GRAMMY nominations revealed the prevalence of many of these issues. Notably missing from the list of nominees was BTS, one of the most popular music acts today. The group followed all the directions for a nomination—they released a hit album, attended Recording Academy events, promoted their achievements through advertisements for their GRAMMY campaign—but these efforts were ultimately overlooked by the Academy.
According to the diversity report, it seems almost impossible for BTS, a South Korean act that sings primarily in Korean, to be nominated at all. Not only does the document contain no information about Asian (aside from Asian-American) artists, but also has no reference to non-Western artists or non-English speaking artists. There is an underlying assumption in the Recording Academy diversity report that treats all artists as English speakers and all as belonging to Western culture. The Academy appears to promote diversity within their comfort zone, addressing issues that both improve their image but also do not extensively disrupt their system. For non-Western and non-English speaking artists such as BTS, great music and campaign advertisements are only half the battle. For these artists, a GRAMMY nomination also requires that the Recording Academy first acknowledge their very existence, something the Academy seems alarmingly unprepared to do.
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Written By: Alapadma
Edit By: Caitlin and Ash