Why award shows will stop being separated by gender in my lifetime
When the musician Prince died in 2016, my husband and I probably played “Purple Rain” on a loop for a week straight. As I followed the outpouring of nostalgia and love for this multi-talented musician on social media, I kept coming across a video that completely surprised me. It was Prince, winning awards for his historic album at the American Music Awards in 1985. There were social media comments about his regal, IDGAF demeanor. There was the comical juxtaposition between this effete, well-dressed man and his blonde-lumberjack-Santa of a bodyguard. But the most startling thing to me was:
“Favorite Black Single”
and
“Favorite Black Album”
I couldn’t believe it. This was a thing in 1985? Why? If aliens came down and asked us, our most well-intentioned answer would sound something like this: “Well, a certain demographic of artists felt like, and often were, shut out of categories that were dominated by, re-purposed for, and/or biased towards, some other specific demographic. So we had to give them special categories where they could compete.”
Of course, in 1985, the AMAs — and possibly everyone else — realized that this particular experiment didn’t make sense. For starters, while it probably began innocently enough to…
