I don't know about you, but when I think "music industry," I think, "white supremacy."

That is certainly what these white performers believe.

Now, I could do the obvious thing. I could note how all the nominees in the "Rap" and "Reggae" categories are people of color, or that black people are represented far in excess of their proportion of the population in many of the most coveted awards, like "Record of the Year."

I could even engage in some cheap snark about how maybe some rap artists should decline their nominations so as to provide underprivileged white people with absolutely no natural talent for laying down rhymes to a recurring beat pattern a shot at a Grammy.

But I'm not going to do that.

Because here's a little something the Okee Dokee Brothers, Alastair Moock, and Dog on Fleas might not know, possibly because they are too busy patting themselves on the back for how very virtuous they are and luxuriating in their self-appointed role of "Great White Savior:"

Half of all winners in the "Children's Music" category over the past six years were people of color.

Not nominees. Winners.

Yes, in the category for "Best Children's Album." The very category they are protesting is too white.

"We thought that it was the strongest thing we could do, to stand with people of color whose albums are too often left out of the Grammy nominations."

Too often? People of color have won half the times over the past six years, a percentage much higher than their proportional representation in the population would suggest.

"This is not just white guys with guitars playing for kids. We want to welcome all different types of music to this community."

You mean like the past three out of six winners?

Guess what guys, they don't need you to welcome them. They don't need your help. Believe it or not, you just aren't that important.

Because while you were busy virtue signalling, they were working hard and producing quality work worthy of recognition.

They don't need special favors from you, they need you to get out of the way and stop trying to bring attention to yourselves. This appears to have escaped these guys.

No, definitely escaped these guys.

"After this year, to have an all-white slate of nominees seemed really tone-deaf."

"Tone-deaf." So, awards should be given out not because of excellence anymore but to assuage the conscience of guilty white liberals.

That was Alastair Moock,

...whose nominated album, Be a Pain, is about American heroes who stood up for their principles: The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Harvey Milk, Rosa Parks, the Parkland, Fla., shooting student protesters and others.

Consider for a moment the mindset in which an artist who created a children's album about MLK, Harvey Milk, Rosa Parks, and anti-gunners still feels that's not quite enough social justice warrioring for a year.

It's like he can't even feed his own internal woke monster enough.

Joanie Leeds decided to retain her nomination because... you know why.

"I didn't decline because my album is really about empowering young women. I mean, I have 20 women on my album."

The pleading is what gets to me. "Look, look at all the women on my album. You could almost say binders full even! I'm one of the good guys, please don't cancel me!"

"So for us, it was like it was kind of counter to our empowering women message to step down. I know that this is really about the guys that dropped out, but I feel like a lot of times women are kind of left on the side. It's a shame. I wish there was more equality with women."

Yeah. "Women are kind of left on the side."

In the music industry.

That's like saying there are not nearly enough women elementary school teachers.

Four out of the last seven winners of "Best Children's Album" were women.

How deeply brainwashed do you have to be to accept, without question, a narrative specific to an industry you work in, that is demonstrably false.

You know who else accepted the narrative with complete credulity?

The media.

The NPR story linked in the beginning is like all the rest, uncritically regurgitating the narrative, cheering it on even, unquestioningly.

Rolling Stone was one of them.

"We can't in good conscience benefit from a process that has… so overlooked women, performers of color, and most especially black performers," three nominees say.

Rolling Stone reprinted without any context or examination, statistics that the three provided such as, "only about 6 percent of nominated acts have been black led or co-led" over the past 10 years. Okay, interesting, probably worth talking about and examining for context.

You know what else would have been interesting to their readers and even more current and relevant and would have served as an interesting juxtaposition to the claims of the three white guys?

The fact that a black group, "Secret Agent 23 Skidoo" won in 2016 (the group is half black which as I understand the way this works these days, makes it black), Lucy Kalantari, half Dominican and half Puerto Rican, won in 2018, and Neela Vaswani, an Indian, won in 2014 for "I Am Malala: How One Girl Stood Up For Education And Changed The World (Malala Yousafzai)."

These are established companies with vast resources including research staff, institutional knowledge, and industry expertise.

I'm a guy with a laptop.

And yet you had to read it here.

Imagine the warped view of the world that would result if all you read, if all you relied upon for information, was a steady diet of these old-guard media outlets.

Unfortunately, we don't have to imagine. We're living it in that world, a world where three white guys can be lauded for their bravery instead of ridiculed for their absurdity.