The Beyoncé CMA Snub and Country Music’s Dangerous Hierarchy

If country music is one big happy family, Black women are its bastard daughters. The illegitimate children that will never be recognized. Despite being born of its flesh, carrying the songs and traditions of the nation’s past in its blood, Black women in country have been denied legitimacy by the industry they’re so firmly a part of. Perhaps it’s because there’s a fear that, if the country music industry did truly recognize Black women as the genre’s heirs—to write them down as the rightful descendants of a great American dynasty—it (and everything it stands for) would likely cease to exist.