As you may know, sample just aired the annual Hip-Hop Honors Awards Special, and BET is set to air their own award show on Oct. 23. You may also have heard that neither has nominated a single female rapper for anything.

The absence of women from these award shows is disappointing, but hardly shocking; female emcees no longer have a high profile. Lil' Kim, Foxy Brown and Remy Ma are better known for their tabloid troubles than their music these days. Long-awaited records by Eve and Shawnna have yet to materialize, and while hip-hop groups in the '90s from Flipmode Squad to The Firm often included a token woman, crews these days are almost always no-girls-allowed boys’ clubs.

Many of the great emcees of yesteryear have gone MIA and not many new artists of any prominence have come to take their place. Still, while obvious go-to awards show favorite Missy Elliott wasn't up to much this year, she did have that single from Step Up 2: The Streets, and both Trina and Li'l Mama had relatively well-received new albums. As I've written about before, Jean Grae finally released Jeanius, and it was one of the best records of the year, period. You'd think BET could have scraped together something. And VH1's show honors artists who've made historic contributions to the genre, so they were definitely allowed to dig into the past.

This problem is way bigger than hip-hop; because we live in a racist and sexist culture, there are limited spaces for black women in pop culture across the board. It's unsurprising that the music industry is not clamoring for female rappers — hip-hop as a genre prizes aggression and a quick wit. Put these qualities together in a black woman and it's way too threatening to a white supremacist patriarchy. Black women have and will continue to push through anyway, but it's not for lack of obstacles. … continue reading