America’s “Prince” problem: How Black people — and art — became “devalued”

Near the end of the 2015 Grammy Awards, musical icon Prince presented the Grammy for Best Album, with this preamble: “Albums still matter. Like books and Black lives, albums still matter.” In just over ten words, Prince reminded us that the Black Lives Matter movement that captured our attention in the last five months of 2014 is having the necessary consequence of sparking a new chapter in our national artistic imagination. A long-held tenet of our liberal American credo is that art