Slate wrapped up the disastrous entertainment year of 2016 with a Full Stupid headline.

So according to author Julianne Escobedo Shepherd — whose credentials include “professor of music writing at NYU” — we Americans have never been “ready” to accept the musical talents of black women in popular music. That is so patently ridiculous, it’s laughable.

Let’s start in 1957, with Ella Fitzgerald accompanied by Louis Armstrong — a legend in his own right — with this classic: “Summertime,” from Porgy and Bess. 

The princesses of 1960’s music were three young women from Detroit, The Supremes.

And the reigning queen was Aretha Franklin, who hailed from Memphis.

If you were in college in the 1970’s, like me, you certainly remember the Pointer Sisters. They had a ton of hits, and I was a fan. Here they are from the 1976 movie Car Wash, with the late Richard Pryor playing a film-flam preacher.

When my husband and I were young parents in the 1980’s, and MTV was fresh and creative, our toddler girl would run from any room in our house to watch Tina Turner’s video, “What’s Love Got to Do With It?” We never understood her fascination with the video. We think it may have been Tina’s big ’80’s hair. Hair or not, it’s a great performance. Tina Turner rocked that decade.

So basically Slate just brushed aside decades of talented black women whose music was embraced by generations of Americans. But that wouldn’t fit Slate’s liberal narrative of America as a racist nation now, would it?