Nicki Minaj, White Fragility and Me
I had a complicated reaction to Nicki Minaj’s interview with New York Times Magazine writer Vanessa Grigoriadis, which ended with Minaj challenging Grigoriadis’s questions as implicitly racist and sexist and Minaj storming out of the interview. I want to unpack my reaction, both for my own benefit and hopefully others.
So if you don’t know, here’s what happened. At the end of her interview with Minaj, Grigoriadis asks about a feud between Drake and Meek Mill, who Minaj is dating. Minaj bristles. And Grigoriadis doubles down, asking Minaj, “Is there a part of you that thrives on drama, or is it no, just pain and unpleasantness…”
Minaj bristles: “That’s disrespectful… Why would a grown-ass woman thrive off drama?’’
And then Grigoriadis writes: “As soon as I said the words, I wished I could dissolve them on my tongue,” recounting in writing that she realizes she said something offensive even though it’s clear she doesn’t entirely understand why.
My first reaction was to identify with Grigoriadis and even to applaud her for being self-effacing enough to include this passage and her own stumbling in the article at all. She could have just as easily not included it and probably avoided all of the criticism that has been lobbed at her since. But she put it in. And I think that’s awesome.
At the same time, part of the reason I identified with Grigoriadis is because of what might be called “defensive whiteness” — the feeling that it could have been me putting my foot in my mouth and freaking out about being racist or, worse, being called racist which isn’t worse but somehow seems it. All my rationalizations on Grigoriadis’ behalf quickly and easily presented themselves — that she didn’t mean it that way, that her editor set her up by sending her as a white woman to report on the piece in the first place, and even that Minaj was just exploiting Grigoriadis’ very legitimate question to create drama thus reinforcing why the question was valid. Maybe it’s partly because I’m a writer and she’s a writer, maybe it’s because we’re both women, but arguably mostly because we’re both white I felt a rush of sympathy for Grigoriadis.
Then I read a piece by Shannon M. Houston that hit me like a two-by-four to my brain. After breaking down line-by-line evidence about why Grigoriadis was arguably unqualified to write the piece in the first place based on her several misrepresentations of Minaj and the history of hip hop, and looking at the recent history of problematic profiles of black women by white writers for the New York Times in general, Houston dives into the part at the end of the interview. After Grigoriadis asked the question, she tried to backtrack, saying she wasn’t interested in “drama” the way she thought Minaj interpreted it but “the kind worthy of an HBO series, in which your labelmate is releasing endless dis tracks against your boyfriend and your mentor is suing your label president for a king’s ransom.”
Houston’s translation:
Grigoriadis is admitting that she asks, not because she’s interested in the mechanics of these two hip-hop feuds, but because she assumes they are fictionalized narratives that exist for her to enjoy, consume and binge. It’s more than just a journalistic faux pas — it’s one more terrifying example of how much the black experience is “other” to much of white America.
Houston began her essay with what I thought was an odd tangent, citing a Saturday Night Live sketch about white appropriation of black culture, especially in music, where Jay Pharoah’s character is warned, “Do not let white people see you dance! Once they see you dance, they will try and dance like you… They’ll try and they’ll try. And when they do it will be a catastrophe.” Suddenly I realize why Houston included that. Grigoriadis is effectively saying to Minaj: Dance for me, dance for my white gaze and white America, entertain us with your drama and all that. Which made me feel for Minaj and how she was being put on constant display, not just as any celebrity is, but especially and uniquely as a black woman and who is increasingly not afraid to call out that mistreatment. I felt that empathy for a good few seconds anyway, before I was back to drowning in my own white experience, now wrapped in guilt.
White supremacy is a fascinating term. It’s come to represent extreme racial antipathy, the sort of overt racism practiced by the KKK and certain basketball team owners and presidential candidates. But at its core, white supremacy nothing more or less than the belief in the superiority of whiteness and the institutionalization, explicit or otherwise, of that superiority throughout society’s structures. And that doesn’t just mean the inherent superiority of white people. It also includes the superiority of white perspectives.
In moments like Grigoriadis/Minaj exchange or when these moments happen in real life right in front of us, we tend to take sides. In a standup bit, Trevor Noah describes the unique facial expression of a white person in America directly or indirectly accused of racism, how we twist and contort ourselves to try and not seem defensive while at the same time almost appearing to be on the verge of a seizure, not at any particular repulsion about racism in general but in reaction to the horror of such accusations made at us. And then we take sides, presumably to defend ourselves but in so doing, often further attack not only our accuser but the very idea that racial bias might exist at all. And where white supremacy comes into play is in putting an historical and structural thumb on our side of that argument — that there can only be one truth, about bias or anything else for that matter, and the truth belongs to white people. How can there be racial profiling by police if I’ve never experienced it? How can black people get followed around stores by mall cops, I’ve never seen that happen? How can racial discrimination be a real thing, it’s never happened to me? Well no shit it’s never happened to you, you’re white!
It’s amazing we white people can think ourselves so persistently unique — in that all we have we deserve, that we’re not the beneficiaries of one drop of history or privilege — and at the same time believe our singular perspectives on the world to be universal. That, folks, is exceptional white privilege in every sense of the word.
Within this context, white fragility is the soft underbelly of white supremacy — that it’s implicitly more important to protect white people and their feelings than to address the reality of racial bias and structural racism. Take a moment to grasp the profound irony that a race which believes itself to be inherently, if unconsciously, superior simultaneously can’t handle being challenged on our identity and perspective. Of course, part of the privilege of whiteness is not having to square that circle nor defend our defensiveness in general — the burden of proof always falls on the “other.” And even then, the perspective of white supremacy means that “their” perspective can’t be right unless “ours” is wrong.
Somewhere in the mess of all these reactions and reflections, I’m not sure I have a singular answer, and that might be the point — that part of the antidote to white supremacy that always inherently privileges whiteness and the white perspective is to be able to hold multiple perspectives as real and valid. What if Nicki Minaj and Shannon M. Houston and Vanessa Grigoriadis all have valid points and the path toward greater equality and mutual respect comes not from picking sides but from acknowledging each others’ realities with an appropriate dose of self-awareness and even self-critique? In that vision, whiteness doesn’t always mean being wrong — it just doesn’t mean being always right! And then, from that place of expanded self-awareness, being able to notice and deconstruct the ways such white supremacy has embedded itself into every crook and cranny of America’s culture, politics and economy.
“I’m feeling myself,” Minaj raps over and over again in her hit song by the same name. Praise to Nicki Minaj, who is challenging us by asserting herself. Now the question for white people: Can we get over our own defensive fragility and white superiority to not only hear but value what Minaj and black America in general are trying to tell us, and do something about it — and ourselves?
