In just one day, 19.6 million people watched Nicki Minaj’s music video for her single, “Anaconda.” This broke the VEVO records for most views in a day. Yet when the Video Music Awards announced their nominations, this video only got two, none of which were the top accolade, “Music Video of the Year.” Taking to Twitter, Minaj commented, “If your video celebrates women with very slim bodies, you will be nominated for video of the year.” Since this tweet, Minaj has become the subject of a lot of controversy in the pop culture space and raises an important issue about the treatment of people of color in the music industry.
Minaj makes a valid point. Slim, white bodies are celebrated in our culture, while the black, female body is often considered unattractive. We often see white bodies as pure and beautiful, while black bodies are the object of fetish and sexualization. Popular music videos perpetuate this idea when white artists surround themselves with black bodies just to add a bit of “edginess.” For example, in the music video for Miley Cyrus’s “We Can’t Stop,” she surround herself with thin, attractive “friends,” but only includes “ghetto,” black women we she twerks. She uses these women as tokens towards validating her “ghetto” persona. Ikamara Larasi, of the black feminist organization called Imkaan, notes: “Either BME (black and minority ethnicity) women are not in videos at all or when we are the way we are sexualized is very specific to our ethnicity.” This inadequate and inaccurate representation only serves to further institutionalized racism (which contributes to prejudices that are the root of aggression towards minorities) in one of the most prominent forms of media in our country.
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When Miley Cyrus stripped down to nothing to ride construction equipment in her music video “Wrecking Ball,” she received the nomination for Music Video of the Year and won it. When Nicki Minaj aired a music video that celebrated the black body, she is denied the same recognition. Minorities simply aren’t viewed in the same light as white women, and that is incredibly harmful to notions surrounding minorities in general.
The increasing prominence of hip-hop has also increased the prominence of “hip-hop culture,” which is deeply rooted in black culture. As hip-hop became integrated in to pop culture, so too did cornrows, dreads, plump lips and tan skin. The issue here is that white artists are sporting these features in their widespread music videos and succeeding more in a realm that was previously dominated by black musicians. White artists appropriate these qualities while ignoring the prejudice and oppression that minorities face for these same aspects. When Kylie Jenner can Instagram a picture of her corn rows and be lauded while Zendaya Coleman sports cornrows and gets called “lazy” and “smells of weed,” there is an issue. Black culture has been adopted by white culture while black people continue to be systematically oppressed and barred from the same recognition as white people.
Hopefully Nicki Minaj and other artists, such as Azaelia Banks and Amandla Stenburg, who have spoken up against racism in popular media can continue to instigate discussion on institutionalized racism in media. We are constantly exposed to media; when that media is rife with racist undertones, it is bound to have an effect. This issue is becoming increasingly important, and people of color have begun to use their prominence to promote fairness and equality in media. With racial tensions growing high in the past couple years, it is incredibly important that we do away with negative representation of minorities in the media and instead promote diversity and acceptance in an increasingly diverse world.
