Nicki Minaj Taught Taylor Swift Important Lessons About Racism and Body Image

So yesterday was a Tuesday afternoon just like any other Tuesday afternoon, until the VMA nominees were announced. Nicki Minaj was upset with MTV because she thought she deserved more than the two nominations she received for "Anaconda." She felt robbed for getting zero nominations for her collab with Beyoncé on "Feelin' Myself."

It all started when Nicki @-ed MTV:

Who on planet earth didn't watch "Feeling Myself" and think it was instantly an ~iconic~ musical moment in history? It features Beyoncé + Nicki (#FriendshipGoals) in the desert at Coachella, who feed each other In-N-Out burgers while chilling in a kiddie pool. Like, what? How doesn't something like that get an automatic nomination, anyway?

That goes without saying ... there's no denying the cultural impact that "Anaconda" had. Even Ellen Degeneres made an Anaconda parody video:

"Anaconda" was everywhere:

Nicki started going IN on the real issue behind the lack of nominations. She said when the "other" girls drop videos that "break records and impacts culture they get that nomination." Nicki was being real and getting at the fact that she created a groundbreaking cultural music video and was not rewarded, like other artists.

No one brought Taylor Swift into the conversation. She jumped out and started @-ing Nicki because she felt that Nicki was referring to her personally. Taylor is the only other female nominated for video of the year besides Beyoncé and Nicki, so maybe that's why she felt the need to jump in on Nicki's fire, but ... it was ultimately a mistake.

Who knows if Nicki actually referred to Taylor. That's not the point. Nicki was getting at a larger point, which is that artists of color, particularly women, are not deemed as valuable as their white counterparts. It's not about Taylor Swift. It's about who holds the power and who's in control of the decision-making and voting that goes into deciding nominations for the MTV VMA's. It's also a conversation about body image in the music industry. Paired with being a person of color, her video isn't seen as being as "artistic" as other artists because she's dancing in a way that white pop stars might not do, but why should Nicki feel ashamed of being herself? She shouldn't.

Nicki was right to call out "white media" for making her back-and-forth twitter exchange with Taylor into something that it wasn't. 

If anything, it would have been amazing to see Taylor jump into the conversation to support Nicki as a fellow pop star and a woman working in the music industry. But instead ... Taylor threw what everyone perceived as shade when she said that she would invite Nicki on stage if she wins the award. 

And that goes without saying that Nicki is right when she argues that "Anaconda" should have been nominated for video of the year. I mean, look at this gif:

Nicki's fans were tweeting photos that prove how influential the "Anaconda" video was worldwide:

Janet Mock, the host of So Popular on MSNBC, tweeted @ Entertainment Weekly that they needed to change the photo they had included of Nicki in their article about the duo because it upheld the "angry black woman" stereotype:

But, Nicki had the last word when she said: