The days since the MTV Video Music Awards have seen media, both social and professional, chew over the onstage dramas, pump out memes and headlines en masse, and gleefully trash the main characters: Kanye West, Miley Cyrus, Nicki Minaj and Taylor Swift.
The sum of this reactionary cycle? A series of uncomfortable truths.
First, the VMAs are particularly good for one thing: assessing which music stars get to be portrayed as “people” in the public eye.
It’s an odd function for what amounts to a celebration of mostly mediocre music, but the VMAs have a history of revealing how modern American racism and sexism can be weaponized to deny even the wealthy and famous black artists a full measure of personhood — that is, the right to be less than perfect. This year’s edition provided ready examples of just how fraught black personhood is and the birthright protections of whiteness.
Depending on your perspective, Miley Cyrus, this year’s host and America’s foremost practitioner of cultural appropriation, enjoys the benefits of this personhood, despite — or perhaps because of — the fact that she’s a garish avatar of the screaming American id.
There isn’t much else to be said about a person who routinely lifts elements of black and drag culture for her own purposes and then turns representatives of those cultures into glorified stage props. For a sense of what that does to one’s mind, consider that as host, Cyrus mimed sucking on a pregnant Kim Kardashian’s nipples and referred to Snoop Dogg as her “mammy” while rocking white girl dreads.
And yet, Cyrus will go on being viewed, at worst, as a harmless neon imp whose admirable work with many charities suggests a person guided by good intentions, never mind the road those intentions are paving. Meanwhile, the consequences of being denied a full measure of personhood were on troubling display when Nicki Minaj, an actual music star, dared to confront Cyrus from the stage — after being stereotyped by her as an angry black woman in the paper of record.
A quick recap: In her VMA acceptance speech Sunday, Minaj bluntly expressed her displeasure with Cyrus over comments Cyrus had made about Minaj in The New York Times, and the world lost its damn mind. Social media lit up with racist attacks on Minaj and media outlets jumped all over the “catfight” clickbait. Salon even sent out a (since deleted) tweet that described Minaj’s two-sentence aside as a “savage” rant.
Few acts tap into America’s streak of racist dehumanization quite like a black person taking issue with a white woman. And this is not the first nor even the most notable instance of that American complex playing out on the stage of the VMAs.
In 2009, Kanye West, an actual music star, interrupted Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech for best female video to declare that Beyoncé deserved the award. For all his success and the success yet to come, West will never overcome the public hatred that fell on him for daring to do this.
It was against this ongoing, now six-years-long fallout that Swift presented West with this year’s Video Vanguard award. A self-serving, PR-perfect preamble by Swift set the stage for West to launch into a 10-minute speech that was as unrehearsed as it was searingly honest.
Facing a public thirsty for him to apologize in front of millions, West instead forced that public to reckon with the fact that he, too, is a person. That so many pounced on the speech’s admittedly rambling and often surreal nature only reveals an unwillingness to accept West on the same terms we ourselves hope to be accepted on; as flawed beings trying to balance a desire to be liked with a desire to be true to who we are.
Amid the technicolor spectacle of an awards show that serves mostly as MTV’s last marker of cultural significance, Minaj and West had to choose between being liked and being true to who they are. Meanwhile, Cyrus and Swift got to exist as they are, free of any such dilemma and wholly protected by a public long invested in preserving the sanctity of their ilk. They are a public reminder that white women are valued more than any black person.
While sympathy for millionaires like West or Minaj is understandably in short supply, when our most culturally prominent and successful black people are forced to grapple with a public forever denying them the benefits of full personhood, the magnitude of the plight faced by those on the margins of society comes into sharp relief.
If we can’t stand to let supposedly beloved artists like Nicki Minaj and Kanye West be human, then the myth of American progress is not so much a myth as it is a joke.
As always, the punchline is the idea that we’re better than we used to be.
