Azealia Banks recently sat down with XXL, and during her interview, she dished about how she is treated differently than male artists when making mistakes.
The Harlem rapper said that she had been shut out of the game, and openly admitted that she was to blame for her own mistakes, “I’m definitely shut out from where I was, 100 percent. People are very scared to be associated with me because of, you know, the controversy, I guess the skin bleaching or the “sand ni**er” or the “fa**ot” thing. I’m not sad about it, I’m not disappointed at the situation. I’m disappointed with myself for sure. I’m a little disappointed in them, but not really.”
–Azealia Banks and Rihanna feud online over Donald Trump–
But, she said, if she was a male rapper, she would have been given more chances to come back from her mistakes.
“I guess the source of my disappointment comes from just watching lots of other men in hip-hop, just like male rappers, have their career setbacks and go through things. Or even when a Black male rapper misspeaks something… just seeing Black men go through the motions, seeing the Black mass just kind of seemingly accepting it as just an attribute of their artistry,” she said.
She then continued:
So they’ll be like, ‘Kanye West is saying all that because he’s crazy’ or ‘Okay, yeah, R. Kelly raped a girl but damn, he makes some good music.’ I don’t feel like I ever got that kind of empathy. I never got those kinds of privileges, I never got those kinds of allowances, especially coming in the rap game without any real rap friends. I basically came in the building by myself. There was nobody to validate me, there was nobody to vouch for me or whatever, and I got mishandled a lot.
“It made me really bitter for a very long time, very, very, very bitter, so bitter to the point that I would just kind of say things that I didn’t mean, like, ‘I hate Black men’ and sh** like that. I would just say things like that because I would just feel so misunderstood. It was all purposeful, like when T.I. was threatening me with physical violence or when Jim Jones was threatening me with physical violence. Come on, hip-hop should have said something about it, and nobody said anything about it.”