Former Spelman Activist Rebukes Nelly’s Angry Tip Drill Tirade

As you read the article below here’s a quick update (Nov 19 20013) . This is the panel discussion that was held yesterday where the women of Spelman College who actually organized the protest are speaking for themselves.. They clear up a lot of misinformation and set the record straight about what really went down with the bone marrow drive and Nelly pulling out…

NellyLooks like the drama that made headlines 10 years ago surrounding rap star Nelly and his infamous ‘Tip Drill‘ video is rearing its head again. For those who don’t know, when Nelly made this video he decided to push the envelop and blur the lines between rap video and porn. he hired a bunch of strippers, filmed an fantasy bachelor party and in the middle of all the gyrating and booty shaking, he infamously swiped a credit card down a woman’s butt cheeks.

Even though the video was shown only on BET‘s then adult themed Uncut TV show which aired after midnight, it caught the attention and upset more than few people including some of the women at Spelman College who decided they wanted to take a stand and do something about it. The opportunity to confront Nelly was within sight when he made Spelman College one of the stops for a a series of bone marrow drives he was doing around the country in an attempt to save the life of his sister Jackie who was battling cancer.

Depending on who you talk to the story that unfolded went something like this; the women of Spelman said they wanted to meet with Nelly and express their concerns about the video and address the issue of mysogny and the exploitation of women. They requested a meeting with Nelly which for the most part was supposed to be private.They had no intention of canceling the bone marrow drive, but felt it was important to meet with him since he was asking for their help.

According to Nelly, the women of Spelman were unfairly protesting him and using an event in which he was focused on saving his sister’s life to bring attention to a conversation he felt could’ve been had when her life wasn’t in danger.  Jackie would eventually pass away from the disease.

The press got wind of this and the ‘protest at Spelman’ received international attention. Nelly pulled out of the bone marrow drive. The women at Spelman went on and held one without him and it’s been bad blood at least on Nelly’s part ever since.

In a recent interview on the Huffington Post, host Marc Lamont Hill asked Nelly about the 10 year old incident and Nelly still upset, offered up his perspective. He placed the death of his sister at the feet of the women at Spelman, claiming their ‘protest’ robbed him and may have turned away a potential donar who would’ve been a match. He also said that if he do do anything different, it would’ve been to kick someone’s ass. You can peep the interview below..

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Needless to say, Nelly’s inflammatory remarks set off a firestorm which prompted a number of women from Spelman including key organizers around the protest like Asha Jennings who had initially teamed up with Nelly’s 4Sho4Kids Foundation to do the bone marrow drive and Moya Bailey, president of the Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance , to point out Nelly spreading a bunch of lies.

Moya Bailey during her days at Spelman

Moya Bailey during her days at Spelman

Moya Bailey who is now an African American Studies postdoctoral fellow at Penn State University, penned a stinging Open Letter to Nelly where she rebukes his claims on the Black Youth Project blog. She wrote…

My group raised questions about the misogynoir in the video and lyrics, and when we heard that you were invited to campus by our Student Government Association, it seemed fair to us that we could ask you about the dehumanizing treatment of black women while you were asking us for our help. You declined our offer to talk about your music and lyrics. Instead, you chose to go to the press, which made our alleged threat of a protest an international news story. In the time since, whenever asked about the situation, you both mischaracterize what happened and lament not using violence, something you repeated most recently during a Huffpost Live interview earlier this week. Let’s be clear: No student or faculty member of Spelman College canceled your bone marrow registration drive. In fact, we held our own drive after you and your people chose to cancel the bone marrow registration drive for fear that there might have been a protest.

She continued:

Had you decided to come, to just talk with us, you would have seen fewer than ten “protesters,” all of whom were planning to register to donate bone marrow, despite your refusal to hear us. I say “protesters” because we didn’t actually get to have a conversation. What started as a simple request that you speak with a small group of concerned students about representations of women in your lyrics and videos turned into a national conversation about misogyny, race, and class in hip hop culture.

Moya ended her open letter by noting

If you want to check my resume and my work, please, go right ahead. Know that this was no flash in the pan for me or most of the Spelman sisters involved.

Glad to know if you had it do over again you would have “kicked some ass.”

Just name the time and place, sir. I’m ready.

Past Imperfect: The Hoodrat Theory ( Protest of Nelly’s Tip Drill) by Jelani Cobb

Past Imperfect: The Hoodrat Theory
http://www.africana.com/columns/cobb/ht20040426hoodrat.asp

By William Jelani Cobb

Professor Jelani Cobb

Professor Jelani Cobb

The flyers posted in Cosby Hall said it all: “We Care About Your Sister, But You Have To Care About Ours, Too.” The slogan explained the position of the student-activists at Spelman College whose protests over Nelly’s “Tip Drill” video led the artist to cancel his scheduled appearance for a bone marrow drive on the campus earlier this month. But in a real sense, their point went beyond any single rapper or any single video and went to the center of a longstanding conflict in the heart of the black community.

That Nelly’s organization decided to cancel the drive is tantamount to saying “shut up and give me your bone marrow.”

We have, by now, been drowned by the clich? defenses and half-explanations for “Tip Drill” — most of which fall into a formulaic defense of Nelly’s “artistic freedom” while casting hellfire on the unpaid women who participated in the creation of the video. The slightly more complex responses point to the pressing need for bone marrow donors in the black community, saying that saving the lives of leukemia patients outweighs the issue of a single soft-porn music video. But rarely do we hear the point that these students were bringing home: that this single video is part of a centuries-long debasement of black women’s bodies. And the sad truth is that hip hop artists’ verbal and visual renderings of black women are now virtually indistinguishable from those of 19th century white slave owners.

History is full of tragic irony.

Full Disclosure: I am a history professor at Spelman College. I’ve also taught several of the students involved in the protests over the video. I don’t pretend to be unbiased in my support for their actions. I openly supported the students who — and this is important — never uninvited Nelly or canceled the marrow drive. They did however request that he participate in a campus-wide forum on the problematic images and stated that if he did not, the marrow drive could continue, but his presence on campus would be protested. That Nelly’s organization decided to cancel the drive rather than listen to the views of women who were literally being asked to give up bone and blood is tantamount to saying “shut up and give me your bone marrow.”

Nelly

Nelly

This is the truth: hip hop has all but devolved into a brand neo-minstrelsy, advertising a one-dimensional rendering of black life. But stereotypes serve not only to justify individual prejudices, but also oppressive power relationships.

In the 1890s, the prevailing depiction of black men as sex-crazed rapists who were obsessed with white women served as a social rationalization for the insanity of lynching. Nor should we forget that Jim Crow took root and evolved in tandem with the growing obsession with blackface caricature of African Americans as senseless children too simpleminded to participate in an allegedly democratic society. It is no coincidence that the newborn NAACP made its first national headlines for protesting D.W. Griffith’s white supremacist epic Birth of a Nation. (www.africana.com/research/encarta/tt_248.asp)

In short, stereotypes are the public relations campaign for injustice.

In the case of black women, the body of myths surrounding their sexuality served to justify the sexual exploitation they experienced during and after slavery. And in so doing, the blame for adulterous relationships that produced biracial offspring shifted from married white slaveholders, to insatiable black temptresses who led them astray. The historian Deborah White has written of the prevailing images of enslaved black women.

“One of the most prevalent images of black women in antebellum America was of a person governed almost entirely by libido, a Jezebel character. In every way, Jezebel was the counter-image of the nineteenth century ideal of the Victorian lady. She did not lead men and children to God; piety was foreign to her. She saw no advantage in prudery, indeed domesticity paled in importance before matters of the flesh.”

Nelly Tip DrillAs long as black women could be understood to be sexually lascivious, it was impossible to view them as victims of sexual exploitation. Some went so far as to argue that black women did not experience pain during childbirth — evidence, in their minds, that they were not descendants of Eve, and therefore not human.

In 1895, when Ida B. Wells-Barnett began traveling abroad to publicize the horrors of American racism — and highlighting the recreational homicide of lynching — this same set of ideas was employed to discredit her. One editor charged that she was not to be believed because it was a known fact that black women were inclined toward prostitution — among an array of other immoral pastimes.

During the 1930s, this image of the black Jezebel was dusted off to justify the forced sterilization of black women who, it was believed, were sexually insatiable and prone to produce far too many offspring.

Half a century later, Ronald Reagan’s rhetoric about punishing “welfare queens” — basically Jezebels who traveled to the big city and moved into the projects — helped him solidify support among white voters who perceived welfare as a subsidy for reckless black sex and reproduction.

It would be easy to assume that sexist music videos are simple entertainment — not the equivalent of a body of myths that have been used to oppress black women, were it not for the fact that the lines between culture and politics are not always that easily distinguishable.

Hip hop is now the prevailing global youth culture and, in many instances, the only vision people have of African American life. In a twisted testament to the ubiquity of black culture, a student who spent a semester in China reported back that some of the town residents were fearful of the black male exchange students, having met very few black people, but viewed a great many black-thug music videos.

Regardless of Nelly’s intentions, videos like “Tip Drill” are viewed as yet another confirmation of the long-standing ideas about black women.

On one level, the consistent stream of near-naked sisters gyrating their way through one video after the next and the glossary of hip hop epithets directed at women: chickenheads, tip-drills, hoodrats, etc. highlight a serious breach between young black men and women. But on another level, it was affirming to see young men from Morehouse and Clark-Atlanta Universities involved in the protests.

All told, the students who organized the protests were not hating on a successful black man or ignoring the pressing need for bone marrow. They were highlighting a truth that is almost forgotten in hip hop these days — a truth so basic that I wish I did not have to state it: anything that harms black women harms black people.

First published: April 26, 2004

About the Author

William Jelani Cobb is an assistant professor of history at Spelman College and editor of The Essential Harold Cruse. He can be reached at creative.ink@jelanicobb.com. Visit his website at www.jelanicobb.com