Azealia is at it again, but not in a good way?

So I know this has been discussed numerous times but I want to add my two cents worth of annoyance/confusion.

Azaelia Banks has recently been all over social media due to a twitter feud she basically had with herself, but which was meant for Zayn Malik. It got pretty heated pretty quickly. However, this is not the first time something along these lines has happened…

•            Sarah Palin supposedly said, “Slavery wasn’t forced on to African-Americans, they accepted it willingly.” To which Banks absolutely lost it and began to post some pretty intense comments towards to Palin in defence of African Americans. Yet a couple of days later when she found out the statement was false, she quickly deleted the tweets.

•           She also defended people of colour, in another feud she had with Kendrick Lamar and Lupe Fiasco with regards to Lamar's comments on police shootings in the US and the death of Michael Brown.

•           She started a feud with Iggy Azalea over Iggy’s lyric “runaway slave master” which she claimed was inappropriate and was “cultural smudging.” She said “The message to white kids is, ‘You’re great. You’re amazing. You can do whatever you put your mind to.’ And it says to black kids, ‘You don’t have shit. You don’t own shit, not even the shit you created yourself.’”

•            She got defensive when A$AP Rocky said dark-skinned women shouldn’t wear purple lipstick.

•          In response to a Dolce & Gabbana collection was very visibly culturally appropriating the women modelling the outfits, she angrily tweeted, “I really hate when people do corny, racist things then try to justify it as ‘art.’ It’s all just really unnecessary. The clothes in the collection were fine without all the ‘black mammie’ imagery.”

 So what I don’t understand is; why did this feud with Zayn Malik go the way it did? She started this argument because she believed he was copying her video, it had nothing to do with race and yet she immediately began to throw a slur of racial insults his way. How can she be so switched on and aware of cultural appropriation and white privilege, and so quick to defend people of colour when someone else says/does something racist, and yet she was okay with doing just that her self? Seems like a double standard there, Azaelia. She has since apologised but how did she let it go the direction it did when that behaviour has made her so angry in the past.

I think that’s one of the really great things about this class, I feel like everyone needs to do it just to get a better understanding. I would say I was pretty clued up about what was racist and what wasn’t before I did this class, but there’s so much to learn. It’s given me a wider perspective of everything and made me super aware of things I probably wouldn’t have recognised before. I feel like that would (hopefully) be a universal thing we can take away from 210, and none of us will be getting into any racist twitter feuds in the future – unless of course you’re taking the defensive Azaelia stance and not the offensive one.