If you recall, a group of Spelman women were outraged at Nelly’s sexually-explicit “Tip Drill” video, most particularly when Nelly took a credit card and slid it between a woman’s butt-cheeks. Nelly has always harbored bitter feelings that his fundraising efforts were thwarted at the HBCU, possibly costing his sister a bone marrow match in his opinion, but he’s just now speaking up.
On Monday, a group of former students fired back at the Country Grammar rapper from a variety of angles. The women blast him for not taking responsibility for his actions. And they resent Nelly placing the blame on the female students instead.
Asha Jennings, a former member of the Spelman Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance (FMLA), said the women hoped Nelly could look beyond his personal situation to understand the broader message that his video, “Tip Drill,” was projecting to the community by objectifying women.
“We are a historically black, all women’s institution,” Jennings told Huff Post Live host, Marc Lamont Hill. “If there’s anybody that has an obligation to young black girls in the community, it’s us.”
The bone marrow fundraising drive was to aid his sister, Jacqueline Donahue, who succumbed to leukemia the following year after the protest. Nelly said he was angry with the Spelman students for robbing him of an opportunity to save his sister’s life and that the only thing he would have done differently was “kick somebody’s ass.”
“You [protesters] robbed me of a opportunity. Unfairly, my brother. Because we could’ve still had your conversation after I got my opportunity, but it could’ve been somebody that was coming to that bone marrow drive that day, that was possibly a match for my sister. That didn’t come because of that…”
Jennings clarified the rapper’s implication that the bone marrow drive did not take place because of their protest, saying it was delayed after Nelly pulled his funding.
“Our important message was to show the African-American community we shouldn’t have to choose between these issues,” she said. “They are all equally as important, we can do both. And so we fought, tooth and nail in order to, before I graduated in May of 2004, put on our own bone marrow drive.”
