Ep 41: Nikki Minaj & Why Trading Your Soul For Power Never Buys Peace

The day already felt heavy—parenting logistics, frayed edges, and no Sunday reset—so we start where real life starts: tired and still showing up. From there, we move into the sharp stuff making so many of us ache right now: Don Lemon’s arrest for “witnessing,” Nicki Minaj’s homophobic attacks, and the public prize of siding with power. The throughline is bigger than celebrity drama. It’s the old playbook of authoritarianism: punish dissenters, criminalize documentation, and loudly reward betrayal so everyone else gets the message.

We connect the headlines to the body. When you trade your people for clout, the invoice lands in your nervous system—anxiety, shame, and a hollow “win” that cannot hold. That’s why we talk about PMDD, gratitude, and high-vibration practices as more than self-help; they’re survival tools that keep us regulated enough to tell the truth without burning out. We walk through how platforms amplify bullying, why witness work matters even when it’s risky, and what it means to protect journalists and storytellers who hold a mirror to power.

Then we imagine something better. Drawing from a decolonized faith and years of anti-racism work, we sketch a grace-shaped society where repair is real, accountability isn’t performative, and community is the safety net that systems refuse to provide. White folks must do the work with white folks; Black communities deserve to center care, joy, and mutual aid. The most practical takeaway lands close to home: name where you’re self-abandoning, set the boundary that brings you back, and let your people keep you honest.

If this conversation steadied you or sparked a boundary you’re ready to set, share it with a friend who needs the reminder, hit follow, and leave a quick review so others can find our community. Your voice keeps this space alive—what line are you drawing today?

Transcript

Showing Up Tired, Staying Hopeful

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I want to tell y'all the truth. Hey girl. Hey, welcome to the Y'all Here Trying to Survive podcast, episode 41. I am Grace Sandra, your host. Happy February 1st, y'all. It's Black History Month. Happy Black History Month. Black history should be all the time, but let's take the month they give us. What a January we had. Is anyone else exhausted? And I gotta be honest with y'all. It's 9 05 p.m. I'm tired. I have my daughter all weekend. Usually her dad comes to pick her up on Sunday at 11 or 12 or so. So I get a little bit of a break on Sunday. And I realize when I don't have that break, how much I really value that alone time. It's really the only time throughout the week where I have like an eight, nine, 10-hour stretch where I'm just by myself, literally by myself and have nothing to do and just can relax. And I miss it. I love my daughter so much, but I miss that alone time today. So I'm tired, but I have told myself that I was going to get out episode a week, come hell or high water. So I'm here, I'm showing up. This is all the time I have to film, and I'm taking it. For those of you watching on YouTube, do you like my cute little sweater set? There was an 80% off sale at my favorite consignment store locally. And I think this whole set was like$4 total. Maybe it might have even been less than that. I think it's so adorable. I was so excited to wear it. And my hair is cute. This is all my real hair. My real hair is longer than it's ever been before in life. And you know, even though I don't have lashes on today or nails, which I usually do for my podcast, I still feel good. I am trying lately, y'all, to really practice what I preach on here and stay in a mentality of positive hopefulness on a personal level. Now, if any of y'all follow the manifestation principles whatsoever, you know that maintaining a high vibration is part of it. It's not living in denial of hard things, but literally choosing to focus on gratitude and stay high vibration. And I want to tell y'all the truth. I feel better today and I felt a little better yesterday. But the previous days, your girl was spiraling, and a lot of it was hormonal because I'm about to start my period and I have an affliction called PMDD, pre-premenstrual dysphoric disorder. If you never heard of it, it's trash. It's literally trash. It's like PMS on crack. And for those of us who have depressive symptoms right before you start your period, it's like depressive symptoms on crack. So I was really struggling, but today I actually was just in a flow of gratitude and just trying to remain high vibrational no matter what. In addition to all of that, the country just stresses me out. It really, really stressed me out that Don Lemon got arrested. Another black journalist got arrested, and this beautiful gay black man was attacked by Nicki Minaj. Nicki Minaj was sucking on the sack of the orange demon. That got on my freaking nerves. We watched them call Don Lemon and other reporters, domestic terrorists. Again, I'm so tired of the same story over and over again, y'all. I'm laughing to keep myself from crying again. I do think we're at a point where what is rotten in America and about America cannot stay hidden any longer. Power is being tested and exposed in ways that man, it's a time of reckoning, that's for sure. So let's talk about Don Lemonic and Minaj and all of that jazz. But before we do, let me introduce myself. I'm your host, Grace Sandra. I'm a writer, author, advocate, storyteller, podcaster, and mom. And you are watching Out Here Trying to Survive, a hope-oriented storytelling space. A warm hug of solidarity from me to you, a safe place of community where we can hopefully not just survive but thrive. Welcome to episode 41. So I don't want to talk about Nikki too long because I really don't want to give her all of that kind of attention. I feel like as someone with probably high narcissistic and or just evil traits, or whatever the hell is wrong with her, maybe she's just a sellout. It could just be that. But as y'all know, she attacked Don Lemon with some homophobic slurs. It was ugly and it was just shameful. And I was never a huge Nikki fan, but I know a lot of barbs, and I know that the barbs, a lot of the gay community built her platform. A lot of LGBTQIA plus people loved her. And for her to come out as now anti-LGBTQIA plus is really I don't even know the word for it. It's just kind of disgusting watching what she's been doing. And I can't even believe that anyone is still on board. I had a friend recently who put up on his Facebook page, so are y'all still buying Nikki's music? Or something like that. Might have said, are y'all still following Nikki or something? And I did a couple of gifts, you know, like the one of the guy being like, nope, nope, nope. But there were a bunch of black women on there who said yes. That's all they said, yes, was the exclamation point. And I was just like, Y'all are so disappointing. What disappointing humans you are. And then I just put a little paragraph underneath that after I saw so many people saying, Oh, I don't care. I don't care who she sucks. I don't care. And I just, I just put something up like you really should care, because anyone who is on the side of fascism is basically taking some sort of responsibility and will be called for accountability for not standing up for all of the people who are harmed under this fascist regime or something like that. I did not mince words, like if you're still okay with Nikki after everything she just said about the orange demon, child, you're an ugly soul. And I hope you're misinformed. I really just hope you're misinformed. Because I would rather someone be misinformed than just willingly evil. So, according to an article on Okay Player, I guess later on, Nikki Minaj said that she's really not homophobic and that she only did that to force attention to the issue. Girl, shut up. Shut up, please, shut the f up. And it's interesting because she gave so much hatred towards someone who is not only black, someone who is not only an openly gay, proud black man who often champions champions the cause of black people. He's a journalist and he's doing something that this country hates and rebels against that I would hope someone like Nikki would actually champion, right? Because what this country hates about him is one, that he refuses to be silent, two, that he's an educated gay black man who's unafraid to share what he's learned and to lead people to a different way of thinking and living. And she straight up bullied him. And we know that when people are bullies, they don't care about the facts, they don't care about that. Usually the the people they're bullying are smarter than them, which is true in this instance. And what she did is something that America loves to do, and I hate that she did this, but she made the audience the jury. You know, she put this on Twitter, which on X, sorry, which, as we all know, has become a hellscape of hate and rage. And the worst humans on the planet, most of them are still operating on X. Anyone I know with a conscience left X right when Musk took it over and just let hate Freeach Freach hate speech run free, including letting the orange demon back onto it after when it was Twitter, he got banned for all of his hateful rhetoric. And what she did was she gave a platform for people to laugh at him, to dismiss him, to talk poorly of someone who's actually trying to do good in the world. That's some evil shit. And like I said, she's betraying her fan base too, which is not good business. It's not even smart business as a businesswoman. Can y'all hear that scratching? Literally, my cat is scratching at the door trying to get in. I don't want to leave the door open because my daughter's in the living room watching TV and the sound is traveling back here. Just today has tested me. Today is testing me. I feel like that gif of whoever it was. I'm not even sure. I think it's for my housewives, and she's like, today drained me. That's how I feel right now. So should I let my cat in and let her roam back and forth? But y'all will hear the feedback from the TV, or should I just let her scratch the door? You choose, A or B. Or maybe C, she could just leave me the F alone for this episode. How about that? Well, Revy let her in. So here she is on the back of my chair, causing shenanigans. Again, I don't want to focus too long on Nikki, but it does beg the question, just in general, what makes people trade in their soul for proximity to whiteness or power? What makes them trade away community, or in her case, even money in some ways, because of her fan base? What makes someone trade that in for power? Because I don't really believe that she believes the things that she said, that she really thinks Trump is a man of God and that God is behind him. As more and more files come out about the absolute evil and horrendous things he did to young girls. Does she really think God is behind that? I don't think so. Y'all correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think so. It's not just a Nikki question, honestly. It's a question for America and American women, I think, in general, because so often this happens with white women. And I'm kind of used to it in that way, but it also does kind of a little bit. It feels jarring when black women do it. Like when Candace Owen did it, it kind of made a little bit more sense when Candace Owen did it because she was kind of for lack of a better term, she was a nobody. She was not a celebrity. She kind of built herself up through aligning with and being controversial. But for Nikki, it's like, girl, what is you doing? And I don't even care about her being successful. But damn, girl, what I hate too, if any young black girls are following her in any way, it kind of pushes forward this idea like, if you be quiet, if you're on our side, you'll be protected. You know, if you just play along, you you might be rewarded like Nikki. Cause did y'all see that she tweeted later the gold card, which is the citizenship card that cost a million dollars that Trump created, so that if somebody wanted to be a citizen right away, they could just pay a million dollars. Get the gold citizenship card and be good. And she tweeted that with it, just said Welp. So now we have young black girls seeing Nikki be rewarded for kissing his ass. This idea that if you cape for men like the orange demon, you'll be safe, which is further from the truth. That's why Francesca's song, I Never Thought the Leopards Would Eat My Face, is such a big hit. Because she has endless amounts of material from all the people who thought that the leopard would not eat their face and the leopard did indeed eat it. And it's just really sad to see like someone self-abandoned like that. She has self-abandoned herself. And I know by the way, the arguments people have said, you know, her brother was a convicted pedophile, her husband as well. And some people were saying, you know, in order to stay here, she was just doing whatever she had to do to be sure that she could stay here and that maybe she's just pretending. The incentive structure that America has set up is really a cruel and losing game. I saw an article on people where she said that the gold citizenship card was free of charge. And some people are reporting and suggesting that maybe what she posted isn't an actual legal document. Some even going as far as like, is there even legality to what he's doing just because he's always doing something and nobody ever knows is this legal or not? Because half the time it ain't, more than half the time it ain't. But honestly, the deeper point of this is not about the paperwork and the legitimacy of it at all. This is more about temporary reward, quote unquote, for loyalty to something that is evil and how abusive systems work. They don't just punish dissent, they actually reward loyalty and betrayal, especially on be especially when it's black folks. And they do it very loudly so that everyone can see. And I think that the orange demon and his ilk and his cronies and thugs that he's got running the streets really thought somewhere like this is some sort of if we do this for Nikki, if we prop her up and then give her this gold citizenship card that more black people will kind of fall in line. I don't think that's happening at all. And I think this is gonna blow up in her face and theirs too. I mean, God, I pray. This is costing her any integrity she had left. A lot of her people, I mean, people in her from her own country where she's from are ashamed of this, just ashamed. Word on the words on these internet streets. And I think it's gonna cost her her nervous system. I know it's a big claim, but I think it will. I think this is this betrayal will cost her her nervous system and her healing. And that's that's self-abandonment. That's all it is. And let's go back to this whole Don Lemon thing, and then I want to connect the two together because I do have a point. But just as a recap, in case you don't know, on January 18th, Don Lemon was reporting from a church in St. Paul, Minnesota. It was an anti-ICE protest, and there were demonstrators present. And they disrupted a church whose pastor had allegations of a connection to ICE. All the people that got arrested said they were there as journalists and that they were documenting the events of the day. But the officials are saying it was a coordinated attack and that Don Lemon was the ringleader and they brought charges against him. There were also two other journalists that were arrested as well. You could call it an arrest, although they are the only of all the journalists in the US who've been arrested for this, the only black ones, or you could call it kidnapping under a legal guise. And honestly, the impact is still the same for them and for the black community as well. Well, first of all, it's a signal that just witnessing something can be criminalized. I mean, we have seen this over and over again, but this feels like a maybe a different level of the extent that this goes. And it's also just more proof that documenting something is punishable too. Although we all know that that has happened in the past to other black and brown people who have documented things that have happened and they themselves have gotten trouble. I'm thinking the most recent is George Floyd, the person who documented that was also arrested. One of them. It just hurt my heart so much when I saw that Don Lemon had been arrested. Actually, I heard it. I was driving on the way to take my daughter to school, and I just my my heart sank. Like I felt it in my body. Such a sadness. Not the guys who recently unalived Renee Good or Alex Pretty, but taking time, energy, and resources to arrest Don Lemon also made me so frustrated because I know she said something about you're getting arrested, you know, when her original like violent attack tweet went out. It's just really sad to me because I know that when there's a society that's evil and when fascism is taking over, they come for the troublemakers, the people, the rabble rousers. And sometimes those people are just literally journalists. And that happened in Palestine as well. Remember when there were a lot of journalists being arrested and/or unalived in Gaza? That was intentional, that was a message. The trouble you can get in just for asking questions or what they deem to be the wrong questions. It's just depressing, y'all. It's just so depressing. It's so depressing. And I hate that they're creating this law and order state and all they want is obedience. And they will never get that from me. They will never ever get that from me. I'm proud to be able to say that for sure. I want to talk about something that I talked about today on a podcast I filmed earlier today as a guest for my friend Jeremy. It's a podcast called Slutty Grace, which is not about women named Grace who are slutty, actually, at all. It's about the kind of grace that God has for us, which is described as scandalous grace. But he asked me a really good question, and that was almost kind of like, what would a society look like today that is informed by God's grace? Like, what do you imagine that that would look like? I forgot his exact question, but it was something along those lines, kind of like let's dream a little. And I told him something, because it was an off-the-cuff question, so I gave him kind of an off-the-cuff answer, but I thought I did a good job, so I'm gonna share it here. Let me pat myself on the back. But I told him that as someone who has legitimately tried for a lot of years to do like some sort of like quote unquote reconciliation work, which is what I did when I was a teenager. I used to do like public speaking engagements. It's funny to me now. I think it's cool that I did that, but it's funny to me now because I would go around talking about God's, you know, God's grace and being a little junior evangelical. But after I graduated college, I went directly into campus ministry. One of the things I did was teach anti-racism in the name of Christianity and my faith at the time. I have since decolonized my faith and divested from evangelical Christianity, and I do not consider myself to be a part of that world at all. Although I still do believe in God and I still have a strong spirituality, I still pray and I believe that we as humans are holy, soul-fill creatures, but I don't believe in the same way at all. And so now, if I were to teach any sort of like anti-racism training or something like that, it would come from what I have learned from non-religious communities about anti-racism, which is the premise is that white people in America at least take accountability for and make amends, not just with reparations, although that's one way, but even some sort of apology. But I'm not even asking for that. So, what I told him today is that I can't even imagine as someone who has been actively a part of doing anti-racism work, both in a religious and non-religious setting for multiple years, you know, probably more than 10 years altogether of all the stuff I've done. And nothing has ever worked. And to get to this point where it feels like it's worse than it was, at least in my generation when I started. Maybe it's not worse than where we were when King was alive, maybe arguably it is. But I'll just because I wasn't there, I'll just speak to when I first got started. Maybe it's not worse, but it feels like it is to me. I can't even imagine what an anti-racist society would look like in America. Is it even possible? I don't know. But I will say this: what I told him was that I do believe it's the work of white people to do the work with other white people. I do not believe that the onus is on black people to lead the charge or to try to convince the white people to do the right thing. And I think the job of black people is to figure out how to survive these systems and thrive in these systems so that we can care for one another. That community is the biggest part of what we have right now. And I think community is the biggest reason why black women have survived what we've survived and still become the good, loving, kind, compassionate, and but empathetic, sympathetic leaders that we are today is because we have typically relied on one another, and that's what we have. And I told him that's what I do well. If there's anything, I do really well. I really, really, really lean on my girlfriends and I really allow them to lean on me, and I really take care that I am pouring into my girlfriends and other women that I know and love on an individual relational level. And I ain't perfect, I mean I struggle too, y'all. And I have a hard time keeping up with everything and I have ADHD brain and all of that, and I'm a mom of three, etc., etc. etc. But community is also what keeps me in check. And I just wonder if Nikki had a group of three or four good close black girlfriends, maybe one of them was an American, one or two. If they'd be like, girl, what is you doing? What the fuck is you doing, girl? Maybe a community would be able to call her out and ask her why she is abandoning herself, why she's willing to abandon herself and her people. So, you know, I just throw that out there as a way for us to do a little self-check. You know, it's never a bad thing to ask what are ways that you are abandoning yourself for a paycheck, a connection, a sense of safety. It's just something I've had to think through myself lately because I do think there's a couple of ways that I am doing that. And it's a hard thing to do. When you're literally out here trying to survive, it's a hard thing to ask those hard questions and do the hard thing. It really is. I won't go into more details right now, but I will tell you that there is something that I feel like Yeah, I know what I need to do. And if there is anything that you feel like you're settling in, what boundaries are you gonna set to come back home to yourself and to be sure that you can keep your soul. Your body, your mind, your nervous system in equilibrium. Because I doubt that's something Nikki's gonna experience for a long time. I know she's happy she got a little gold card citizenship free of charge. That joy will not last long. That is the episode for today, short, quick, and sweet. Let me just remind you: if you are listening on Apple, could you please leave me a quick review? Give me some five stars. If you're listening on Spotify, it only takes five seconds to hit those five stars. And if you're watching on YouTube, please make sure that you're subscribed. Give me a like and leave me a comment and let me know how this episode hit you and what you're thinking about as a result. I know that you could be anywhere on these internet streets. So if you're here with me, I'm truly grateful. And I will see y'all in the next episode. Bye.