Minaj says she was defending West, not criticising the rapper with recent “white girl” comments.

Nicki Minaj has denied slamming Kanye West in an interview in which she quoted a line from his 2005 song ‘Gold Digger’ to highlight racial double standards.

Minaj is quoted in the new issue of Marie Claire as saying: “I’m so tired of black women feeling that when our men get rich, they’re going to leave them for a woman of a different race.” She goes on to pick out Kanye’s Late Registration track ‘Gold Digger’ and the lyric: ‘When he get on, he’ll leave your ass for a white girl’. “Kanye happens to be with a white girl now. It wasn’t funny when he said it, it was the fucking truth.”

However, responding to an article by Cosmopolitan yesterday (October 17) that suggested Minaj was criticising West with these comments, the former Kanye collaborator has now taken to Twitter to defend herself.

Elsewhere in the Marie Claire cover feature, Minaj talks about young women’s goals, explaining that she feels like more young women are now placing importance on marrying into money. “I don’t want that to be a woman’s goal in life. I want your goal in life to be to become an entrepreneur, a rich woman, a career-driven woman,” she says. “You have to be able to know that you need no man on this planet at all, period, and he should feel that, because when a man feels that you need him, he acts differently.”

In the same interview, Minaj also discusses the double standard that exists for women of color in the media: “When Kim Kardashian’s naked picture came out, Sharon Osbourne praised it, and my fans attacked her for being such a hypocrite,” she recalls. “So it wasn’t trashy and raunchy when a white woman did it, but it was when a black woman did it? It’s quite pathetic and sad, but that is my reality, and I’ve gotten accustomed to just shutting it down.”