On December 30th, a video circulated online of Azealia Banks, clad in safety goggles and a headscarf, surrounded by feathers and black junk. “Three years’ worth of Brujería,” Banks says panning the room, before turning the camera back on herself. At this point she’s holding a sandblaster and ends the video by saying, “Real witches do real things.” Almost immediately, writers from XXL and Page Six began their reports with comments on Banks’ oddity and insanity. Sure, not cleaning a room after three years’ worth of chicken sacrifice is cause for concern, least of all for the smell, but the knee-jerk reaction to call Banks crazy are sensationalistic at best, stigmatizing at worst, and completely typical any way you slice it.

Banks is initiated in Palo Mayombe, a traditional African religion brought to Cuba from Congolese slaves. It is a belief system built on the veneration of spirits and the importance of the earth’s natural forces, and it’s one that Banks has urged black women in particular to join in order to overcome institutional powers like white supremacy. That message was lost in part because non-Abrahamic religions remain misunderstood, but mostly because anything Banks does is undercut by her persona of instability and insanity. In a Facebook post made days before the witch video emerged, Banks herself acknowledges all this, ultimately bemoaning the public’s misunderstanding of mental illness and psych-drug side effects. She’s sang about these struggles before, like she does on the *Broke with Expensive Taste *track “Soda.”

Black artists struggling with mental health issues are nothing new, but shifting empathy emerged late last year in the wake of Kid Cudi’s admission of mental health issues and Kanye West’s hospitalization. The former’s Facebook post inspired hashtags, such as #YouGoodMan, and op-eds in the Washington Post and the Huffington Post alike, positioning Cudi as a way to shed light on the hyper-masculinity problem facing male hip-hop stars. So why was Banks’ post about the same exact topic almost entirely ignored by the media? To borrow a turn of phrase from Jamilah King, Banks has been “permanently exiled to the land of broken black bitches, the place inhabited by pioneering black women who aren't perfect and have neither the interest nor resources to hide that fact.”

Like West, Banks’ pro-black politics have been both complicated and controversial. For Kanye, it was saying that George Bush doesn’t care about black people back during a Katrina benefit, to urging black people to stop worrying about racism 11 years later, to admitting that he would’ve voted for Trump (had he voted at all). Banks’ own assertions have run a similarly jagged course but in a shorter time frame: feuding with Iggy Azalea over cultural appropriation between 2012 and 2014, refusing to date black men in 2015, and offering to perform at Trump’s inauguration, perhaps precisely because he’s “a piece of shit.” Commentators at The Ringer and Slate, among others, have rationalized away Kanye meeting’s with Trump as pure provocation. It would be difficult to see someone doing the same for Banks, though her music and persona are as much about thorny prodding as West’s. But her audacity is often compartmentalized, deemed appropriate through the music (which often has been critically praised) but not through her unfiltered interactions with the world.

Early on in Banks’ career, Spin’s Zach Baron implied that her “brazen ambition” would do her more harm than good in the music industry. And perhaps to an extent, he was right. Banks did not introduce herself as the latest competitor for the female token that mainstream rap allows, but rather, someone who had already succeeded by her own metrics—by being a “rude bitch” and brazenly pursuing her sexual desires, even among male rappers she could best. Whether fabricated or real, this no-fucks-given persona was necessary armor for Banks. In a now-deleted Instagram post, she stated that black people, particularly black men, told her how “ugly,” “skinny,” and “weird” she was, yet whenever she speaks out on this belittlement, she’s deemed the crazy one.