Shannon Sharpe is apologizing to Nicki Minaj after she dissed him on Lil Wayne’s “Banned From NO” remix.
In the remix, released on Wednesday (June 11), Minaj takes a jab at the NFL star-turned-media personality while rapping, “‘Bout to cop you slides, all you do is flip-flop / If I send a pic of Shannon, you ain’t that Sharpe.”
The lyric is seemingly in response to a February 2024 tweet in which Sharpe wrote, “Nicki who?” after a fan said she wanted to appear on his Club Shay Shay podcast.
In a new episode of his Nightcap show, Sharpe clarified that the tweet was not directed at Nicki Minaj but rather stemmed from a political discussion about then-Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley.
“I used to go back and forth with people. I was talking about Nikki Haley,” Sharpe said at the 58-second mark in the video linked above. “Nikki Haley said it’s really great for everybody of Black America, and I was like … ‘When has it ever been great?’”
“So somebody says Nicki really wants to come on your podcast. I’m like, ‘Nicki who?’” he added.
From there, Sharpe explained he had no ill intent toward the Pink Friday 2 rapper.
“Nicki, I was not trying to be disrespectful. Of course I know who you are,” he said. “I would be remiss to say that I thought you knew who I was, or that you knew anything about Club Shay Shay. I’m not that arrogant.”
He continued, “Nicki, I apologize. I meant no disrespect. You’ll always have an open invitation if you ever want to come sit down and have a conversation. Even if you just want to have a private conversation on the phone or something. It won’t go any further between you and I.”
Further into the clip, he added, “That was not my intent, but intent only matters to me because clearly you’re still offended. So I apologize sincerely and hopefully we can move forward.”
Sharpe may have been referring to Haley’s claim that the United States “has never been a racist country” in January 2024.
“We’re not a racist country, Brian. We’ve never been a racist country,” the former South Carolina governor told Fox News host Brian Kilmeade at the time, per CNN.
“Our goal is to make sure that today is better than yesterday. Are we perfect? No. But our goal is to always make sure we try and be more perfect every day that we can,” Haley continued. “I know I faced racism when I was growing up. But I can tell you, today is a lot better than it was then. Our goal is to lift up everybody. Not go and divide people on race or gender or party or anything else. We’ve had enough of that in America.”
