Nicki Minaj Made Fun of a Homeless Woman in South Beach Yesterday

A note to all celebrities visiting Miami for A-list events like New Year's Eve, Ultra Music Festival, and Art Basel: Miami is a real place, with real problems, and you don't live here. That's typically still true for famous people who own Miami property: There's a clear distinction between people like Iggy Pop and DJ Khaled, who live here year-round and give back to the community, and guys like Drake, who own houses here but visit so infrequently they film whole music videos here without unwrapping their furniture.

Nicki Minaj, a New York City native, belongs in the latter group, which is why it's so upsetting to see her latest Instagram post, in which she treats the city's people like CGI characters from SimCity.

As Art Basel came to a close, she filmed herself making fun of a clearly mentally ill woman in South Beach. The woman is a regular on the streets of South Beach: She's often seen hanging out in high-traffic areas smoking cigarettes, and many believe her to be homeless.

But after getting into an altercation with the woman, Minaj tried to clown the woman on social media yesterday for some reason, posting a video of the fight to her 70 million Instagram followers, captioned with the "crying laughter" emoji:

A video posted by Nicki Minaj (@nickiminaj) on Dec 4, 2016 at 6:06pm PST

The post, however, backfired in spectacular fashion: Gossip blogs such as TMZ and Perez Hilton picked up the video, and now Miami's chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) has officially condemned her actions, stating that, in poking fun of a clearly ill woman, Minaj is contributing to the stigma surrounding mental illness in America.

"Mental illness is no laughing matter, but unfortunately attitudes like the one Nicki Minaj shows in the Instagram video are a consequence of the stigma and ignorance that mentally ill patients endure," NAMI Miami-Dade said in a statement.

Here is the full statement that we sent to @TMZ on @nickiminaj https://t.co/SWZpUEuuv3

— NAMI Miami Dade (@NAMIMiami) December 6, 2016

Minaj hit a nerve: Miami is America's most mentally ill city, and homeless advocates are grappling with how to handle the city's mentally ill homeless population after an ill homeless man killed a retiree in September.

There's possibly a debate as to whether Minaj could clearly tell the woman was ill, but millions of her followers and a few mental illness professionals sure seem to think the distinction is clear. But regardless, there's almost no way Minaj could have not noticed the woman was, in some form, either homeless or suffering in some way. And her response was to "punch down," laugh at her, and try to get millions of people to join in online. Her plan has predictably not worked.

You don't get to make fun of a homeless person if you have a home; you don't get to make fun of a mentally ill person if your brain is functioning in a normal capacity. That's all exponentially truer if you're famous and worth millions. But in addition to exposing Minaj as a bit callous, this whole brouhaha illustrates a particularly "Miami" problem: the idea that wealthy people get to fly into town, parade around on red carpets, and treat the Magic City like a plastic castle full of Playmobil people.