Cardi B Won’t Glorify, Nor Apologize, for Her Past

I believe the Venn diagram between Cardi B fans and people who love messy s*it is just a circle, and I say that with love, because I would absolutely be counted among that demographic. So, this is really for everyone else who isn’t caught up on the latest with Cardi.

Friends, I’ll let CNN explain the set-up to this latest controversy because our girl has made it to the big times with that domain coverage!

Cardi B is discussing dark corners of her past after an old video circulated on social media over the weekend.

The “I Like It” rapper has addressed a three-year-old Instagram Live video in which she said she had drugged and robbed men during her days as a stripper in the Bronx.

Oh, yikes…Cardi. That’s not great, is it?

Wait, Papermag has a bit more context:

“I had to go strip, I had to go, ‘Oh yeah, you want to fuck me? Yeah, yeah, yeah, let’s go to this hotel,’” she says in the video, before saying she “drugged” and “robbed” men she brought back to her room. “That’s what I used to do.”

The context clarifies that she, as a stripper, was treated like a sex worker by these men.

So, to proactively answer anyone who is thinking to themselves “well, what if the genders were reversed and a man said that about women?!” Friend—men generally aren’t afraid of threats to their personhood and life when they politely reject a woman’s advances. Most women can be terrified to turn down a man’s sexual advances.

As the Margaret Atwood quote goes :

Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them

Anyway, Cardi took to Instagram to clarify:

View this post on Instagram

All I can do now is be a better me for myself my family and my future.

A post shared by CARDIVENOM (@iamcardib) on Mar 26, 2019 at 1:03pm PDT

“Whether or not they were poor choices at the time”

That, right there, is a phrase of a woman living her truth…and possibly alluding to her means of survival in a bad situation.

I don’t think anyone is standing up to be counted as someone who thinks what Cardi said was a good idea. It wasn’t. There is, however, context that makes this statement seem less horrific than it does on the surface, which I’ve explained above.

So. Yeah. Where to go from here?

Well, according to CNN, #SurvivingCardiB was trending on Twitter, undoubtedly coming from neckbeards who want to point out the perceived double standard of misandry (which, btw sirs, is not a thing) and their feeble attempts to draw a comparison of the not great but one-off throwaway comment on an Instagram Live video to the systematic abuse and general terrorizing of young black women at the hands of R. Kelly. That little comparison needs to be taken behind the shed and disposed of immediately. Additionally, anyone who thinks they are remotely the same needs to stand in the corner, alone, and think about how they are simply the worst in the world, indefinitely.

What, ultimately, can we learn from this?

I mean, my primary take away is that there is a very large swath of the world that is actively looking to (and salivating at the prospect of) taking down a young, successful woman of color; and that everyone should watch what they say on video and social media, because you never know when something will rear its ugly head again. What about you?