Carefree Black Girls by Zeba Blay

Author:Zeba Blay [Blay, Zeba]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Mae Jemison

Mae Jemison: On September 12, 1992, launch day of the STS-47 Spacelab-J mission on space shuttle Endeavour, NASA astronaut Mae Jemison waits as her suit technician, Sharon McDougle, performs an unpressurized and pressurized leak check on her spacesuit at the Operations and Checkout Building at Kennedy Space Center. Image Credit: NASA.

#CardiBIsSoProblematic

In October 2018, Cardi B went on an Instagram tirade. She uploaded one, two, three, eventually nine videos in which she went off on her apparent nemesis, Nicki Minaj. Nicki had allegedly told lies about her, and Cardi wanted to set the record straight. In each uploaded clip, she disputed Nicki’s recent claims on an episode of her show Queen Radio that Cardi was “ragged” by Nicki’s associate (friend seems too strong a word) Rah Ali during their infamous altercation at a Harper’s BAZAAR party that past September.

You may remember this incident, or at the very least the dramatic paparazzi photos of its aftermath: Cardi dressed in an opulent lacy red Dolce and Gabbana gown, barefoot (she had thrown her stiletto at Minaj earlier), being escorted out of the party flanked by security guards. On her face, carefully fixed like a mask, an expression of concentrated unbotheredness. And if you looked closely, there, just above her left eyebrow: a large, round, raised red knot on her forehead. (A year later, Cardi would re-create this photo in a cover spread for Harper’s BAZAAR, complete with red evening gown, bare feet, and a Cinderella-esque forgotten stiletto shoe spotlit in the background.)

According to Cardi, the fight was really the inevitable result of what she felt had been a long-simmering whisper campaign against her, orchestrated by Nicki. In her Instagram polemic, she alleged that Nicki had actively tried to stop her bag on several occasions, had allowed and even encouraged her fanbase to harass Cardi, had perpetuated the idea that Cardi was disrespectful and ungrateful to the self-professed Queen of Rap, and, perhaps worst of all, had questioned Cardi’s parenting of her newborn baby girl, Kulture.

The rant in its entirety was peak Cardi: at the height of her career, young, reckless, outspoken, and unapologetic. Without a second thought of the potential consequences, she was coming for Nicki Minaj, a powerful and beloved hip-hop colossus with a fiercely passionate and devoted contingent of fans and stans.

At times, it has been Cardi’s seeming disregard for the consequences of what she says that has attracted me to her music, and to her as a pop cultural figure overall. And yet it has been this very same disregard that has also at times repelled me and, ultimately, forced me to grapple with the unspoken truths of her celebrity, of celebrity in general, in more meaningful and exacting ways.

The exciting thing about Cardi is also the exhausting thing about Cardi: she’s always a topic of discussion on the gossip sites and on Black Twitter. She’s invariably doing or saying something that gets people talking. At any one moment, she’s breaking some industry record for women in music, or

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