Not where I expected to be on a rainy Wednesday morning, but I have some things on my heart concerning the US/Russia/Ukraine crisis and Cardi B.* Anyway, if you missed it, Cardi B posted a video on Twitter, expressing her fear about the evolving situation with Russia and Ukraine. Cardi B is far from alone in thinking that a war between the US and Russia over Ukraine would be bad. Unlike many sharing this sentiment, Cardi B is
1) a rapper
2) a former sex worker
3) a young woman
4) a woman of color
As it happens, these are all categories of people who are often have a hard time being taken seriously. This goes double if the topic in question is something like diplomacy. Let's break it down:
Rappers: I am a white kid from the suburbs who has been fascinated by rap music and hip hop culture ever since I heard Rapper's Delight at Camp Coniston in 1980 or so. Pretty much everything I have thought, or occasionally written, about hip hop since the mid-1990s has been filtered through a kid's drawing that was on the wall of a grocery in Federal Hill, an Italian enclave in Providence. I don't recall the image, it was a kid's drawing with the caption was "RAP = r*tards attempting poetry." Not sure why the owners of the grocery posted this charming bit of art, but it says a lot about the way some folks feel about this music. (Also, don't use that word, obvi.) As far as I can tell, the logic is something like "Rap music has lyrics that rhyme. Poetry sometimes has lines that rhyme, but Chuck D's work is not like Robert Frost's. Thus, rappers are bad at poetry.
Sex workers: Name another category of people where jokes about their murder are still socially acceptable in many swaths of society. If you can get people to pay you to be naked, that seems pretty smart to me, and yet, the idea that strippers are dumb is persistent. There is also the way that a woman ever having done any sex work at all follows her forever. Ask Mistress Snow. I worked for a rare book dealer in grad school. If there is news about me, it will never say "Former rare book dealer Jonathan Beecher Field was arrested today after a multistate JetSki chase."
Young women: I teach English at a STEM school. In this instance, this configuration means that I mostly work with young women. As a rule, they are pretty great! And yet, lots of folks insist on calling them girls, not reviewing the music they like, and generally not taking them seriously.**
Brown people: I am not really qualified to speak to this, but fortunately, Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs wrote two whole dang books about this very topic.
So, the cards are stacked against Cardi B in this instance. One could ignore this 29 year old biracial ex-stripper rapper, and go watch CNN instead. Instead, Cardi B was trending on Twitter yesterday. How come? In a word, tits. Cardi B has large breasts, and wearing revealing outfits is part of her persona, and her persona is her job. As it happens, in the video she dropped about Ukraine, she's swaddled in a blanket and not even wearing makeup. If you go look at coverage of this video, the images tend to be of Cardi B much more dolled up than this, b/c tits get clicks. As a result, Cardi B expressing a really quite reasonable sentiment of rooting against a land war in Europe turns into a cottage industry of folks on Twitter ridiculing the idea that Cardi B could have an opinion that matters -- sometimes shitting on her and including a sexy picture of her in the same picture. Is Cardi B a foreign policy expert? Not as far as I know. Is hoping we don't have a whole new war a reasonable opinion.
There is no shortage of this but the social media ecology of sharing a picture of an attractive woman so you can basically say "look at this dumb bitch" is, for lack of a better word, bad. It involves both major media outlets and the proverbial dudes in their mom's basements, and it sucks.
*Are my new meds making me a little manic? Or was I a little catatonic before? Hard telling, not knowing.
** We really need a memorial somewhere, maybe NYC, for all of the people who now regret a underestimating young woman because of her southern accent, hair color, or Panhellenic affiliation. It would need to be large. This goes double for folks who don't know the difference between Panhellenic and NPHC sororities.
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