Cardi B Dog Whistles, I Hear Her

I really don't talk about celebrities on this blog, because I don't know much about them.  I don't watch much in the way of TV or movies.  It's only been in the last year that my anxieties are under control enough that I can read for pleasure.  So I just don't engage the entertainment sphere that much.  (Though I did watch Dark Winds and it was awesome.)

But I am vaguely aware of who Cardi B is.  And I used to like her, at least generally.   But I'm nobody's dog.

BET:
Cardi B Plans to Sue LAPD for Mistreatment and Accusations of Drug Trafficking

"They had all the helicopters in L.A. Yo, I was freaking out. They had me outside for like three hours. They had me getting butt-naked outside,” Cardi said in the video. “Yo, like, s**t was crazy. It was deada** a movie and whatever but you already know."
“They didn't believe me, it was some White cops and they ain't know who I was. It was really tough on me and everything,” Cardi added. "

[I note that she capitalizes white when it refers to a race.  This doesn't make grammatical sense to me, which is why I've stopped capitalizing black.  It's not more respectful to capitalize something, first of all.  Asian gets capitalized, African, European, because those are  continents.  Not colors.  But that's just me, and also not the point here.]

Daily Mail UK:

"And now Cardi has come forward to say that there was 'no truth' to her wild story and that she was 'taken out of context.'

'This IG live was taken out of context and there is no truth to this story. Apologies for any confusion,' the rapper said in a statement to Billboard."

For me as a rape survivor and someone who lived through the recent riots in Long Beach, all of that is an extreme piss-take.  Because Cardi is rich now, and lives in a very different part of LA.  I'm willing to bet that during the riots -- where my neighborhood had eight full weeks of helicopters circling 24 hours a day overhead, whatever mansion Cardi lives in, they had peace the whole time.  She could get groceries, prescriptions, an ATM, every day of the riots where we were locked down in Long Beach like it was The Purge for eight weeks.  So fuck her just for the helicopter comment.  She doesn't live in the part of LA that gets terrorized by helicopters in real life.

The white police "aint" know who she was, because  she's saying "we all look alike to them."  As a 60-year-old disabled white woman with no radio, I know who Cardi B is, but on-duty cops in her neighborhood in LA don't, sure.  And they made her strip down right on the road!  Which was horrifying, because Cardi B tries so hard to keep her clothes on, especially in front of men.

No actually all of that was just a cheap shot and piss-take on African-American women who have been assaulted by white cops.  I can't help but think about Jannie Ligons getting attacked by Daniel Holtzclaw, made to expose herself on some desolate highway in the middle of the night by a stranger with a gun. The courage it took for Ligons to come forward against him, not even knowing his name.  She really was attacked, and couldn't even be sure they'd take the report, or wouldn't treat her as a suspect.  And then Cardi pulls this bullshit like it's a joke. 

The trauma other people have been through in real life is the only reason there's a red-hot button to be pushed.  I'm tired of people like me being exploited. 

I recognize that I'm not necessarily welcome to self-identify with Holtzclaw's survivors, that his attacks are sometimes defined as specifically or strictly racial.

The OKC Artists for Justice, who supported Holtzclaw's survivors, were quoted explaining how police rape can't and doesn't ever happen to white women.  They went on Democracy Now! and told Amy Goodman how a rapist's bond would be exponentially higher if his victims were white.  Amy Goodman didn't fact-check that. It is what it is.  I'm glad Holtzclaw got sentenced to hundreds of years.

All of that misinformation passes within America'
s ever-imbalanced narratives, as will this latest stunt by Cardi B.  She won't get punished as much as Carlee Russell, which is actually fair because the police wasted a lot of resources on that person.

NPR:
"In a Jefferson County, Ala., circuit court Thursday, Russell pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor counts for filing a false police report. She was ordered to pay nearly $18,000 in restitution and was sentenced to 12 months of supervised probation, community service and evidence of continued mental health counseling.

During the sentencing, Judge David Carpenter also suspended Russell's two six-month sentences, as said it would be a "waste of government resources" to put her in jail."

So, nothing.  She has to pay the police back for the helicopter and dog search.  Clean trash off the roadway where she pretended to be kidnapped.  I'm willing to bet she learned nothing.  Know how I know?  Because she's not a pariah among African-Americans the way Sherri Papini is with white people.  If she was, Cardi B wouldn't have done this.  People aren't really mad at Carlee Russell.

But Sherri Papini got two years in prison.  And all of the white people applauded that, because what she did was disgusting.  And we don't want to see that again.  And she at least had the decency to not pretend there was a child involved.  Sherri Papini had an actual motive, an affair.  It wasn't just for attention, like with Carlee Russell and Cardi B.  But Rebecca Latimer Felton had no excuse and wasn't sorry for everything she did, and got no punishment at all, so.

Again from DailyMail UK:

"Alright, so no, seriously, I just wanna say thank you to my mother f***ing fans,' she added at the end. It comes just days after Cardi stripped down for the X-rated music video to her new hit Enough (Miami). Cardi can be seen strutting her stuff in a racy one-piece, which partially covered her with furry coat, and knee-high platform platform."

Look, when Carlee Russell said that her kidnappers, "Didn't want to leave wrist marks," that was like Sherri Papini saying they "allowed her to do some yoga."  Then they made Carlee strip down and took naked pictures, but did nothing else.  As a rape and trafficking survivor, all of that sounded like actual bullshit to me.

As a second-generation American, and a white lady who's never even ridden in a Mercedes, much less abandoned one in a fake kidnapping, everything about Carlee Russell makes me want to dunk her head in a toilet.

The unraped portion of white America doesn't knows this, but a lot of people find a "white woman's tears" truly infuriating, along with any suggestion of rape.  It's because of the abuses of Confederate America and the Jim Crow era in particular.  After Rebecca Latimer Felton calling for "1,000 lynchings a week to prevent rape (of white women)" it's a tough sell.  People don't want to hear it.

America had all these plantation sows, bored, lonely, and desperate for attention, wanting to be Confederate favorites, crying "rape" so other people would be severely punished.  The Carolyn Donham Bryant factor is so strong, people's hatred of her so visceral, that a lot of people altogether forget the half-dozen men who actually put hands on the child.   That's why nobody's mad at Carlee Russell or Cardi B.  Because people who look like me are so much worse.

Meanwhile, in the slave quarters, women were actually being brutally attacked.  And nobody got punished for that, either.  So all these unaddressed narratives are just ripe to be exploited in this big, stupid, male supremacy -- where white men also attacked white women with impunity from Day 1 and counting.

The matter is that American "justice" has always been incredibly uneven, and thus unjust.

I don't necessarily expect Cardi B to be making things better per se.  I was glad for her to be out there for Bernie, that was cool.  But with this, she's acting like the worst white women, race-  and rape-baiting to promote herself when her fans are bored.