(ThySistas.com) By the time Cardi B closed out the opening night of ESSENCE Fest this year, the hour was late and the Superdome still held a crowd. That tells you plenty. Folks stayed. They wanted her there. I have been coming to this festival, on and off, since my thirties, and I know that brand of stamina. You fly into New Orleans in July. Your good sundress is soaked clean through by afternoon. Somewhere in a legacy set the horns hit and your eyes sting a little. By Sunday you drag home feeling held by your own kin. So let me be honest before I say anything sharp. I love it, deeply and without apology. I have grieved inside those walls and laughed with old girlfriends inside those walls and felt, more than once, like the whole city had thrown an arm around me. Which is exactly why the Cardi booking sat funny with me. The next morning, it is sitting funny still.
Let me clear the air early, because these conversations get twisted the second they start. I am not asking for Cardi to be canceled, silenced, or shoved out of the business. Making whatever records she wants is her call, and grown folks have every reason to spend their money on them and shake whatever the good Lord gave them while they do it. Her talent is not up for debate. Funny, quick, magnetic, she built a career out of a personality most executives would have sanded down to nothing. Earned, every step, and it belongs to her. My question runs along a different road. Why does ESSENCE, a brand that has spent decades telling Black women they are worthy and brilliant and whole, decide this particular message deserves one of its biggest stages on its most important weekend?
Because a Friday headliner slot carries weight. No small favor, that. The message could not be plainer: this is who we hold up. ESSENCE promoted her as a marquee name, slotted her at the top of the bill next to Kehlani and Latto, sold three day packages behind her face, and stocked BeautyCon with her hair line. Nobody was tricked. Everyone in that building knew the catalog, the stage persona, the raunch, the joyful vulgarity, the beautiful and complicated package all of it arrives in. Cardi has never once pretended to make inspirational music, never sold herself as a role model in the church basement sense. There is a strange integrity to that, honestly. What you see is who she has always told us she is. My discomfort, then, is not about her fooling anybody. It sits with the institution choosing her, eyes wide open, then asking the rest of us to read that choice as a celebration.
Here is where it gets tender for me. Cardi stands for the uncomfortable side of authenticity. We spend so much breath telling girls to be themselves, to stop shrinking, to quit apologizing for taking up space. Beautiful advice. Except the culture only hands its trophies to certain versions of that self. Be yourself, we say, but stay palatable while you do it. Speak your mind, only keep it classy. Enjoy your body, sure, just not so loudly the room turns uneasy. That fine print, she ignores entirely, and part of me cheers the nerve of it even as another part flinches at where it lands. The very trait gets her punished and praised, sometimes inside a single week. Online, folks drag her for being crude, then stream that same filthy song forty million times. Nobody in this arrangement keeps clean hands, myself included.
What made this edition sit so heavy was the company she kept on the calendar. That very night, ahead of the concert series even cranking up, Michelle Obama took the stage with Keke Palmer for a live conversation tied to her latest book, The Look, talking about identity, scrutiny, purpose, and the weight of being watched and judged as a Black woman in public life. Sit with that whiplash a second. In one corner of the building, a former First Lady is unpacking the exhausting labor of dignity, the expectation to represent an entire people without a single misstep, the way she is never once allowed an off day. Hours later, on the largest stage the weekend offers, the festival throws its considerable institutional muscle behind music that plenty of women in that very crowd feel shrinks female sexuality down to a sideshow. Both moments belong to ESSENCE, each handed the platform. I doubt the people programming it ever paused to sit with how strange those two rooms look side by side.
Now, I can already hear the pushback, because I have stood on that side myself over kitchen tables and in group chats. Sexual freedom is Black women’s freedom too. Our foremothers were denied the right to want, to enjoy, to name their own desire until somebody weaponized it against them. There is real liberation in a woman planted flat footed before a stadium crowd, saying out loud exactly what she likes with zero shame. I believe that down to my shoes. I have defended raunchy Black women artists all my adult life against the respectability crowd that would have muzzled every last one of them. So no, I will not pretend this splits neatly into good taste and bad. It does not. Real tension lives here, and anybody who swears it is obvious is peddling you a story.
What I cannot shake is how choosy the applause tends to be. A white pop star sings a filthy verse and gets called bold, a boundary pusher, a genius in charge of her own body. A Black woman does the identical thing and the culture reaches for uglier words, then turns around and profits off her anyway. The double bind is not Cardi’s doing, and it is no reason to shove her offstage. It does mean, though, that the stakes of who the institutions we built choose to lift up run higher for us than for anybody else, because we are already being watched through a warped lens. When the mic is in our hands, the choice weighs more, not less.
Freedom and celebration are not the same word, though, and ESSENCE keeps smudging the line between them. To say a woman may make whatever art she pleases costs nothing. Insisting that art belongs at the sacred middle of a gathering built to affirm us is the heavier claim, and a different one. A festival, stripped down, is a pile of choices about what a community wants to raise up as its best face, its hope, its point of pride. When the flagship celebration of Black womanhood makes that particular sound its Friday centerpiece, it is quietly answering a question about what it thinks we most want to see reflected back. And I am not convinced the answer it gave this year is the one most of the sisters in that room would have chosen.
There is also the question of who gets flattened along the way. This year’s lineup ran gorgeously wide. Patti LaBelle. Brandy and Monica together, which had me hollering out loud. George Clinton hauling the Mothership back after fifty years. Babyface. Public Enemy. Soul, funk, gospel, the diasporic songbook laid out end to end. Breadth like that is the case some will make in its defense, and it is a fair one. Cardi was a single thread in a rich tapestry, not the entire cloth. Fine. But threads do not carry equal weight, and everybody knows it. A headliner sits at the peak of the bill for a reason. When the marketing leads with a certain image, that image turns into the shorthand for the weekend, top to bottom, in a way a Sunday tribute set never will. Our elders get honored. The young provocateur gets pushed out front. Read that gap however you like, but do not tell me it means nothing.
I keep circling back to the mothers and the daughters. I watched grandmothers, mamas, and teenagers drift through those daytime spaces together, three generations shopping the Black owned marketplace, sitting in on panels about ownership and wealth and healing. That intergenerational current is the soul of ESSENCE, the true reason for the pilgrimage. So what is a fifteen year old meant to make of a weekend that lifts up Michelle Obama’s discipline in one breath and, in the next, crowns a starkly different notion of what a woman’s body is for? I do not have a tidy answer. Honestly, there may not be one. What I do know is the organizers showed no sign of wrestling with the contradiction, and that absence of struggle is what nags at me. It read less like a considered stance on identity and more like a bet on ticket sales dressed in the language of empowerment.
Maybe that is the crux of it. Somewhere along the line the vocabulary of liberation curdled into a marketing tool, and now any booking, any brand deal, any filthy verse can be scrubbed clean by the word empowerment until it means precisely nothing. Cardi did not build that. A machine assembled around all of us did. Walking through a door somebody else propped open is no crime, and any of us would have done the very same.
Getting rid of her is not what I am after. I want the institution to look itself in the mirror and be plain about what it picked, and why it picked it. Celebrate us, by all means, mess and glory and all the shades in between. Just do not wave a pretty slogan in my face and expect me to miss which version of a Black woman keeps landing the loudest mic, while the other one gets a folding chair, a courteous little clap, and a panel that wraps up before the lights come on for the real show.
Staff Writer; Raven Jones
Raven writes about music, relationships, and the everyday ups and downs of Black women… She keeps it honest, encourages other sistas, and can be reached at RavenJ@ThySistas.com.