Cardi B.'s meteoric rise has seen few missteps as she has climbed from the stripper pole to the top of the music charts.
Until today.
The 55th anniversary of the March on Washington and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream,” speech.
A raunchy video has surfaced, aired first on TMZ, of the brassy New York rapper, portraying a version of Coretta Scott King in a skit parody called "The Real Housewives of Civil Rights."
“All these hussies wanna sleep with my huuusband!” the “Bodak Yellow” rapper said in the videos’ climax. “But that’s alright. I know he marches home to me.”
What?
On Tuesday morning, Bernice King, the youngest and most vocal of the Kings' four children, called the rapper's portrayal "repulsive."
But by 12:49 p.m., King tweeted that Cardi B. had reached out to her to offer an apology.
“Thank you, @iamcardib, for reaching out to me and apologizing for the skit that aired on @TMZ,” King tweeted. “I look forward to talking with you soon.”
But by then, the damage had been done.
The sketch is from Rip Michael’s new show "Off the Rip," and the video was apparently leaked to TMZ.
The premise of the skit, comes from the popular “Real Housewives,” series and plays off its familiar trope of conflict spurred by…nothing.
The Housewives, King, Rosa Parks, Betty Shabazz (wife of Malcolm X) and Jacqueline Lavine Brown (wife of Jesse Jackson) are gathered in a living room, along with a Secret KKK spy and a random white woman named Margaret to discuss King’s upcoming march in Memphis, where he would eventually be killed.
Shabazz gets the trouble started in a voice over asking, “I don’t know why none of these ho’s here. In fact, I don’t even know why I am here.”
King then tries to assert dominance, claiming that she should be the leader of the group, because “My husband has marched in every states and have fought so we could use the same toilet as every….”
Shabazz cuts her off.
“Well your husband is a ho,” Shabazz says, before saying in another voiceover. “Everybody done had a piece of Martin.”
The video ends with Margaret coming into the room and revealing that she had slept with King.
“I’m sorry, I thought you guys were fighting for equal rights,” Margaret says. “I’m pretty sure me (having sex with) Martin Luther King is like a perfect example of that.”
Cardi B. is the perfect example of the social media celebrity to actually make it as a legit celebrity. She was the breakout star of Love & Hip Hop: New York, and scored her first hit with 2016’s “Bodak Yellow.”
She became only the second female rapper to top the charts with a solo output.
In 2018, Time named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world.
She has been in the spotlight lately after giving birth to her daughter, Kulture, with her husband Offset of the rap group Migos.
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