This weekend, #DojaIsOverParty and #WeAreSorryDoja began trending on Twitter after supposedly incriminating videos of the "Say So” rapper surfaced online. Some users alleged that Doja made anti-Black comments, mocked police brutality, and participated in Alt-Right forums. But as is often the case with trial-by-Twitter, due diligence wasn't strictly observed.
Doja Cat spent a large part of her ascent to stardom in public chat rooms; a fact she addresses in the Instagram statement below. "I've used public chat rooms to socialize since I was a child. I shouldn't have been on some of those chat room sites, but I personally have never been involved in any racist conversations."
In the past, the rapper has offered tepid apologies for her seemingly prejudiced language. However, many of the supposedly incriminating videos shared with the #DojaCatIsOverParty hashtag were baseless and shared without context. Eventually, the tide began to turn — hence #WeAreSorryDoja.
Nevertheless, her more meticulous critics have pointed to her 2015 track, "Dindu Nuffin." According to Genius, “Dindu nuffin” is a pejorative term used in reference to black people who are victims of police brutality. It allegedly originated on the “politically incorrect” or “/pol/”4chan message board in 2014, in reference to the murder of Michael Brown, an unarmed African American man who was fatally shot by police in Ferguson, Missouri.
In her above statement, Doja argues that the song was "in no way tied to anything outside of my own personal experience. It was written in response to people who often used that term to hurt me."
She argues that the now-deleted song was an attempt to "flip its meaning," implying that she was aware of the racial violence connected with the term.
As a followup to her initial Instagram post, Doja Cat took to the social media platform to further address the racism allegations. She utilized bullet points on Instagram Live to single out various aspects of the situation.
"I've seen tweets about me," she began. "It's a video, it's not even me. It's my friends helping me see through Twitter with a filter. I'm not on Twitter. That shit hurts my feelings. Seeing people come for me. Seeing people come for my character. Just like any of you guys, it wouldn't feel good to me so I avoid social media. My friends looked on social media and they told me what was going on. I know exactly what you guys are talking about as far as self-hate goes. I had a video of me talking about my hair. I have a lot of trouble taking care of my hair.. A lot of my friends would agree who have hair like mine that they have a hard time taking care of it. What I think that the mistake may have been was saying it on a social platform, saying it out in public. Maybe being honest about how I feel about taking care of my hair was a bad idea."
She then spoke on the aforementioned track, "Dindu Nuffin."
"To anybody who I have hurt using this term when I used it, it was because I was in chat rooms all the time and I was kinda locked away and I was always on there dealing with people coming at me left and right talking about different slanderous terms after another," she said. "The term that I used in the song was one that I learned that day. People were calling me it left and right."
"It was to kinda take back and fucking just say fuck you to those people. The song, however, I agree. Maybe the worst song in the entire world. Not good. Lyrically lost. The worst song. The lyrics in the song don't make sense. I see some of the interpretations of the lyrics. A lot of them are wrong," she continued. "I can rewrite the lyrics for you guys. I don't know how important that is but if you need me to, I can. But that song is in zero ways, in no way, connected to police brutality or Sandra Bland."
Doja also touched on her activity in chat rooms, race play fetishes, and her dating life. You can hear her comments from the Instagram Live session below.
