Singer Doja Cat was poised to take over 2020 after becoming a TikTok sensation, collaborating with Nicki Minaj, and gearing up to release a song with Ariana Grande, but that may have all come crashing down over the long weekend when the artist found herself the guest of honour at the #DojaCatIsOverParty. After digging up the 24-year-old's participation in some reportedly questionable online chatrooms, fans who were just celebrating her rise to the Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 spot are now reckoning with accusations of racism being lodged against the "Say So" singer. On Sunday night, she issued an apology, but war is still being waged back and forth on Twitter and the rest of the internet as fans get to the bottom of what really happened with Doja Cat, those chat rooms, and a controversially-titled 2015 song.
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Why is Doja Cat trending on Twitter as #DojaCatIsOverParty?
On 22nd May, videos surfaced of Doja Cat appearing in a chat room that has been accused of being well-known for alt-right and racist affiliations. Others say it's just a chat room for trolls. Either way, the artist has already spoken about frequenting chat rooms for Paper Magazine.
"People would pick on me and use horrible, horrible language, just the worst, and I just didn't understand why people were so crazy on there," she said of her experience. "So I became the person who would make offensive jokes and do things sort of out of the box."
Accusations from anonymous sources began flying, with some saying they had been in chats with Doja Cat and heard her use racist and anti-Black language, with others saying she never said or did anything racist, using the hashtag #WeAreSorryDoja to popularise the defence.
What is the Doja Cat song that uses a racist slur?
In 2015, Doja Cat released a song titled "Dindu Nuffin," which is a racist slur that emerged from from /pol/, 4chan's "Politically Incorrect" politics forum, suggesting Doja Cat was part of or at least aware of the forum. The slur is in reference to police brutality against Black people, and the song was released shortly after the death of Sandra Bland.
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Did Doja Cat apologise?
In an apology posted on Instagram on Sunday night, Doja Cat addressed the chat rooms and the controversial song.
"I've used public chat rooms to socialise 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," she wrote, emphasising that half of her family is "Black from South Africa."
"I'm sorry to everyone that I offended," she added.
As for the song, the singer wrote that her use of the slur was an attempt to "flip its meaning" but that she now knows it was a "bad decision" to use it at all.
Is this Doja Cat's first time being cancelled?
No. While the singer may have recently had a mainstream blow-up, her first brush with controversy came after she went viral for "Mooo!" back in 2018. Her new audience quickly stumbled upon her use of homophobic slurs, which the artist initially defended before apologizing for, and then deleted all evidence of. The world moved on.
Has Nicki Minaj, who recently appeared on a remix to "Say So," said anything?
No. Not yet, at least, which has pissed off none other than Azealia Banks.
How does Azealia Banks play into all this?
After all this went down, Banks took to Instagram Stories to call out Nicki Minaj for her silence about Doja Cat when Minaj was outspoken about Cardi B.
“Another thing that I find fucking funny, Nicki, is for all the fucking mouth you have for Cardi B for talking shit about black women, now you quiet because you got your little number one with this white bitch," she said.
Something tells me the wait for the Doja Cat x Ariana Grande collab just got a little longer.