Explained: What did Doja Cat actually do and why do people on Twitter want her cancelled?

Doja Cat is in the news currently, and it’s not looking good. You know the one – sounds slightly like Nicki Minaj when rapping, made that song that you can’t go on TikTok without hearing constantly, actually ended up remaking said song with Nicki Minaj. Yeah, her.

It’s the age-old tale: old tweets dating back five years, even older controversial music, and a resulting Instagram Live apology. We know that this all arose from Lana Del Ray’s Instagram post where she called Doja Cat out for glamorising abuse – all that needed to happen was for the internet to do its thing and go digging. But is Doja Cat really an extremist or a racist? Does Doja have beef with Beyoncé? We’ve got the answer to every question that you’ve got so that you’ll have a full understanding of what’s going on with Doja Cat right now and why people are calling for her to be cancelled.

It all started back in 2015 when Doja Cat released a song titled “Dindu Nuffin”

“Dindu nuffin” is an alt-right expression that is used when referring to African-American victims of police brutality that claim innocence. Know Your Meme writes that the phrase “is derived from a bastardization of the phrase ‘didn’t do nothing’, a plea for innocence often used in reference to unarmed black men killed by police. Detractors often use ‘dindu nuffins’ to refer to sympathizers of the black community.”

This music video resurfaced, and immediately people on Twitter were accusing her of being racist.

Then came the discussion surrounding her use of TinyChat

TinyChat is a chat website that is notorious for not being monitored as closely as other chatrooms, meaning that it is well known as a place where racists and alt-right supporters go to chat with each other.

According to her response to allegations in the coming days, Doja admitted that racism occurs “more” on TinyChat, in comparison to Twitter and Instagram, saying: “When you see racist shit on TinyChat, it’s because people aren’t paying attention.”

There were also allegations that she stripped for white supremacists in these chats, and that she deliberately mispronounced Beyonce’s name as “Beyonkey”, a phrase that is supposedly used to compare Beyonce to a monkey. On top of the music video, this didn’t look good.

She released a statement on Instagram denying several claims

https://www.instagram.com/p/CAmGIqnjHZP/

As you can see, she refutes any claims of racism, from both the chat site that she uses as well as the music video: “I shouldn’t have been on some of those chat room site, but I personally have never been involved in any racist conversations.

“As for the old song that has resurfaced, it was in no way tied to anything outside of my personal experience. It was written in response to people who often used that term to hurt me. I made an attempt to flip its meaning, but recognise that it was a bad decision to use the term in my music.”

And also did an Instagram Live to address the issues

She then announced on an Instagram Live that the statement was edited by her team, and so wanted to use this as a way to address the issues herself.

First off was the allegation of stripping for white supremacists, to which she said: “The chatroom that I go to is a public chatroom. It’s me and my friends, you go in there. I learned that there are racist people who come in and out of the chat. They’re there. They happen, and then they’re banned. The idea that this chatroom is a white supremacist chatroom is… I don’t understand it in any way. Not even.”

She then went on to address her song, as well as her pronunciation of Beyonce’s name. You can watch it here:

However, this is only the latest controversy for Doja

Back in September 2018, her Twitter history was dug up and homophobic slurs were uncovered. In a particular 2015 tweet, she referred to Tyler, the Creator and Earl Sweatshirt as “faggot[s]”.

Initially she defended her tweets: “I called a couple people faggots when I was in high school in 2015 does this mean I don’t deserve support? I’ve said faggot roughly like 15 thousand times in my life. Does saying faggot mean you hate gay people? I don’t think I hate gay people. Gay is ok.”

Doja Cat issued 2 (!) apologies for her now-deleted tweets. Both have also been deleted.

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