This weekend, #DojaIsOverParty and #WeAreSorryDoja began trending on Twitter after supposedly incriminating videos of the “Say So” rapper surfaced online. Some users allege 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 her 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.