Following a week filled with calls for her cancellation over her controversial online activities, Doja Cat last night issued an apology on Instagram. “I want to address what’s been happening on Twitter. 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. I’m sorry to everyone that I offended.”
Addressing her own identity, Doja (real name Amala Zandile Dlamini) added, “I’m a black woman. Half of my family is black from South Africa and I’m very proud of where I come from.”
The news comes on the heels of Doja achieving her first Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 single with “Say Say,” a song featuring Nicki Minaj.
In her apology, the 24-year-old Doja was referencing tinychat.com, an online chat website that allows users to communicate via instant messaging, voice chat and video chat. In one of two prominently reposted videos, Doja is wearing a yellow tank top in a visual that shows two white males and a white female. In the video, she uses a racist expletive to refer to one of the males in the room. According to the individual who posted the video on YouTube, the exchange took place in August 2019.
Doja had revealed she was “religiously obsessed” with chat rooms in a December 2019 interview with Paper, and added that she still was participating in them at the time of the interview. “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,” Doja explained.
Rather than leave, Doja said she toughened up and joined in on the bullying banter. She added, “So I became the person who would make offensive jokes and do things sort of out of the box.”
While Doja’s use of a Tinychat room full of whites males (as recently as May 16th) was bad enough, the controversial nature of her conversations was underscored by the reveal of a Doja song titled “Dindu Nuffin.” The song’s title references a term used by racists to describe black people who claim “I didn’t do nothing,” in the face of a criminal accusation.
Referencing the song, Doja wrote, “As for the old song that’s resurfaced, it was in no way tied to anything outside of my personal experience. It was written in response to people who used the term to hurt me. I made an attempt to flip its meaning, but recognize it was a bad decision to use the term in my music.”
While this information is surfacing now, chatter about Doja’s off kilter behavior on Tinychat and Periscope has been circulating for over a year. In a Doja-dedicated thread on thecoli.com, users discussed “Dindu Nuffin” as well as her questionable behavior on Tinychat and other online forums.
Check out the single below.
