Cardi B is fed up with the hate Tyla has received online.
During a recent X Spaces session with fans, the Bronx rapper addressed how hard it is to be a celebrity during the social media age and used the South African pop star as an example.
“Look at Tyla,” Cardi began after explaining how she felt body-shamed during one of her pregnancies. “People been dragging the sh– out of Tyla and it’s, like, the girl don’t even f—ing address or talk about nothing.”
She added: “I’m starting to feel that people just don’t like celebrities. It’s like the only way that that people like celebrities [is] if you don’t f—ing say nothing at all. And they beat your energy and they beat your confidence, they beat you to the f—ing ground.”
Cardi then admitted that she grows tired of seeing “thousands of videos of people talking sh– about you and again brought up the online vitriol spewed Tyla’s way” — though, she admitted she didn’t know where the hate stems from.
“To be honest with you, I don’t even know the hate about it because I never really got into the details of what is the real hard-core thing,” she said. “However, all I do know is every single time I scroll down on my TikTok, there’s a video of her and people are talking sh–. And it’s like, goddamn, what do you want her to f—ing do, cut her f—ing veins? Like, enough. Enough. I really think that’s what ya be wanting.”
The online hate Tyla has gotten goes back to a resurfaced TikTok from 2020 when she referred to herself as a “Coloured South African” and her decision to not answer a question about the debates surrounding her ethnicity posed by Charlamagne Tha God on The Breakfast Club, which perhaps made things worse, according to a recent Variety profile.
In that same profile, she told the outlet that the situation she found herself in was confusing. “That [controversy] was really confusing for me,” she admitted. “I understood both sides of the story, but I was left asking, ‘OK, but what do I do now?’ When who you are is challenged, especially when it’s all you’ve ever known, it shakes you. You want to stand your ground, because if you don’t, someone else will try to define it for you.”
She also addressed choosing not to answer Charlamagne’s question during a British Vogue cover story earlier this year, essentially saying that she doesn’t regret not answering it. “Me choosing not to say anything, I’m happy that I didn’t,” she revealed. “I didn’t want to explain my culture and something that is really important to me on a platform that is just going to be purposefully misconstrued. I’ve explained it a lot of times before, but people took that and put words in my mouth. They said a whole bunch of things that I never said and ran with it.”
She then continued by trying to explain the different meaning the word “colored” has in her native South Africa as opposed to its racist roots in the United States and admitted that she experienced a bit of a cultural shock when she came to America.
“If people really searched, they’ll see that in South Africa we had a lot of segregation,” she began. “It was bad for a lot of us. They just classified us. And that just so happens to be the name that the white people called us. They chose to call people that were mixed ‘coloured’. And I’m not gonna lie, it was hard because all my life, obviously I knew ‘I’m Black’ but also knew that ‘I’m coloured’. So, when I went to America and people were like, ‘You can’t say that!’ I was in a position where I was like, ‘Oh, so what do I do? What am I then?’”
In other Cardi B news, she announced earlier this week that she will be releasing a new single from her highly anticipated upcoming album Am I the Drama? on Friday.
