What racial slur did KSI say and why is he taking a break from YouTube?

Controversial YouTuber KSI is once again prompting backlash, this time for uttering a slur on one of his group’s Sidemen Sunday videos.

KSI, which serves as the online moniker for 29-year-old Olajide William Olatunji, has sparked plenty of pushback before, but this most recent example may be enough to permanently damage his brand. The rapper and up-and-coming boxer has been hit with sexual harassment claims, accusations of transphobia, and backlash regarding his off-color jokes, but his latest slip-up was enough to see the creator take a step back from his YouTube channels.

News of his decision to take a break from social media — paired with ongoing reactions to his slur — continue to buzz around the web, as KSI fans and detractors react to the YouTuber’s latest debacle. As a part of the YouTube group Sidemen, and as a blossoming young boxer, KSI has just begun to make a name for himself outside of his typical channels. Any further growth looks set to stall, for a while at least, as the creator works to recover from his Sidemen Sunday slur.

What racial slur did KSI say?

During a recent entry in YouTube’s Sidemen Sunday videos, KSI and his fellow creators were engaged in a “Countdown challenge” based around a game popularized by the U.K.’s Channel 4. The game sees its contestants choose between a stack of consonant letter tiles or a stack of vowel letter tiles, and work to come up with the longest word they can in 30 seconds, using nine letters.

While participating in last Sunday’s bout, KSI’s group — who dubbed themselves the N-Word — was struggling to find an answer, and settled for a slur in the absence of anything acceptable. When the team failed to think up any reasonable answers, KSI offered up a pejorative term used in the U.K. to describe people of South Asian origins. His use of what we’ll call the “P-Word” prompted a little bit of laughter from his fellow contestants, but online, the reaction was far less positive.

Soon, KSI and his fellow Sidemen Sunday regulars were facing widespread backlash for laughing away a slur that’s used to dehumanize and belittle an entire group of people. His claim that “I don’t mean this maliciously” wasn’t nearly enough to stem the pushback, which quickly overtook social media in the wake of the video.

KSI’s YouTube break

As outrage spread online, the video was removed from the Sidemen YouTube page and KSI, along with the group itself, issued an apology. KSI’s came first, arriving on his Twitter page during the evening hours of Sunday, and contained the announcement that the YouTuber plans to “take a break” from social media for a while. He also noted that “there’s no excuse” for his use of a racial slur, and admitted that “I shouldn’t have said it and I’m sorry.”

The following morning, Sidemen’s official Twitter page followed suit. In a far more lengthy statement, the YouTube channel’s page explained that the team behind it finds the use of the racial slur to be “unacceptable and inexcusable” and expressed their apologies. The remainder of the statement followed the tried and true YouTuber apology format, noting that this isn’t what they stand for and promising to “do better” in the future.

It’s unclear how long KSI plans to keep off social media, but people online have their money on exactly as long as it takes for public attention to shift away from his latest “mistake.” Few people have faith that KSI and his team actually learned a lesson, and are instead convinced that they’re simply working to side-step the backlash. This could be proven false, should KSI return with an actual lesson learned, but few people are holding their breath.

Instead, most people seem to assume that KSI will take a few weeks, or maybe a few months, off from consistent social media activity, only to slink back in once the furor over the controversy either shifts or ebbs away. If that’s the case, we’ll likely be back here in a half year or so, writing about the YouTuber’s next major controversy.