Camila Cabello has defended herself from critics who took issue over a backup dancer who had darkened his skin — something that many have said was racially offensive.
The backlash followed Cabello's performance on "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon" on Friday, and on Saturday Cabello took to Twitter to explain that the dancer, Dylan Pearce, was "just supposed to be a white man with a terrible spray tan."
"We purposefully tried to pull together a multicultural group of performers, the expectation was not that everyone in the performance needed to be Latin," Cabello noted in her statement. "There are white people, African American people, latin people, etc., and so the point wasn't to try to make everyone look Latin either. There are a lot of people in the performance who are not."
Cabello added that "the point was to try to make each person look like an over-the-top 80's character just like in the video, including a white dude with a terrible orange spray tan."
In her tweet, Cabello included a screengrab from one of Pearce's Instagram Stories featuring a photo of him in his ensemble.
"In case you missed my spray tan last night on @jimmyfallon with @camila_cabello," he wrote in the post.
A Cabello fanpage also jumped to the singer's defense by sharing a statement from stylist Lisa Katnić.
"For people messaging me feeling stressed about this character, he is meant to have a bad fake tan. The makeup artist put light concealer around his eyes to express that," the statement read. "Perhaps it needed to be lighter so it was more pronounced. This is not blackface. Sorry if it looked like that to anybody but I assure you that was not the vibe."
This is not the first time Cabello has faced accusations of racial insensitivity. In 2019, she came under fire after a series of tweets believed to be from her Tumblr reemerged, showing her using racist language. Cabello promptly issued an apology expressing her regret.
"When I was younger, I used language that I’m deeply ashamed of and will regret forever," she wrote on her Instagram Stories, according to People. "I was uneducated and ignorant and once I became aware of the history and the weight and the true meaning behind this horrible language, I was deeply embarrassed I ever used it."
Cabello explained that she would "never intentionally hurt anyone," adding that she regretted her actions.
"As much as I wish I could, I can’t go back in time and change things I said in the past," she continued. "But once you know better, you do better and that’s all I can do."
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Zoe Papadakis ✉
Zoe Papadakis is a Newsmax writer based in South Africa with two decades of experience specializing in media and entertainment. She has been in the news industry as a reporter, writer and editor for newspapers, magazine and websites.
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