Camila Cabello addressed backlash following a performance where people accused her backup dancer of wearing blackface.
On Saturday (July 24), the Fifth Harmony alum performed her latest single “Don’t Go Yet” on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. She later addressed the accusations that the dancer was attempting to look Black or Latin through a darker spray tan than his natural skin tone. Cabello shared a screenshot of a behind the scenes photo of a dancer in question and a letter to her fans.
“This dude was just supposed to be a white man with a terrible spray tan,” she clarified. “We purposely tried to pull together a multicultural group of performers, the expectation was not that everyone in the performance needed to be Latin. 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 explained that their goal was to “try and make each person look like an over-the-top ’80s character, just like in the [music] video, including a white dude with a terrible orange spray tan.”
Some fans noted that the spray tan tone in the performance video looked less orange compared to a photo of the backup dancer backstage. Others didn’t accept the “notes app apology” and believed that they shouldn’t have attempted the bad spray tan in the first place.
Watch the performance, below:
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