Camila Cabello Defends "Don't Go Yet" Performance After Blackface Accusations

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Camila Cabello, Blackface

Camila Cabello says her backup dancer wasn't wearing blackface, but instead a spray tan.

Camila Cabello debuted her new song, “Don’t Go Yet,” on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, earlier this week, and was met with backlash online after a backup dancer appeared to be wearing blackface for the performance. Cabello explained on Twitter that the dancer was actually supposed to be wearing a "terrible orange spray tan," in line with the '80s theme.

“Hey! so this dude was just supposed to be a white man with a terrible spray tan,” she said in a note she posted on Twitter, in response to the criticism. “We purposefully 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.”

Theo Wargo / Getty Images

She added: “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.”

Check out Cabello's performance below.

[Via]


About The Author
Cole Blake is currently an Editor at HotNewHipHop based out of Brooklyn, New York. He began working at the site as an intern back in 2018 while studying journalism at St. John’s University. In the time since, he’s graduated with a bachelor's degree and written extensively about a wide range of topics including pop culture, film & television, politics, video games, sports, and much more. He’s also covered music festivals such as Gov. Ball and Rolling Loud. You can find him publishing work for HNHH from Monday to Wednesday or on weekends. On the sports front, Cole’s a passionate NBA and NFL fan with his favorite teams being the Indianapolis Colts and Los Angeles Lakers. He also roots for the Yankees whenever he finds himself at Yankee Stadium or the Red Storm when in the company of other SJU alumni. His favorite hip-hop artists are billy woods, Earl Sweatshirt, Cam’ron, MIKE, and Mach-Hommy.