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.”
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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]