Fresh off the release of her new single “Don’t Go Yet,” Camila Cabello stopped by Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show on Friday to grace the NBC stage with the debut performance of the track.
Shortly after her performance, Cabello began trending on social media as some viewers accused one of her backup dancers of wearing blackface. The 24-year-old singer took to Twitter to respond to the accusations with an explanation.
“Hey! so this dude was just supposed to be a white man with a terrible spray tan,” she wrote in a note shared on Twitter. “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.”
“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,” Cabello added.
She also shared a screenshot of the dancer’s Instagram Story, which shows him posing in costume backstage. “In case you missed my spray tan last night on @jimmyfallon with @camila_cabello,” he joked.
Speaking with Zane Lowe on Friday about her forthcoming album Familia, the official follow-up to her sophomore LP Romance, Cabello explained that during the recording process she focused on manifesting “collective joy.”
“I was like, ‘I don’t want to be alone on stage, I don’t want to be alone hopefully doing the tiny desk.’ I want it to be that kind of family affair selfishly, because it would make me happy,” Cabello shared. “It would make my life better and that’s what I want, so that’s really what I was trying to manifest with this whole album. And I think “Don’t Go Yet” is just, sonically and melodically, me being free. I think being in Miami for so long and having more family around me and speaking Spanish more made me feel, I don’t know, just brought me back. I think my roots went deeper in a way that I really needed.”
Check out Camila Cabello’s performance of “Don’t Go Yet” up top, and stream the song now on all major platforms.
