One day after YouTuber Shane Dawson issued an apology for donning blackface, using racial slurs, and making sexual comments about a minor, the content creator may be in hot water again.
Dawson is being called out by Jada Pinkett Smith and Jaden Smith after he was seen in a video sexualizing Willow Smith when she was a minor.
Dawson, 31, apologized for his past videos, which he agreed were inappropriate and controversial. It seemed as if many people accepted his apology at first.
Then, a clip from 2010 resurfaced in which Dawson pretends to masturbate while singing “Whip My Hair” by Willow Smith while looking at a poster of the artist. At the time, Willow was just 11 years old.
Jada, 48, was disgusted by the video that featured her daughter’s song. Jada responded to its resurfacing on social media, saying, “To Shane Dawson . . . I’m done with the excuses.” Willow’s boyfriend, Tyler Cole, also expressed his disgust at Dawson's resurfaced video.
Jaden, Willow’s brother, also responded to the video on Twitter. He wrote that he is “disgusted.” He accused Dawson of sexualizing a minor, claiming the video “is the furthest thing from funny and not okay in the slightest bit.
Jaden also mentioned Dawson’s videos in which he sports blackface. He claimed that Dawson was doing blackface “on the regular” and inserted facepalm emojis. Jaden called out the need to support creators who “support . . . our morals.” Later, Jaden wrote, “It’s bad for him right now.”
The apology video made mention of Dawson's sexual comments regarding children. He said, "My childhood, my past, I've had a lot of pain. I've had a lot of issues with my family. And I took that pain and I turned it into jokes."
While Dawson may have turned his own pain into humor, many claim that videos in which children are sexualized is no laughing matter.
He later added, "That is disgusting, that is gross, it is not something I would ever do."
Dawson admitted in his apology video that “blackface was something that [he] did a lot.” He added, “There’s literally no excuse.”
The content creator also admitted that he “added to the normalization of blackface” and “the n-word.” He also admittedly made sexual comments in a video with a 12-year-old as part of a joke in a video many viewers found disturbing.
At this time, Dawson has not responded to the Smith family online, nor has he addressed the specific video in question.
