Tory Lanez
Tory Lanez jumped on social media to address colourism in music videos and on music video sets.
The young star posted a clip of behind-the-scenes footage of a video shoot, where a dark-skinned woman that can be seen dancing next to Tory is replaced with a light-skinned woman. Tory calls time out on the play when he notices the change, and the original dancer is brought back in.
In the caption, Tory provided explained the motivation for posting the clip:
This is an On -Going problem in our community of entertainment that needs to stop. As a black man, Sometimes I’m going to joke about the black community just like we all do. BUT WHAT IM NOT GOING TO DO IS ALLOW ANY OF THESE DIRECTORS TO DE-VALUE OUR BLACK WOMEN … countless times I’ve seen directors swap out our women of color for women of lighter complexion, or women with straighter hair ETC . … IT IS OUR RESPONSIBILITY AS ARTIST TO STAND UP AND NOT LET THIS HAPPEN .. it’s BEEN time to embrace our woman of color #BlackIsBeautiful.
At first, social media was rallying behind the video’s message, and praising Tory for taking a stand. But in an unexpected twist, various outlets are reporting that the models in the video have claimed that the clip was staged and just a publicity stunt.
Cassius Life quotes model Sultry Shen as saying, “Where’s the scene then if Tory wanted me so bad. The director is the best director, I know. Fake news.”
Tory, of course, has addressed those claims as well (using IG story to post a typed out message):
“This is the one and only time ima address this. I went out of my way to bring awareness to an important topic of discussion that never gets addressed. The internet has a funny way of tryna make light of truthful shit. IF it was a publicity stunt, why would I be doing it for someone elses music video? Mind y’all this video happened 3 months ago, and a behind the scenes camera man DM’d it to me the other day. All parties involved know what happened in the 30 minutes that I was at the shoot.”
Unless someone else on set comes out with more information, we might never know the real deal but there’s obviously conflicting opinions of what transpired during that shoot.
