Willow Smith’s brother and mother have seen resurfaced videos of YouTube star Shane Dawson after he brought it all back up in a new video called “Taking Accountability” and they have no interest in his apologies or attempt at accountability.
“To Shane Dawson … I’m done with the excuses,” Jada said simply in a tweet after the YouTuber posted a 20-minute video where he apologized for basically his entire history of horrifying and abhorrent behavior for the sake of shock value or attempts at humor.
Following Jada’s brief statement, Jaden took it a step further with an all-caps response on his own Twitter account.
“SHANE DAWSON I AM DISGUSTED BY YOU,” he wrote. “YOU SEXUALIZING AN 11 YEAR OLD GIRL WHO HAPPENS TO BE MY SISTER!!!!!! IS THE FURTHEST THING FROM FUNNY AND NOT OKAY IN THE SLIGHTEST BIT.”
In the resurfaced clip, Shane is seen staring at a poster of 11-year-old Willow as he sang along to her “Whip My Hair” hit and appeared to be touching himself.
While fans of Shane Dawson’s work throughout his career are all too familiar with how far he pushed his content into bad taste and downright offensive, his latest apology also serves as a wake-up call to so many who had no idea this kind of content was out there and so popular.
Throughout a career spanning over a decade, Dawson has managed several websites where he performs comedy skits in various characters, has released music, a podcast and two bestselling books. His most recent channel boasts 23 million subscribers and over 5 billion views.
In other words, new media is much bigger than many traditionalists might believe, which means his behavior and comedy was not being sent out into a vacuum. It was being consumed, sometimes voraciously, by a whole generation of fans.
While Dawson has apologized in the past for the choices he made earlier in his career, he said he’s come to realize that even those apologies weren’t enough, or fell flat or were coming from a place still rooted in ignorance.
The new media star took an uncomfortable deep dive into his own catalog in his lengthy apology on Friday, where he also acknowledged his complicity in attempting to obscure or hide his past in the wake of powerful social movements in recent years like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter.
“I have done a lot of things in my past that I hate, that I wish I could make go away, that I tried to make go away by deleting videos, or un-tagging my Instagram, literally doing whatever I can to pretend those things didn’t happen,” he said. “Because yes, I apologized for a lot of them but I’m 31, almost 32. Those apologies suck. I don’t know who that person is anymore.”
“Every apology video I’ve ever made has been from fear,” he said, which is a very telling statement.
He goes on to say that he “should have been punished” for the things that he did throughout his career, and yet he never was. “This video is coming from a place of just wanting to own up to my shit, wanting to own up to everything I’ve done on the internet that has hurt people, that has added to the problem, that has not been handled well.”
As seen with the Smith family, the video is also serving to hurt all over again so many of the people and groups he victimized over the years. And Willow wasn’t his only instance at trying to create shock humor out of pedophilia. He had a recurring child molester character.
“In seriousness, I would never talk about a child in any way that was inappropriate,” he said. “That is disgusting. That is gross. Ir is not something I would ever do. It is something I did for shock value or because I thought it was funny, like ‘Oh my god, my child molester character.’ It’s all gross and I promise that is not real. That is not me.”
He also addressed his past usage of the n-word and blackface, admitting that even past apologies for this behavior were not sufficient or acceptable.
“I made a video six years ago talking about it, and I gave excuses and I knew it was wrong and I knew I would never want to do it again, but I didn’t do the work,” he said. “I didn’t actually look into the history of it and why it’s so wrong and why people were so upset.”
“I can’t even imagine what it would be like to be Black, and see this white f–king guy do blackface, and the whole internet at that time being like, ‘LOL!'” he continued. “That’s insane and I am so sorry.”
As for using the n-word, Dawson said, “Me as a white person wearing a wig and playing a character and doing stereotypes and saying the n-word is probably what I should have probably lost my career for, at the time. And there’s no amount of apologizing that can take it away.”
“I’m sorry that I added to the normalization of blackface or the normalization of saying the n-word,” he said. “No it’s not okay. And it’s not a funny word especially for a white person to say.”
He also acknowledged “all the racism” he “put onto the internet” beyond blackface, including stereotyping and mocking Mexican and Asian cultures in his sketches.
“At this point realizing how many people I’ve hurt, or how many people I’ve inspired to say awful things or do anything awful, to finally just own up to all of this and be accountable is worth losing everything to me,” Dawson said.
Finally, Shane said that he totally understood if people felt unwilling to forgive him for his past actions. His latest apology comes on the heels of fellow YouTube star Jenna Marbles apologizing for her own racist videos before ultimately leaving the platform altogether.
