Colleen Ballinger faces yet more backlash over perceived blackface video [UPDATED]

[Update 7/6/23 11:32 am]: Legal representatives for Ballinger tell Variety that Ballinger was in green face paint in the viral clips of Miranda Sings performing “Single Ladies.” According to her reps, she had just finished a duet of “As Long As You’re Mine” from Wicked with Oliver Tompsett and then “went right into” the Beyoncé number, which she closed most of her shows with “as it was one of her most popular bits.”

[Original Story]: Recently, a lot of people—many against their will—learned who Colleen Ballinger is for the first time. If you somehow missed that train as it left manipulation station, she’s the popular YouTuber behind the character “Miranda Sings,” which was spun off into a Netflix series Haters Back Off. Ballinger has come under fire for what some are describing as “grooming” her fans; whether or not that term precisely applies, Ballinger herself has admitted to lacking appropriate boundaries in communications with her young fanbase. Since accusations against her went viral, the backlash has snowballed (as online backlash is wont to do), and now yet more allegations have surfaced—the latest being that Ballinger performed “Single Ladies” while wearing blackface.

This allegation arose after Twitter user Paige Christie posted a clip from a live Miranda Sings show with the caption, “I’m gonna need someone to explain the black on her face…” In the clip, which was apparently bonus content for the 2018 Miranda Sings book My Diarrhe, Ballinger (as Miranda) performs Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” with dark paint smudged across her face. Based on the excerpt Christie posted on Twitter, one would reasonably assume that Ballinger was in blackface. However, per Variety, some Reddit users have suggested that the face paint is actually green and that she’d recently concluded performing “Defying Gravity” as the green-skinned Elphaba from Wicked. (You can judge for yourself: the video is still viewable, though unlisted.)

Regardless, the decision to perform the song wearing dark face paint was ill-advised, and even more so to attach (via a QR code) grainy footage of the performance to a mass-produced book. There’s no need to split hairs over whether this specific instance was actual blackface, however, when there are other credible accusations of racism against Ballinger. A writer’s assistant on Haters Back Off detailed her experiences on the show, which include Ballinger allegedly being against casting people of color, amongst other things. Ballinger herself had to issue an apology for making videos with racial stereotypes of Latina women when she was a teenager. And another viral clip going around shows the Miranda Sings character doing a “Gangnam Style” parody in which she substitutes nonsense words for the Korean lyrics, which many have deemed insensitive, if not outright racist.

The “Single Ladies” video may not be actual blackface, nor her inappropriate interactions with fans actual “grooming,” in a precise definition of the term. However, what Ballinger has done—what she’s owned up to—is condemnable enough on its own without adding unnecessary fuel to the “toxic gossip train.”