Another big YouTuber has issued an apology video. Shane Dawson, 31, followed in Jenna Marbles‘ footsteps after the latter apologized for old racist videos, which Shane also decided to do in a new video called “Taking Accountability,” shared on June 27. Shane has previously apologized for past racist content on his YouTube channel, which has now amassed 23 million subscribers, but is now admitting that “those apologies suck.”
“Every apology video I have ever made has been from fear. It’s me sitting at home, thinking the whole world hates me and crying and hyperventilating and then just turning on a web cam and just saying I’m sorry and hoping people know I’m a good person and then it’ll go away. That is stupid. That is something a child does,” Shane admits in the video above. Shane had this epiphany after watching fellow YouTuber Jenna Marbles’ apology video for “blackface” and an “awful” rap that mocked Asian people, uploaded a day prior, so he too decided to “start with all of the racism that [he] put on to the internet as an adult.”
“I was at least 20 when I started YouTube. I made the decision to play stereotypes of Black people or Asian people or Mexicans, or pretty much every race. I made that decision. I said, ‘Oh, this is funny,’ and I put it on the internet’,” Shane said. “Now years later, I look back at that — when I say I hate that person, I mean it in the most intense way possible. That person was filled with sadness, filled with anger…[was] in the closet..I hate that person so f–king much.”
He then moved onto his two most hurtful offenses: using blackface makeup for old video sketches, and once using a racial slur. “Blackface was something that I did a lot. Like I did it a lot on my channel…there’s literally no excuse. 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. I didn’t actually look into the history of it and why it’s so wrong and why people were so upset…I’m so sorry.”
“I’m sorry that I added to the normalization of blackface or the normalization of saying the n-word,” Shane continues. “And my justification at the time for that was, ‘Oh I was playing a character and it was in comedy and my Black friend was there and that makes it okay.’ No it’s not okay. And it’s not a funny word especially for a white person to say. 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.”
Shane Dawson’s original apology from 2014, which he refers to in his new video above.
After apologizing for the racist content, Shane moved onto a controversial video that has been circulating the Internet, which The Real Housewives of Atlanta star Porsha Williams shared on her Instagram earlier that day. In it, Shane joked about a child being “sexy” and gave his “justification” for pedophilia. Under the video, Porsha wrote, “Hell no! Why is this ok? So y’all cancel everyone else but this is allowed. I don’t play about the kids! Gross just foul as hell.”
“So there’s a clip that has been going around…they cut out all the parts where I said pedophilia is disgusting, and they put it together and it made it seem like I was talking about how it’s normal — so gross, I would never say that,” Shane clarifies, but admits he shouldn’t have been “joking” about that topic. He adds, “I swear on my life, I am not somebody who would ever talk about a child — like in seriousness, I would never talk about a child in any way that was inappropriate. That is disgusting, that is gross, that is not something I would ever do. It is something I did for shock value, or because I thought it was funny — or whatever. It’s all gross…Have I done sketches where kids were saying crazy things? Yes. Do I regret it? Yes.”