'Riverdale' Star Lili Reinhart Apologizes After Being Accused of Racism
"Riverdale" star Lili Reinhart is the latest celebrity who is being accused of racism after people misinterpreted that she was going to dress up in blackface for Halloween.
Over the weekend, the actress reportedly posted a photo of a woman, whose body was covered in black paint, with a caption that said: "Found my Halloween costume!! Inspired by the color of my soul."
While it was clearly meant to be a joke, Twitter users came after the 21-year-old actress and called her out for being racist over the "blackface" photo. On the other hand, fans also tried to defend her, pointing out that the woman in the photo was portraying a demon or a witch, and not a person of color.
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The photo has already been deleted from her page, but a number of people had already snagged screenshots and shared it on their own accounts.
Following the backlash, she sent out an apology for the tweet, which she said was not meant to harm anyone.
"I apologize. Never meant any harm. I can see how it could've been misinterpreted," Reinhart posted on Twitter.
The Betty Cooper actress also explained that she saw the photo on Instagram and thought that it would not be perceived as a "racially insensitive" material. "I did not mean for my tweet to come off that way," she said in a tweet as a response to entertainment blogger Perez Hilton's tweet showing a screenshot of her deleted post. "I can see how it was interpreted as being insensitive, completely. I saw the pic on a Halloween Instagram and didn't think it would be interpreted as being racially insensitive," she added.
This was not the first time though that a celebrity has been accused of doing blackface on Halloween.
Another The CW star, Colton Haynes, who used to play Roy Harper in "Arrow," was slammed for doing blackface a few times, according to E! News. Back in 2011, he dressed up as rapper Kanye West for Halloween. And in 2012, he dressed up as Indian civil rights leader Mahatma Gandhi. He, later on, apologized for these.
