This year, Bhad dressed up as Poison Ivy, wearing a metallic green bodysuit adorned in leafy accents and a bright red wig. Her usually pale skin appeared noticeably darker in the photos she shared to Instagram.
The images immediately went viral online as people said they barely recognized her. “Girl i ain’t know who the hell i was looking at,” one person commented. Another agreed: “I didnt recognize who this was until I saw the ig username. Wow!”
Many accused Bhad of blackfishing — the practice of altering one’s appearance to make them appear or sound Black when they’re not. “She wanna be a black woman so badly,” one comment said, while another added, “It’s giving black face.”
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“Bruh…it sucks cuz I like her,” another fan said in part. “But this ain’t just a tan. It’s intentional. Especially cause poison ivy originally was white. Like embrace your beauty. You are perfect the way you were made……”
The outrage wasn’t just on Instagram, either — it also poured over to X, where people continued to react to Bhad’s look. “who gon be the yt people?” one person tweeted, drawing over 70,000 likes. Another viral comment said, “she used to say ‘who tf wants to be black‘ now she completely transformed her entire appearance into a lightskin black woman lmfaoooo.”
Bhad later responded to the discourse on Instagram. When one person wrote, “I’m so confused this doesn’t even look like her,” she replied, “Go tan ☺️.”
The rapper and influencer previously addressed accusations of blackfishing in 2017, telling the Fader she wasn’t trying to “act Black.”
“You cannot act a color,” she said. “Do not tell me I’m acting black because I’m not. I’m acting urban, or whatever you want to call it. I don’t even have a name for it, I call it, ‘me.’ How I act is me. I get braids all the time, you can’t tell me I’m acting black because I braid my hair. That makes no sense whatsoever.”
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