Coco Jones was called “Blackie” and “disgusting” by a woman who walked up to her during a photoshoot in New York, and the video of how calmly she handled it is now going viral.
Video:
The encounter happened while Coco was posing for photos outside the Plaza Hotel during a Tommy Hilfiger event. A woman approached her as the cameras rolled, and at first, Coco seemed to think she was getting a compliment. She smiled and answered, “Thank you!”
Then the woman kept going.
“So disgusting!” she said. “You look so freaking Black! Blackie!”
Coco did not argue. She did not curse her out. She kept her composure and walked away.
The woman in the video has not been identified, and Coco has not publicly commented on the encounter since the clip started circulating this week.
The moment hits differently coming from Coco, who has been open for years about the colorism she faced early in her career. Before she was a Grammy winner, she starred as Roxie in the 2012 Disney Channel movie Let It Shine and was signed to Hollywood Records, which dropped her in 2014. In 2020, she posted a YouTube video explaining how she believed her skin tone limited the opportunities she got at Disney. “The colorism out here is crazy,” she said at the time. Clips of that video spread across TikTok and reached millions of people.
Since then, Coco has built the career a lot of people told her she would not have. She plays Hilary Banks on Peacock’s Bel-Air, signed with Def Jam, and won a Grammy for her hit “ICU.”
Being called “too Black” by a stranger on a New York sidewalk is the same message she spent years pushing back on in the industry, and this time she answered it by refusing to give the woman a reaction at all.
