"Not her fetishizing black men" — Netizens accuse Sabrina Carpenter of Black fetishization over her 'BBC' comment

Sabrina Carpenter shocked several netizens on May 26 when she added an NSFW pun to the abbreviation 'BBC' in her performance at BBC Radio 1's Big Weekend 2024 in Luton, England. The 25-year-old singer performed a live rendition of her song Nonsense and dropped the pun while singing the song's outro.

Since then, the performance has divided the internet between people who took offense at the gesture, and Sabrina Carpenter's fans who thought it was completely fine. While many fans came to her defense, some criticized Carpenter on social media platform X(formerly Twitter), as they alleged that it fetishized black men.

"Not her fetishizing black men…," one person commented.

"The face I just made... a white woman shouldn't make racial jokes that contribute to the fetishization of black men sorry not sorry. And it's even worse bcs her actual boyfriend is very white himself," one netizen said.

Another netizen thought of Sabrina Carpenter's joke as 'corny and creepy.'

"I’m happy someone’s finally putting my thoughts about Sabrina Carpenter’s corny and creepy outros. She’s used this BBC thing before too, she’s so unoriginal," said another.

"Using the term “BBC” in a s*xual context does fetishize Black men and idc what y’all say. It’s very weird and telling for people, especially white people, to still use that term. It’s just not cute imo. Y’all can stop that anytime, please and thank you lmao," another person commented.

However, Sabrina Carpenter's fans have defended the Espresso singer, explaining that her joke was just a 'play on words.'

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Netizens divided over Sabrina Carpenter's NSFW pun on 'BBC'

2024 Coachella Valley Music And Arts Festival - Weekend 1 - Day 1 (Photo by Emma McIntyre/Getty Images for Coachella)

When it comes to acronyms, with only a limited number of letters in the English language, some abbreviations are likely to have multiple meanings. 25-year-old singer Sabrina Carpenter seems to take advantage of this caveat as she performed at the BBC concert. Carpenter's lyrics included:

"BBC said I should keep it PG/BBC I wish I had it in me/There's a double meaning if you dig deep."

However, many netizens were apparently offended by the wordplay and thought that Carpenter's joke had an underlying racial connotation. Many people considered it as 'hyper-sexualizing black men.'

This is reportedly not the first time Sabrina Carpenter has cracked the 'BBC' joke. In fact, the singer apparently used another rendition of the same pun in her performance at a BBC Radio 1 Live Lounge Session in 2023. Similarly, she performed Nonsense in the 2023 session.

Carpenter included the following lines in the outro of the song:

"I'm American, I am not British / So BBC, it stands for something different."

Although BBC initially uploaded the uncut version on their YouTube channel, they took it down shortly afterward. Presently, the video stays on the channel with the outro edited out.

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Sabrina Carpenter creates "Magic" onstage with Coldplay

Coldplay has been one of the mainstays of BBC Radio 1’s Big Weekend Festival for years now. The band is known for inviting special guests onstage during their live performances, and they called Sabrina Carpenter, on the same day as her act. Chris Martin announced as he invited Carpenter onto the stage:

“What we’d like to do, to say thank you to you for being so wonderful for the whole three days is bring on a singer who’s much younger, more beautiful, more successful, better in every way, and sing a song of ours that is okay but make it really good.”

Thereafter, they performed Coldplay's Magic while visuals of a man in a hat struggling to hold on to a woman played in the background.

The band had also hinted at Sabrina's guest appearance a few songs earlier while singing Fix You. During the song, Martin slipped an Espresso reference into the mix.