Paris Jackson took to Twitter to talk about a character she plays in the new Prime Video series. Swarm.
Jackson, 24, the daughter of the late singer Michael Jackson, plays stripper Hailey in Donald Glover’s new series (Atlanta) and author Janine Nabers.
The show follows protagonist Dre (Dominique Fishback), a young Houston-born fanatical obsessed with the global pop phenomenon Ni’Jah, whose music and fan base bear a striking resemblance to Beyoncè.
In swarm In the second episode, Dre finds work as a stripper and befriends fellow actor Hailey, and is surprised to learn why she chose Halsey as her professional nickname.
Hailey tells Dre that she feels “connected” to her because “I understand how it feels to not be accepted.”
“I mean, I ran away from my last relationship because he couldn’t accept that I was black,” Hailey says, and a shocked Dre replies, “You’re black?”
“Yeah, half my dad… that’s why my stage name is Halsey. You know who Halsey is right? Were you living under a rock, she’s like the best singer!”
Viewers watching the show reacted in shock at the scene, which they imitated as art, and also at Halsey’s apparent dig.
“The fact that it’s Paris Jackson makes it 10x funnier.” tweeted a person.
Other added: “Halsey caught a stray from Paris Jackson via Donald Glover & Janine Nabers, that’s crazy.”
And a third wrote: “paris jackson says that too…like there are so many layers here.”
Singer Halsey, best known for her hits “Closer” (with The Chainsmokers) and “Without Me,” is the daughter of a black father and a white mother.
She was criticized in 2020 for not “claiming her black side” during the Black Lives Matter protests following the police killing of George Floyd.
Halsey hit back at the backlash, saying she didn’t feel she had the right to speak out on the issues in the same way as the black community because she “passed white.”
“I’m over. It’s not my place to say ‘we’. It’s my place to help. I feel pain for my family but no one will kill me because of the color of my skin,” she said tweeted in June 2020.
“I’ve always been proud of who I am, but it would be an absolute disservice to say ‘we’ if I wasn’t subjected to the same violence.”
In a 2017 interview, Halsey described how growing up biracial felt “weird.”
“I look like a white girl, but I don’t feel like one. i am a black woman It was weird to deal with,” she said playboy Magazine.
As for Jackson, she has previously opened up about how her famous father helped her be proud of her black identity.
“(He) would look me in the eye and point a finger at me and say, ‘You’re black. Be proud of your roots.’ And I would say, ‘OK, he’s my father, why would he lie to me?’ So I just believe what he told me because to my knowledge he never lied to me,” she said Rolling Stone Magazine 2017.
Jackson also slammed people for photoshopping their skin color to make it appear lighter or darker than it really was.
“I appreciate everything you guys do for me, I enjoy every single edit I see. But please stop lightening my skin to make me look whiter. And please stop darkening my skin so I look more mixed,” she wrote on Twitter in 2018.
“I am what I am. I am aware of how I look and I [am] Finally happy with it.”
