The exaggerated features of Katy Perry's dancers seem to be depicting Black women's bodies. 

It would be rather myopic of Perry's team not to notice that the costumes here read as offensive — especially since both Miley Cyrus and Lily Allen recently came under fire last year for treating their Black backup dancers as props, of using performances of stereotyped Black female sexuality to seem edgy and provocative.

As Ayesha Siddiqi put it at the New Inquiry, such acts "[exemplify] the White impulse to shake the stigma its mainstream status affords while simultaneously exercising the power of Whiteness to define Blackness."