Another day, another overblown controversy online. Once again, Taylor Swift has come under fire for alleged racism in a video – this time, it’s the video for her newest single, “Wildest Dreams.”
In planning out this article, I realized it may come across as a hardcore Taylor Swift fan defending her god. And I do like Taylor Swift, but not enough to defend her solely because I hate criticism against her. (An aside – I once accompanied a friend to see her walk the red carpet at the Toronto International Film Festival, which was a horrible experience with hardcore fans shoving and screaming. I think a friendly photographer thought I was a sad Swift fan because I couldn’t see over the crowd, so he invited me to stand on his stepstool with him. I’m sure it would have been an intoxicating experience for a fan who cared).
“Wildest Dreams” takes place in the 1950s on the set of a movie being filmed on the African savannah. It shows Swift falling in love with the leading man (Scott Eastwood) intercut with her twirling whimsically on the plains in front of various African animals. It’s a bland video for a bland song. But you’d never know how underwhelming it is from the number of people flipping out about it.
The main issues are that it a) celebrates European colonialism, b) doesn’t portray any black people despite being set and filmed in Africa, and c) is using Africa as a prop.
I get it. Actual Africans probably aren’t too thrilled about yet another piece of media ignoring the real atrocities that went on in the continent during the colonial era – and in fact two black contributors to NPR wrote about their displeasure. If people focused only on that aspect, then maybe the controversy wouldn’t be so overblown.
But the thing is, it’s not racist to film in a different country. Swift is not a racist for setting her video on the savannah and having native animals in it. People film in different locales all the time. I would even go so far as to say that she is not some horrible racist for not including black characters in the video – in the time it’s portraying, there likely would not be any black people working on the crew. Is she tone deaf for positively portraying a time of turmoil in Africa? Yeah, but Swift has never been the smartest. Is she malicious racist for doing so? Not in the slightest.
Besides, if Swift were to use black actors in her video, she would be accused of any number of things – using black people as props, anachronism by having black people on a movie set when they likely would not have been involved. In her video for “Shake It Off” – yet another racist monstrosity if you believe the hype – she received backlash for the role black people played. The video features Swift badly dancing in front of different groups of professional dancers. The group of breakdancers and the group of twerkers were largely black (though not all, which nobody ever mentions) and she was accused of using black people as stereotypical props. If she leaves black people out, she’s a racist. If she puts black people in, she’s a racist. What do they want from her? To sing an upbeat, shallow pop song like “You Belong With Me” with the backdrop of Apartheid-era atrocities? I mean yeah, she’s no paragon of progressiveness or anything, but to expect so much of an immature and frankly, kind of dumb pop star is a little out of the realm of possibility.
It’s important to talk about lack of diversity in media. It’s important to talk about celebrities being tone deaf to issues. But it’s also important to pick your battles. If the online mob slams every celebrity for every tiny thing, the real issues get watered down and the message is lost.
