ngl it does bother me to watch white swifties finally address taylor Swift's racism that Black women and people of colour have been talking about for almost 2 decades. I remember in 2009 seeing Black culture critics be run off social media for calling out the way Swift so emphatically used the Kanye West awards show incident to position herself as a victim in the way white women have defined their status against Black men in the US for centuries. I remember the Wildest Dreams music video being called out by Black people GLOBALLY in 2014 for romanticising the aesthetics of African Colonialism, and swifties doxxing those people. I remember in 2015 when the Shake It Off music video dropped and the countless articles written by Black women and women of colour about how racist it was for Swift to (again) position herself as so pure and innocent by comparing herself to Black people, specifically the faceless bodies of Black women in that video. I remember seeing my Black mutuals being called conspiracy theorists in 2016 for calling out the manufactured outrage when the whole Kanye thing started up again with that lyric he wrote about making her famous, only for it to be revealed that she intentionally let it all kick off and tried to cover it up that she had okayed the lyric. I remember watching Black swifties be doxxed and bullied for pointing all this out and more and expressing disappointment at Swift's silence during Black Lives Matter. I myself have been targeted and harassed by Swifties for years for pointing out her white feminism, for pointing out all her actual friends were white and/or racist. A few years ago when I was posting sources about Taylor Swift trying to bulldoze Olivia Rodrigo's career with lawsuits, a 17 year old woman of colour, and pointing out how Swift does not do this with white artists who are her peers, the harassment I experienced from Swifties drove me to self-harm. And that's all without mentioning her silence on the genocide in Gaza for the past 2 years, her associations with MAGA people for the past 5 years- all of which have been called out by people of colour the entire time and those people of colour were also harassed over calling a spade a spade, a racist a racist. I could go on, but you get the idea. I'm glad white people are finally seeing what Black women and people of colour have been telling you about this woman for nearly 20 years. It's super interesting that they had to hate her art before they were willing to agree. I don't think this is a problem with just Swifties so the point I'll leave the post at is this: we will never be able to have meaningful and effective communication about racism in art and arts industries more broadly if people are only willing to discuss that racism when art is "bad".
