An Egyptian's Response To Katy Perry's Dark Horse
I'm not going to lie with all the shit going down in our country and the whole being on the brink of civil war thing, the actions of one white artist trying to benefit from our history while literally knowing nothing about it is not too high on our list of priorities. I did reblog a post about it earlier with a little comment about how insanely offensive she was being but it was just a few sentences. But apparently there's a lack of Egyptian opinions on the matter here on tumblr, so here you go.
Katy Perry is not the first person to do this. Westerners have been whitewashing Egyptian culture for centuries which can be easily seen when watching films such as Cleopatra.
However, they whitewash it with themselves in power and people of middle-eastern colouring being subordinates or evil. When watching the video, Katy Perry has placed herself in a position of power as the only white person in the video with every single coloured person being her subordinate or some suspicious looking guy who wants to buy her. Not only so but all the slaves who clearly have dark coloured pigmentation are wearing animal masks which makes me incredibly uncomfortable. Whether or not she meant it to be offensive, it really is because she's turning the only clearly Egyptian looking people into animals.
Furthermore, the guards are all blue. Like Jotunn or Avatar blue, as in they're wearing blue make-upon their bodies making them look distinctly alien and you know, not Egyptian. Maybe it's to add to the whole mystical feel of it but it just comes across as erasing a person of colour's skin which is just wrong.
Additionally, all the suitors who happen to be men of colour are destroyed by her. A white woman literally having the power to destroy men of colour makes me so damn angry and genuinely sick. She's depicted as being more powerful than everyone else in the video who are all people of colour. That's disgusting. Not only saw, but one of the suitors has a pendant saying "Allah" on it which is just wrong on several different levels. The most important of which is that Islam did not exist in ancient Egypt. Like what the actual fuck, where did you even get that idea? Why would you put that in a video. Egypt only became an Islamic state in 1249 which was well after the end of ancient Egypt as we are taught it in school today.
In conclusion, the video is incredibly offensive to me as both as Egyptian and Muslim. It's derogatory, completely whitewashed and just generally disgusting. I don't care if any of the above were completely unintentional, it's still really offensive and insulting.
