'Wildest Dreams' Video Draws Backlash For Racism

[Dillon]

Taylor Swift's 'Wildest Dreams' Video Draws Backlash For Racism

Her video for Wildest Dreams, which she premiered on the red carpet during Sunday's MTV Video Music Awards, is being slammed by some critics for romanticizing white colonialism, and for using Africa as a backdrop for a story about white people. The video depicts Swift as an early-20th-century movie star who falls in love with her married co-star, played by Scott Eastwood, while filming a movie in Africa. It contains sweeping shots of the African landscape, plenty of African animals, and what appears to be no African people. Some say this is inappropriate in 2015. The Daily Dot wrote: “An homage to a love triangle about white colonialists is going to present some, uh, challenges to an artist who just wants to make a three-minute music video to put on her VEVO page – and Taylor Swift found that out the hard way. The video wants to have its old-school Hollywood romance but ends up eating some old-school Hollywood racism, too." NPR echoed the sentiment, noting some harsh realities about colonialism: "Here are some facts for Swift and her team: Colonialism was neither romantic nor beautiful. It was exploitative and brutal. The legacy of colonialism still lives quite loudly to this day. Scholars have argued that poor economic performance, weak property rights and tribal tensions across the continent can be traced to colonial strategies. So can other woes. In a place full of devastation and lawlessness, diseases spread like wildfire, conflict breaks out and dictators grab power."

This is the same kind of backlash Swift received after the video for Shake it Off premiered last year. In that video Swift dresses in gold chains and hoop earrings, and crawls through the legs of twerking black women, a scene that drew quite a bit of controversy. As The Daily Dot goes on to note:

However, this isn’t the first time Swift has been accused of 'accidental racism' in her work. After her video for Shake It Off debuted last August, rapper Earl Sweatshirt accused the singer of 'perpetuating black stereotypes' ... The Pitchfork Review’s senior editor Jessica Hopper argued it was even worse than a similar moment in Miley Cyrus’ We Can’t Stop. 'Miley used women of color as props, but her appropriation was participatory,' Hopper wrote. 'In a strange way, her dancing with them is maybe a modicum ‘better’ than Taylor tunneling out from underneath these legs and looking up with this smirk, like Isn’t this wacky? I don’t even understand?'"

Wildest Dreams director Joseph Kahn, who also directed Swift's Blank Space and Bad Blood videos, has defended the video, saying that it's not racist. In a statement provided to Entertain This! by Swift's representative, Kahn says:

Wildest Dreams is a song about a relationship that was doomed, and the music video concept was that they were having a love affair on location away from their normal lives. This is not a video about colonialism but a love story on the set of a period film crew in Africa,1950.

There are black Africans in the video in a number of shots, but I rarely cut to crew faces outside of the director as the vast majority of screentime is Taylor and Scott.

The video is based on classic Hollywood romances like Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, as well as classic movies like The African Queen, Out of Africa and The English Patient, to name a few.

The reality is not only were there people of color in the video, but the key creatives who worked on this video are people of color. I am Asian American, the producer Jil Hardin is an African American woman, and the editor Chancler Haynes is an African American man. We cast and edited this video. We collectively decided it would have been historicially inaccurate to load the crew with more black actors as the video would have been accused of rewriting history. This video is set in the past by a crew set in the present and we are all proud of our work.

There is no political agenda in the video. Our only goal was to tell a tragic love story in classic Hollywood iconography. Furthermore, this video has been singled out, yet there have been many music videos depicting Africa. These videos have traditionally not been lessons in African history. Let's not forget, Taylor has chosen to donate all of her proceeds from this video to the African Parks Foundation to preserve the endangered animals of the continent and support the economies of local African people.

He also tweeted:

A sentiment that was met with sharp criticism from The Huffington Post:

"So it totally can't be racist, right? Especially since she's not just kinda hot or lukewarm hot. Solid defense, dude. ... we now have some advice for filmmakers. Just hire a good-looking black woman to work on all of your projects and feel free to be as racist and sexist as possible. Free pass!"

Swift has not addressed the controversy.


Source: USA Today, usat.ly/1EBOu5q