Taylor Swift's new video for her song "Wildest Dreams" is making progressives' heads spin as they accuse it of "channeling white colonialism."
The setting for the video is Africa and the storyline follows two 1950s Hollywood actors who are in a relationship as they film a movie. A writer for Jezebel, Madeleine Davies, quickly noted after her first viewing that there is "nary a black person in sight" despite the location. She also calls the two "lovelorn colonizers."
The complaints that the video only featured white people spilled out from other outlets as well. Lauren Duca, writing for Huffington Post, remarked that the video "channels white colonialism." She elaborated:
Instead of the cultural appropriation that has become almost status quo in today's pop music, Swift has opted for the bolder option of actually just embodying the political exploitation of a region and its people. It's brave, really. Almost as brave as moving sensuously in the vicinity of a real-life lion.
Zak Cheney-Rice wrote for Mic:
The video's narrative of white people finding romance in the hinterlands of a land wracked by colonial violence is not only obliviously ahistorical, but also exhibits tropes that people across the African diaspora have been trying to dispel for years... which romanticize a version of the era that overlooks the anti-black violence and slavery on which the lifestyles depicted were built.
Then there was Nico Lang, who found "a major race problem" in the video and reported to The Daily Dot:
For a clip that’s set in Africa -- it’s about as white as a Sunday morning farmer’s market. The video wants to have its old-school Hollywood romance but ends up eating some old-school Hollywood racism, too. Just because you represent the past or pay respect to it doesn't mean you need to recreate its worst aspects.
Swift was also made a target by NPR, whose headline read, "Taylor Swift is Dreaming of a Very White Africa." The writers of this article, two Ugandans, said the subject matter of this video "stings:"
We are shocked to think that in 2015, Taylor Swift, her record label and her video production group would think it was OK to film a video that presents a glamorous version of the white colonial fantasy of Africa.
And, of course, Twitter exploded:
The video is a huge success, though. It has been viewed over 10 million times since its release. Swift is donating all of the proceeds from advertisements linked to the video to African Parks Foundation of America.