Yes, Taylor Swift is racist—just not the kind you think she is.
Her liberal attachment to whiteness is actually scarier than if she was MAGA.
For the week following a new Taylor Swift album release, I try to stay away from the Internet. I find that hot takes are usually extreme, contrarian, and reactionary. And I like to form opinions of my own, rather than letting my thoughts be too deeply influenced by others. Even my friends know that they have to be chosen to chat with me about a new Taylor Swift album. I like to take my time.
The release of The Life of a Showgirl on October third was no different. I sat down to listen to it at 9am, not even opening an app beforehand. And I liked it immediately: darker pop with moments of vulnerability; clever, oftentimes sarcastic lyrics; character-driven narratives; and boppy happiness. It reminded me of Reputation meets Lover. It was exactly what I was expecting.
There are songs on the album that I think can go: “Wood,” “Wi$h List,” and “Honey” are surprisingly half-baked for a self-proclaimed try-hard. “Ruin the Friendship” simply doesn’t have a place here. And while we can keep “The Life of a Showgirl,” I’m disappointed that it doesn’t have more bite.
But I was wildly surprised when I finally logged in: Everyone fucking hates it.
I’ll leave the criticisms that the album is too simple, lacking in intelligence, and not poetic enough behind. I disagree with them. But as Swift herself said in a recent Apple Music interview: “I have a lot of respect for people’s subjective opinions on art. I’m not the art police.”
What I want to talk about here are the criticisms that The Life of a Showgirl is a bit of a magnum opus of white supremacy. Because I neither completely agree with this take (people are saying this is a dog whistle for far-right extremism; I think that’s taking it thirteen steps too far), nor do I disagree with it (as throngs of white Swifties come out of the woodwork screaming in defense of Swift’s purity).
I think it’s complicated.
More so, I think that within that complexity is a more insidious (and therefore, more terrifying) problem: liberal white women’s ignorance of their own whiteness.
Is Taylor Swift racist? Yes.
Is she actively, explicitly anti-Black? a Trump supporter? pro-eugenics? I doubt it.
But that’s actually what worries me more: that there are so many liberal white women who move through the world never making connections between their whiteness and white supremacy.
In 1963, in Letter From Birmingham Jail, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., writes:
“First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace, which is the absence of tension, to a positive peace, which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’… Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.”
This is not a popular quote to post on MLK Day because it doesn’t comfort white people. Indeed, someone sent me a message on Instagram to let me know that positioning the quote “I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate” in block letters over an image of Taylor Swift would result in people feeling “judged,” “attacked,” and “defensive.”
But the reason why that is, is because of how easy it is for people to position their whiteness as neutral, their liberalism as goodness.
But as Rev. Dr. King points out, the protectors of the status quo are not so much those on the far right, but those who purport to be left-of-center, but who remain moderate in their thinking and their actions.
Are flag-wielding, MAGA-shouting Trump supporters a problem? Yes. They’re horrifying. But the biggest obstacle in taking down fascism isn’t far-right extremists.
It’s “liberals.” It’s “progressives.” It’s “democrats.”
It’s folks with “BLM” in their bios who live in majority-white suburbs and send their kids to private school. It’s folks who claim to be allies to the queer and trans communities and then have gender-reveal parties when pregnant. It’s people who look at the United States’ descent into fascism and ask, “How did we get here?” It’s folks who compare their European ancestors’ immigrations to what Black and Brown immigrants are experiencing today, as if race is inconsequential.
It’s Taylor Swift – and the majority of her fans.
Taylor Swift is a white woman whose success relies on cultural narratives of the fragility and purity of white femininity, while practicing zero interrogation into her own whiteness.
And her fans run to her defense whenever that is criticized. “But she publicly endorsed Kamala Harris!” they press, not realizing that this proves the point: Moderate politics dressed up as leftism don’t stand a chance against far-right extremism, a lesson I wish the Democratic Party would learn.
In Wi$h Li$t, Swift cheekily admits that while most people dream of Balenciaga sunglasses and soccer contracts with Real Madrid, all that she – “the girl who has everything and nothing all at once” (Elizabeth Taylor) – wants is a simple life, the so-called American dream.
“I just want you / Have a couple kids / Got the whole block looking like you,” she sings about her fiancee, football star Travis Kelce.
People were quick to point out that, especially given the cultural climate, expressing a fantasy in which two Aryan-esque rich people populate a neighborhood with blonde-haired, blue-eyed babies is a little… insensitive, at best.
Obviously, Taylor Swift didn’t sit down to write a pro-white (not to mention, deeply cisheteronormative) line here; I don’t think she did, not in the slightest. However, pushing the idea of passing on one’s genes, in the context of whiteness, has history to it – history that the pop star who is often lauded for her genius (“her brain!”) has to be willfully ignorant of for this not to occur to.
What makes Taylor Swift dangerous isn’t that she writes lyrics that could serve as the background music to a pro-eugenics Sydney Sweeney ad. It’s that she lacks the self-awareness to see how those two things could be connected.
Similarly, do I think she is explicitly, intentionally referencing Travis Kelce’s Black ex-girlfriends with her Opalite lyric, “Sleepless in the onyx night / But now the sky is opalite?” No. Of course not. If anything, it’s just a tired metaphor (one that she’s already used at length, on a much better song).
But Taylor Swift is often called the greatest songwriter of our generation – if not of all time – to the point that not only do fans joke that she’s an English teacher, that we need to bust out a dictionary with each new album, but she referenced the joke in her engagement announcement.
There is no way that our literary “tortured poet,” whose first single from the album is a spin on Hamlet, doesn’t know that light/day, day/night, white/black metaphors have overlap with anti-Blackness.
And if she doesn’t know these things? Oof. Then this is especially worrisome to me – perhaps more so than if she wrote the aforementioned with anti-Black intention.
At least then, droves of her fans (myself included) would (hopefully?) abandon her. There would be consequences. If Taylor Swift were pro-MAGA, rather than just coolly liberal, she would have to answer to someone. Instead, she gets to smile the criticisms away – because “that’s not what she meant.”
And this is The Left™.
This perfectly encapsulates the problem with the “liberal,” “progressive,” “democratic” left.
We can’t push against anti-Blackness with a brigade of white women who deny their (conscious and subconscious) pro-whiteness.
Taylor Swift isn’t MAGA. We have plenty of evidence to the contrary. Not least of which is that an entire documentary was made about her journey to “come out” as liberal in the face of warnings from her team that she could lose her conservative fanbase.
Indeed, since then, Swift has made a point to endorse democratic candidates, in both national and local (Nashville, TN) elections. And she’s responsible for influencing over 400,000 people to visit vote.org, where one can register to vote.
She’s also explicitly used the phrase “white supremacy” to describe President Donald Trump on X (formerly Twitter).
But this is all part of the problem: Taylor Swift is just your average liberal white woman.
She doesn’t think about race at all, and when she does, she sees white supremacy as a far-right issue. She thinks that voting in centrist “democrats” will save the country, if not the world. And because she believes herself to be a “good person,” she can shake off any criticisms that question her ethics.
And her fans then look at her most basic interpretation of activism and advocacy and follow suit, never leaving their liberal bubble to consider the radicalism of the far left.
She’s a mirror.
And in this case, she’s a mirror for what so many of us don’t understand (or even hate) about ourselves: our own whiteness.
And that’s what makes her dangerous.