Taylor Swift’s Kamala Endorsement rings both hopeful and hollow given her problematic history with Black people
Taylor Swift recently gave a glowing endorsement to Kamala Harris for the 2024 presidency and everyone’s pretty excited about that. I, on the other hand, have a few issues, as Swift’s history with Black people is fairly problematic.
It’s no understatement to say that Taylor Swift is probably the biggest musician on the planet right now. Thanks to her record-shattering Eras tour, Swift has now joined the illustrious billionaire musicians club only a select few like Paul McCartney and Kanye West have ever been in. According to AP News, Swift is the first musician whose tour has grossed past the $1 billion mark. I’m not too big on late stage capitalism stuff, but it’s kind of wild how big Swift has blown up in the past few years or so.
As most of us know by now, Swift recently endorsed Harris, marking the first time she’s ever endorsed a president in her life. Normally, Swift tends to stay fairly quiet with her politics, which is kind of a bad thing. Swift isn’t what you would say like you and me, everyday people with a different set of expectations, but a mega celebrity with a huge platform of influence. And it’s a shame that, while she did decide to endorse a woman of color, her history with people of color is, well, not good.
For starters, Swift’s lawyers once went after a woman of color’s blog that criticized Swift for her silence in white supremacy. As ACLU says, Meghan Herning of PopFront wrote a blog post called “Swiftly to the alt-right: Taylor subtly gets the lower case kkk in formation,” which examines imagery in Swift songs like “Look What You Made Me Do” and their potential to be hijacked by the far-right. Herning also criticized Swift for not endorsing Hilary and for not publicly denouncing neo-Nazis who claimed her as an Aryan goddess.
Swift’s lawyers were quick to the punch, sending out a cease and desist and claiming defamation. Of course, the writer did no such thing, which the ACLU of Northern California even defended, but Swift was unusually quiet on this end. If people of color can’t criticize her silence in the face of racism, then that says a good amount about her politics.
Another issue with Swift is that she’s always eerily silent on the racism of past partners. Swift and John Mayer dated for a brief while back in 2009. If you know anything about Mayer, you’ll know where this is heading. As reported by The Guardian, Mayer on record has apologized for using the n-word, and even said he has a “David Duke c*ck” because he refuses to date Black women. Swift did not have much of anything to say on this end.
In an excellent Salon piece written by Kelly Pau, she goes over ex-boyfriend of Swift Matt Healy and his anti-Black racism and far-right politics and how Swift basically turned a blind eye to all of this. Healy even followed Kyle Rittenhouse on Instagram, but that still wasn’t enough of a red flag for Swift to say much about it publicly. As we’ve talked about before, Swift also used Ice Spice to shield her own white feminism and basically avoid all wrongdoing.
While it’s good that Swift is putting some much needed attention behind Kamala’s presidential bid, we need to recognize where she seriously misstepped with non-white people and reconcile hard truths.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
