WASHINGTON, Sept. 2 (UPI) — In the wake of the debut of her “Wildest Dreams” music video, Taylor Swift is being criticized for allegedly endorsing a colonized Africa.
The video’s director, Joseph Kahn, has spoken out against harsh criticism published in several pieces including on NPR, in the Huffington Post and on the Daily Dot. NPR’s article, “Taylor Swift is Dreaming of A Very White Africa,” written by African-born writers, Vivian Rutabingwa and James Kassaga Arinaitwe, has already gone viral.
“My long time producer Jil Hardin who did Power/Rangers, Blank Space, Wildest Dreams is a (super hot) black woman FYI,” Kahn said on Twitter early Wednesday morning.
“I work with the most famous people in the world…and I would never want to be famous,” he continued in a second tweet. “People take shots at you 24/7. It’s nuts.”
Kahn has reportedly worked with artists including Swift, 50 Cent, Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg.
Neither Swift nor her team has yet commented on the controversy. Phone calls and email attempts by UPI to Swift’s team in regards to the published reports have not been returned.
In the published reports, fans and critics alike are discussing the resonating issue of Swift’s racial politics. In the video “Wildest Dreams,” Swift portrays a brunette actress shooting a film with Clint Eastood’s son, Scott, in the middle of an African desert. According to critics, the issue of the video is not only the setting and inferred time period, but the distinct exclusion of people of color on-screen.
“For a clip that’s set in Africa — it’s about as white as a Sunday morning farmer’s market,” writer Nico Lang wrote for Daily Dot. “The video wants to have its old-school Hollywood romance but ends up eating some old-school Hollywood racism, too.”
Rutabingwa and Arinaitwe said in their piece:
“To those of us from the continent who had parents or grandparents who lived through colonialism (and it can be argued in some cases are still living through it), this nostalgia that privileged white people have for colonial Africa is awkwardly confusing to say the least and offensive to say the most. […]
Swift’s music is entertaining for many. She should absolutely be able to use any location as a backdrop. But she packages our continent as the backdrop for her romantic songs devoid of any African person or storyline, and she sets the video in a time when the people depicted by Swift and her co-stars killed, dehumanized and traumatized millions of Africans. That is beyond problematic.”
“Wildest Dreams” premiered on Sunday during this year’s MTV Video Music Awards after Swift won four top-spots including Video of the Year for “Bad Blood.”
Comment count on this article reflects comments made on Breitbart.com and Facebook. Visit Breitbart's Facebook Page.