Taylor Swift Receives Backlash For Video, Producer Defends Her
Critics are bashing Taylor Swift's music video to "Wildest Dreams."
The video is being bashed for romanticizing white colonialism, and for using Africa as a backdrop for a story about white people, according to USA Today. She premiered the video during last week's MTV Video Music Awards.
The story features Swift as a 20th Century movie star, who falls in love with her married co-star.
She is accused of using the African landscape and plenty of African animals, but not African people in her video.
The director for the video, Joseph Kahn fired back, saying that there is no political agenda to Swift's video and that many African staff members worked on the video.
"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," Kahn said.
"We cast and edited this video. We collectively decided it would have been historically 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."
Swift's "Shake it Off" video received backlash in the past for "perpetuating black stereotypes" for a scene which featured a group of girls twerking.
The director of "Shake it Off" Mark Romanek said that the video was "a satirical piece... playing with a whole range of music-video tropes and cliches and stereotypes," BBC News reported at the time.
"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," Kahn said of the "Wildest Dreams" music video.
What does Taylor Swift think of the video?
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