“Wildest Dreams” video doesn’t contain racist overtones

When I first watched Taylor Swift’s music video for “Wildest Dreams” during the 2015 VMAs, I didn’t think much of it. To me, it was just like all of her other music videos: visually stimulating and full of romance.  Critics such as Katherine Timpf of National Review, however, have been claiming that this music video not only depicts a heartbroken movie star, but actually glamorizes brutal white colonialism.

In the video, Taylor Swift, playing a movie star from the 1950s named Marjorie Finn (in reference to Swift’s grandmother, Marjorie Finlay), falls in love with her co-star Robert Kingsley, played by Scott Eastwood. After a fight between the two of them on set (no surprise here), we are taken to a scene of the movie’s glamorous Hollywood premiere where Marjorie sees Robert with another woman. By the end of the video, Marjorie is seen running away from the premier in anguish.

Let’s be honest — there’s really no surprise here. This is the usual Taylor music video, full of emotion and betrayal. The argument for racism stems from a few facts about the music video itself. The video is set in Africa during the 1950s with a landscape full of lions, giraffes and a beautiful cascading waterfall. The problem is  there are very few black people in the cast of this fictitious movie being filmed in what some call a “colonial fantasy.”  I saw a few black extras, but finding them was even quite difficult. For anyone not really looking for them, it would have been like they did not even exist.

This was at most a microaggression, the everyday verbal and nonverbal insults, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate a derogatory message to target someone based on their minority status. Though I certainly understand why some would claim this video to be racist, I believe it neither glamorizes white colonialism nor promotes ideas of racism.

Video director Joseph Kahn, stated to Entertain This!, “Wildest Dreams is a song about a relationship that was doomed, and the music video concept was that they were having a love affair on location away from their normal lives. This is not a video about colonialism but a love story on the set of a period film crew in Africa, 1950.” I think Kahn’s intention for this video wasn’t to offend anyone just as he said. It was an honest mistake, and it should be overlooked.

I want to be clear, however. This microaggression isn’t okay. Taylor Swift, as the mega superstar she is, should be more careful with the type of messages she disseminates through her videos. She, along with the producers, should have done more research on the past of white colonialism and been more careful with how they represented it. Microaggression after microaggression can have an insurmountable effect on society.

Ultimately, there are many more important things than this video. For instance, the fact that modern-day colonialism actually still exists as depicted in the documentary We Come As Friends. Let’s have a conversation about that instead.