Not sure why you’re being such a prick. It’s really not that wild for someone to point out the link between her behavior and a well-known phenomenon in US history. But if you really feel the need to defend that, okay.

The line she made such a huge deal about was that he “made her famous”. I don’t really care if she was “half-right.” She still dedicated an awful lot of time to reaffirming a narrative that casts her as an underdog and props up a pretty common racist myth.

Exactly. The alt-right could have latched onto any super white artist, so I couldn’t really blame her for the association. But I mean, her last reinvention was all about this feminist awakening and being self-aware, yet she can’t even say “whoa I don’t agree with these bigots at all.”

What argument? I responded to a comment that I agree with. And whether you like it or not, the optics of playing into a racist trope while refusing to address the fact that Nazis adore you are uhm, really bad.

V true. Idk why it’s so difficult for folks to understand that this is about more than just piling on a pop star. Also she’s like the darling of the alt-right and has never really dispelled rumors that she voted for the Orange One, so I don’t think it would matter even if it was just a pile on

I mean, Kanye seems like kind of an ass but I don’t think that makes it ok for Taylor to perpetuate the whole “big scary black man was mean to me” thing. It would be different if she was saying “you’re a sexist egoist who seems to have bizarre double standards about women and sex work.”

This is what that bothers me about the whole Taylor/Kanye/Kim thing. And I get the vibe that to Taylor and her people the issue is simply that she got caught in a lie, not the fact that she got caught in a really insidious lie with painfully racist undertones.

That’s actually a really good point. She’s been famous, to some extent, since she was 16 or 17. I imagine she’s been surrounded by yes people since then, so it makes sense that her emotional maturity would halt around late adolescence/early adulthood. But yeah, the song is unimpressive either way.

I get what you’re saying, but she’s pushing 30. I’m a few years younger than she is and idk, coming of age stuff doesn’t really seem appropriate when you’re over 25.

This is so depressingly true. I’m relatively white passing and I’ve been subjected to a lot of these “let me reveal my bigotry to you as you are presumably a fellow bigot” conversations. But I’m also in the south, so people are a bit less covert about it.

I am v late to this story, but fucking thank you for mention that “I have no racism in my heart” bullshit. I don’t care what’s in someone’s heart if their actions actively prop up and perpetuate insitutuonal racism.

You basically just described my family.

It really is. Depression is a serious illness and treating it like a phase or something you can just get over is so needlessly cruel.

The point about parents telling kids to “get over it” really breaks my heart. I’ve been in that place, where self-care seems damn near impossible and your hygiene falls to the wayside, but never when I was living with family. I really, really hope this girl has someone in her life she can talk to and confide in.

You know, I grew up in the decades where people were supposedly brow beaten into saying “African American” and I genuinely don’t recall the insistence that saying “black” is racist. I was pretty much always told to listen to how people self-identify and go from there. Idk why that’s so complex.

Bleh, that was supposed to say “Americans.” But my point still stands. I would understand recent immigrants being wary about our health care system though.

You would be wrong. I may not know people from the cultures you do, but my parents are first generation immigrants sooo

If by “peers” you mean other students rather than other black folks, I’m guessing they felt uncomfortable holding eye contact with an authority figure. It’s a personality quirk, not a cultural norm.

This is both odd and somehow not surprising to me. My family’s from Lebanon, but I grew up in the south and a truly weird number of white people think Arabs come from India.

Right?? I didn’t realize ointment was somehow racially coded..