On October 26th, Taylor Swift’s music video, “… Ready For It?” dropped on YouTube. A day later it was grossing 17 million hits and had hit #1 of YouTube’s trending videos. The world has seen Taylor Swift rise through the ranks of the pop world, from her curly-headed days of “Teardrops On my Guitar” to her modern bleached bob and “Look What You Made Me Do.” She was the small town sweetheart we all rooted for—I certainly did, and was definitely a fan back in her underdog days. But now I can’t even get through a single music video. While Taylor is undeniably a talented musician, she’s fallen far from her original role. Although people evolve many times throughout their lives, in her case it’s been changed for the worse. Recently, Taylor has been attempting to ditch her innocent southern persona in favor of becoming a vengeful ‘badass.’ We see this when she bathed in a bath of diamonds in order to redress the “wrongs” Kanye enacted upon her. However, in effect, she looks weaker and more inconsiderate than ever. A reference to an extremely traumatic and scarring experience targeting a mother of two children? Really, Taylor?
Let’s take another example, her most recent music video for “…Ready For It.” The music video is basically a cinematic replica of “Ghost in the Shell,” a movie that came out earlier this year starring Scarlett Johansson. Johansson was widely criticized for playing the part of a Japanese woman, particularly since the film essentially fetishized Japanese culture without even including any real Japanese influences or Japanese protagonists. And yet, despite the widespread criticisms of racism and whitewashing, Taylor still made the carbon copy of it. DId she not see the public uproar over Johansson’s appropriation? Did she not understand the cultural implications and repercussions of appropriation? Did she simply choose to ignore it? Either way, this blatant ignorance is, quite frankly, insulting.
It seems like white Hollywood world is always able to get away with an excessive plethora of these racist insults. Unfortunately, being inclusive and just not racist is extremely important in Hollywood because movies, tv shows, and their stars have a huge influence on lives around the world as the Western ideal prevails and anything lesser than the blonde and beautiful is usually used as a simple prop. Taylor will probably never truly see—let alone understand—the repercussions of her actions that make people want double eyelids or lighter skin or straighter hair and undergo sometimes dangerous procedures to achieve them.
Asians continue to be the butt of the joke because “Asians don’t have enough visual range of emotion” and “Asians won’t appeal to a wide audience.” Yet, simultaneously, Asian culture is exotic and therefore the perfect background for the “more important” white narratives like in Transformers: Age of Extinction, Pacific Rim, The Wolverine, The Hangover Part 2, and many more! It’s time to stop exploiting tired stereotypes for profit and start showing Asian people for who they truly are—complex, real people, not props or one-dimensional characters. When it comes to insulting cliches and cultural appropriation: Taylor Swift, please exclude us from that narrative.