Taylor Swift, White Feminism, and the Illusion of Inclusivity

I’ve never been a huge Swiftie. That (rarely voiced) opinion has never gone over well with the people around me; as a teenage girl, almost all of my friends adore Taylor Swift, having grown up listening to her music. I personally don’t understand the hype, but that’s not my issue with her. My issue is how Swift is a symbol of the epidemic of “white feminism.”

Many of us know Matty Healy, Taylor Swift’s rumored recent boyfriend and a musician known for following Kyle Rittenhouse on Instagram, bragging about being aroused by the brutalization of Black women, and doing the Nazi salute at concerts. In addition to these incidents, he recently came under scrutiny for making racist remarks about rapper Ice Spice, including generalizations about her body and ethnicity.

Swift took no public stance in response to any of Healy’s comments and actions, but she did collaborate with Ice Spice on a remix of her hit song, Karma, which was released three months after Healy’s comments about her. The timing of one of Swift’s few collaborations with a woman of color was not well received, with some suggesting that Swift threw Ice Spice a bone to compensate for Healy’s comments.

Of course, a litany of female celebrities have remained silent in the face of their male partner’s sexist and racist actions, and it’s worth mentioning that neither Swift nor Healy confirmed that they were in a relationship. But even if Swift didn’t condone Healy’s disrespectful, racist remarks, she chose not to denounce them publicly. Being neutral is not neutrality; it’s complicity.

Swift hasn’t been politically active for very long; she forayed into the world of politics in 2018 when she endorsed Democratic candidates running for office in her home state of Tennessee. She has since spoken out in support of Black Lives Matter, against Trump, and even professed her desire to become more inclusive and intersectional in her documentary, Miss Americana. But Swift still hasn’t meaningfully demonstrated that she’s intersectional or inclusive in her advocacy. She simply seems to be a white feminist whose platform occasionally overlaps with the myriad issues women of color face.

Of course, this is not to say that we should scrutinize and prosecute celebrities for making mistakes or not speaking out on every issue — and we should recognize that Swift specifically isn’t the cause of, but is rather a symptom of, a system that feminists of color have contended with since the suffrage movement. This system is often referred to as “white feminism,” a type of feminism that is exclusionary of the experiences of women and AFAB people of color. Often, the issues that white women face don’t overlap with the experiences of women of color, and our needs are left behind in favor of theirs.

Take Swift’s hit song, “The Man.” Swift states in the lyrics that the only reason she’s a “bitch” and not a “baller” is because she is a woman and that “every conquest [she] had made would make [her] more of a boss to you.” Of course, what she’s telling her audience is that she, too, wants to be a part of a patriarchal hustle culture but can’t because she’s a rich white woman instead of a rich white man. Exemplified here is how white feminism seeks control over systems of oppression instead of liberation for all. If Swift were an intersectional feminist, she would be working to dismantle these systems of oppression instead of working to entrench herself more deeply in a system that benefits her and actively works against women of color.

Again, it’s worth emphasizing that Swift is a symptom of a much bigger problem, and instead of attacking her, as feminists, we need to focus on uplifting women of color. It’s time we look beyond Miss Americana and examine our privileges and what we can do to level the playing field for all.