Director Denies Taylor Swift’s Wildest Dreams Is Racist

Singer Taylor Swift

THE  director of Taylor Swift’s latest music video has defended the singer after she was accused of creating a African colonial fantasy in the video.

The video has been viewed more than 15 million times, but some have criticised the scarcity of black people and said it portrays a stereotyped colonial-era view of Africa.

Joseph Kahn said the video for Wildest Dreams does include black people and was produced by a black woman and edited by a black man.

“This is not a video about colonialism but a love story on the set of a period film crew in Africa, 1950,” Khan said in a statement.

“There are black Africans in the video in a number of shots, but I rarely cut to crew faces outside of the director as the vast majority of screen time is Taylor and (actor) Scott (Eastwood).”
Kahn, who also directed Swift’s Blank Space and Bad Blood videos, is Asian.

Watch video for Wildest Dreams

Wildest Dreams shows Swift as an actress who falls in love with her co-star on the set. Black actors are seen in some of the clips from a distance.
Khan said: “The reality is not only were there people of colour in the video, but the key creatives who worked on this video are people of colour. …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.”

The video, filmed in Ethiopia, also features a number of African animals including lions, giraffes and zebra.

Swift is donating all of the proceeds from the Wildest Dreams video to the African Parks Foundation.

The song is the fifth single from her best-selling 1989 album.

She has not responded to the criticism.