Why do white women defend Taylor Swift so proudly?

Billionaire Taylor Swift has announced her engagement to American footballer Travis Kelce. And, Swifties are flooding the internet with their comments and takes on Tay Tay’s latest relationship. However, as ever with Swift, there’s something more than a little off with her public persona.

As a left-wing news outlet, she isn’t our usual fodder. But, the image that Swift has curated throughout her long career is rife with controversies that just won’t go away. And, for many people. she’s become a symbol of what’s wrong with our societies.

Taylor’s Version

For many of her fans, Taylor Swift is a powerful woman overcoming misogyny from the music industry and the press to become a glass-ceiling-busting billionaire. She’s an apparent inspiration to young girls, and has toured the world in record-breaking tour after record-breaking tour. But, Swift’s experiences of misogyny certainly doesn’t exempt her from the racist spats she’s created. And, a billionaire girlboss is still a billionaire. Last I checked around here, it’s simply not possible to become a billionaire without exploitation.

At a time when people around the world are struggling to feed themselves, to afford suitable housing, and see their pay checks swallowed up instantly, Swift’s billionaire status is less girlboss done good, and more parasite rights in action. Swifties often point to her billionaire status as a sign of her success. The thing is, it’s not a sign of success. It’s a sign of how limited collective understandings of success are. Why should girls have role models whose success is built on capitalist exploitation?

And, it’s not 2007. We don’t need to re-tread the very well-worn ground over white feminism’s allegiances to racial capitalism.

Carbon footprint of a small country

Taylor Swift is notorious for her gigantic carbon footprint. Carbon Market Watch reported that:

Her private jet usage amounted to an estimated 8,300 tonnes of carbon emissions in 2022 – that’s about 1,800 times the average human’s annual emissions, or 576 times that of the average American and about 1,000 times that of the average European.

Undoubtedly, the climate crisis is a product of global capitalism. It’s not going to be solved by individuals washing out yoghurt pots that their councils may or may not recycle. But, when one individual – no matter how super duper sparkly she is – is generating such a massive carbon footprint, there’s an obvious answer: fucking stop it.

In 2024, after years of criticism and pleading, Swift’s representatives claimed that she had “offset” her carbon footprint. Unfortunately, they didn’t provide any details as to how she had done so. And, of course, there wasn’t any acknowledgement that offsetting isn’t a magic wand that undoes the damage to the planet caused by private jet usage. Obviously, it’s better to not fly as much in the same way that it’s better to use less plastic than to buy more plastic shit that can be recycled.

Taylor Swift: a white supremacist barbie?

However, logic has nothing to do with Swift’s public image. For a 35 year old, she’s amassed a remarkable number of accusations of racism. Perhaps the most prominent, or at least the one that just won’t go away, is the allegation that Swift is an alt-right white supremacist darling. During Donald Trump’s first term in office when Nazi marches became a thing again (….yes, really), white supremacist rallied around Swift. The founder of a neo-Nazi site said:

The entire alt-right patiently awaits the day when we can lay down our swords and kneel before her throne […] as she commands us to go forth and slaughter the subhuman enemies of the Aryan race.

It took two years for Taylor Swift to speak up:

There’s literally nothing worse than white supremacy. It’s repulsive. There should be no place for it.

And, a then-28 year old Taylor Swift claimed she was learning as much as she could. The sheer luxury of such a pronouncement isn’t lost on those of us who are not insulated from the real world by whiteness. Since her fanbase’s flirtation with white supremacists, Swift has remained largely tight lipped about her political affiliations. However, that same silence has spoken volumes when it comes to Israel’s genocide in Palestine.

Swift can’t control who her fans are. But, she can control what she says about a genocide documented in real time. And here is the thing that’s most grating about her public persona. She luxuriates in the insulation that being an unfathomably rich, skinny, white woman affords her. She’s free to be on a learning journey, to date scumbags, to blunder around being clumsily racist, and ultimately to be defended by hordes of white women.

Nuanced hating on Taylor Swift

In 2015, Taylor Swift stated that misogyny was “ingrained” from birth. How long until a similar realisation about racism? There are much more serious people than Swift unlearning their internalised racism, but apparently we’re supposed to believe she isn’t a racist.

Don’t get me wrong – I am absolutely being a hater here. Swift is far from the only fucked up billionaire singer. She doesn’t have to be – and nor is she expected to be – perfect. But, it’s just not realistic to expect everyone to like her with rabid fervour. To some people, she’s a feminist success story. And to some people, she’s a symbolic marker of how crushing and invalidating white women can be. The standards for white women are entirely different than for women of colour. White women are afforded more grace, space, and time to be themselves. Women of colour are policed socially, culturally, and economically. Having lived, so far, 33 years of it myself, white supremacy shapes how white women are perceived, how they conceive of themselves, and it touches every possible aspect of modern life.

So, why do white women have such allegiance to Taylor? White supremacy isn’t just the preserve of men in KKK hoods. After all, someone has to make the KKK hoods: the handmaidens of white supremacy. Just as misogyny is ingrained into people at birth, so too is white supremacy. Even for nice white people, and even internalised white supremacy for people of colour. The impulse white women feel as a group to defend Swift is perhaps rooted in far uglier roots than they would like to admit. And, ultimately, they’re not reaching for a defence of Taylor as much as they are a defence of the racial capitalist status quo.

Every possible permutation of identity – class, disability, sexuality, gender – moves through the prism of white supremacy. The mediocre lyricist that is Taylor Swift isn’t immune from that.

Featured image via the Canary