Director defends Taylor Swift's "Wildest Dreams" video of whitewashing
The director of Taylor Swift's new music video is defending the singer after some claimed she whitewashed her video based in Africa.
Joseph Kahn said in a statement Wednesday that the video for "Wildest Dreams" includes black people and was produced by a black woman and edited by a black man.
Kahn, who directed Swift's "Blank Space" and "Bad Blood," is Asian.
"Wildest Dreams" is set in 1950s Africa and portrays 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.
Kahn said: "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."
He later took to Twitter with a series of posts in which he appears to make light of the backlash:
Still, some social media users and critics took aim at the video.
"Taylor Swift is dressed as a colonial-era woman on African soil. With just a few exceptions, the cast in the video -- the actors playing her boyfriend and a movie director and his staff -- all appear to be white," NPR contributors Viviane Rutabingwa and James Kassafa Arinaitwe write in their commentary of the video. "We are shocked to think that in 2015, Taylor Swift, her record label and her video production group would think it was okay to film a video that presents a glamorous version of the white colonial fantasy of Africa."