'This is not about colonialism'

Director defends Taylor Swift's 'whitewashed' music video set in Africa

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 that the video for Wildest Dreams includes 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," Kahn 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 screentime is Taylor and (actor) Scott (Eastwood)."
Kahn, who directed Swift's Blank Space and Bad Blood, is Asian.
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Wildest Dreams 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.
"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," Khan said.
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"This video is set in the past by a crew set in the present and we are all proud of our work," he added.
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.