{"id":1459003,"date":"2024-02-23T20:45:00","date_gmt":"2024-02-24T01:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/?p=1459003"},"modified":"2024-02-23T20:45:00","modified_gmt":"2024-02-24T01:45:00","slug":"its-slightly-racist-to-be-a-taylor-swift-fan-blm-co-founder-says","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/its-slightly-racist-to-be-a-taylor-swift-fan-blm-co-founder-says\/1459003\/","title":{"rendered":"It’s “Slightly Racist To Be A Taylor Swift Fan”, BLM Co-Founder Says"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s “Slightly Racist To Be A Taylor Swift Fan”, BLM Co-Founder Says<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Authored by Sarah Wilder via The College Fix,<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Melina Abdullah, a professor of Pan-African Studies at Cal State University Los Angeles who is a leader in the Black Lives Matter movement and once argued Jussie Smollet was framed, recently stated she thinks Taylor Swift fans are kinda racist.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Abdullah made the comments in a\u00a0post<\/a>\u00a0on X during Super Bowl, prompting a lively debate on the platform as Swift attended the game to watch her current boyfriend, Travis Kelce, help lead his team, the Kansas City Chiefs, to victory.<\/p>\n

Abdullah also\u00a0wrote<\/a>\u00a0on X after the game, in response to the San Francisco 49ers loss: \u201cWhy do I feel like this was some right-wing, white-supremacist conspiracy?!?! Booooooo!!!!\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cFolks think they\u2019re attacking me by asking why I think everything is racist\u2026I\u2019m not offended. Virtually everything is racist,\u201d <\/strong><\/em>she wrote in another post that day after her comments garnered attention.<\/p>\n

Abdullah did not respond to requests for comment from\u00a0The College Fix<\/em>\u00a0over the last week seeking further context on her posts and the interest they prompted.<\/p>\n

Why do I feel like it\u2019s slightly racist to be a Taylor Swift fan?<\/p>\n

\u2014 Melina Abdullah (@DocMellyMel) February 11, 2024<\/a><\/p>\n

“Too many American flags”<\/strong><\/em> is also racist-feeling-y…<\/p>\n

I said FEEL, not think.
\nKind of like that feeling I get when there are too many American flags.<\/p>\n

\u2014 Melina Abdullah (@DocMellyMel) February 13, 2024<\/a><\/p>\n

Professor Abdullah\u2019s faculty bio describes her as \u201ca womanist scholar-activist \u2013 understanding the role that she plays in the academy as intrinsically linked to broader struggles for the liberation of oppressed people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Abdullah is\u00a0listed<\/a>\u00a0as a co-founder of Black Lives Matter\u2019s Los Angeles chapter and\u00a0co-director<\/a>\u00a0of Black Lives Matter Grassroots,<\/strong> the activist wing of the controversial advocacy organization.<\/p>\n

In December 2021, she authored a post arguing Jussie Smollett is innocent during his trial.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn our commitment to abolition, we can never believe police, especially the Chicago Police Department (CPD) over Jussie Smollett,<\/strong> a Black man who has been courageously present, visible, and vocal in the struggle for Black freedom. While policing at-large is an irredeemable institution, CPD is notorious for its long and deep history of corruption, racism, and brutality,\u201d she\u00a0wrote<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Two days after that statement was published, Smollett was found guilty of staging a fake hate crime. <\/strong><\/p>\n

The actor had claimed he was attacked by two white men screaming \u201cThis is MAGA country\u201d in the middle of the night in freezing weather on the streets of Chicago in 2019. He has actually hired two black men to perpetrate the hoax.<\/p>\n

Abdullah\u00a0called<\/a>\u00a0the verdict a \u201cwhite supremacist charade.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

As\u00a0The College Fix<\/em>\u00a0has previously reported, at a 2017 conference on intersectionality and discrimination, Abdullah\u00a0said<\/a>\u00a0current-day police officers are the \u201cslave catchers\u201d of yesteryear: \u201cYou literally have a target on your back. That is what policing was founded on and that is what it evolved out of.\u201d<\/p>\n

A year before that, Abdullah\u00a0referred<\/a>\u00a0to Jewish conservative commentator Ben Shapiro as a \u201cneo-KKK member\u201d and\u00a0\u201cpart of the conversation about \u2018anti-blackness.\u2019\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

In 2022, she\u00a0said<\/a>\u00a0on X that white people should not go to Juneteeth cookouts.<\/p>\n

Abdullah\u2019s more recent comments come as academia focuses on the Swift \u201cphenomenon.\u201d<\/p>\n

Swift\u2019s ongoing musical tour\u00a0became<\/a>\u00a0the highest-grossing tour of all time and hit $1 billion in revenue as of December 2023. <\/strong>The singer received six nominations at the Grammys this year, announcing a brand new album as she received one of her two awards of the night.<\/p>\n

The University of Florida will\u00a0offer<\/a>\u00a0an honors course on Swift\u2019s \u201cevergreen songwriting\u201d this spring semester, led by a professor with a\u00a0stated<\/a>\u00a0interest in promoting \u201cdiversity, equity, and inclusion.\u201d<\/p>\n

Harvard University is also offering a course on Swift\u2019s music titled \u201cTaylor Swift and Her World\u201d during the spring semester.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cWe will move through Swift\u2019s own catalogue, including hits, deep cuts, outtakes, re-recordings, considering songwriting as its own art, distinct from poems recited or silently read,\u201d a course description on Harvard\u2019s website\u00a0reads<\/a>. \u201cWe will learn how to study fan culture, celebrity culture, adolescence, adulthood and appropriation; how to think about white texts, Southern texts, transatlantic texts, and queer subtexts.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Abdullah is also not the first in academia to blast Swift and her fandom.<\/strong><\/p>\n

In 2022, shortly after Swift released her album \u201cMidnights,\u201d the singer was\u00a0forced to delete<\/a>\u00a0a section of her music video for the song \u201cAnti-Hero\u201d for what some viewed as promotion of fatphobia.<\/p>\n

In the music video, Swift is astonished to see a bathroom scale reading \u201cfat,\u201d while a second character, also played by Swift, looks at it reproachfully. Some defended the music video, saying the scene drew attention to the harms of eating disorders suffered mostly by women. Kristin Rodier and Heather McLean, professors at Athabasca University, responded to Swift\u2019s defenders in an article for\u00a0The Conversation.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cSome have raised concerns that Swift\u2019s removal of the scene from the video watered down her feminist message,\u201d Rodier and McLean wrote. \u201cThis suggests that fat becomes a feminist issue only in the context of the harms of eating disorders from a white woman\u2019s perspective, within market-friendly celebrity feminism.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Northeastern University and the University of South Carolina also announced upcoming courses on Swift\u2019s discography, with Northeastern\u00a0focusing<\/a>\u00a0on \u201cGender and Storytelling\u201d in her music.<\/p>\n

University of South Carolina\u2019s course will focus on Swift\u2019s \u201cagency as a woman,\u201d\u00a0according<\/a>\u00a0to a university spokesperson. The course is titled, \u201cLife is Just a Classroom: Taylor\u2019s Version,\u201d an allusion to lyrics in her song \u201cNew Romantics.\u201d<\/p>\n

An academic conference put on by the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2021 examined the \u201cwhiteness\u201d of Swift\u2019s fanbase, referring to listening to her music as a \u201cguilty pleasure\u201d of many.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn addition to looking at how she engages with gender and age and maturity, some scholars are really engaging with the politics of whiteness and how that plays out in her fandom,\u201d<\/strong><\/em> said Kate Galloway, an ethnomusicologist at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Tyler Durden<\/a><\/span>
\nFri, 02\/23\/2024 – 15:45<\/span><\/p>\n

\u200bRead More<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s “Slightly Racist To Be A Taylor Swift Fan”, BLM Co-Founder Says Authored by Sarah Wilder via The College Fix, Melina Abdullah, a professor of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1459003","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","wpcat-1-id"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbimBl-67yj","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1459003","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1459003"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1459003\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1459003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1459003"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1459003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}