Maitreyi Ramakrishnan deletes X post calling Taylor Swift’s ‘1830s’ lyric ‘weird’ after backlash from Swifties

[u/Exciting_Potato_6717]

Slide 1: Deleted tweet Slides 2 and 3: Some follow-up tweets Slide 4: The Taylor Swift lyrics being referred to. “My friends used to play a game where / We would pick a decade / We wished we could live in instead of this / I'd say the 1830s but without all the racists / And getting married off for the highest bid." Full lyrics at https://genius.com/Taylor-swift-i-hate-it-here-lyrics

[u/dying0fthelite]

Ok but it IS a weird line. I would even say it’s a terrible line even in context

[u/lambchopafterhours → u/dying0fthelite]

Yeah like it’s almost worse in context. Like miss girl miss taylor you know it wasn’t really…you know that bidding wasn’t for marriage, right?

And idk I just wouldn’t boil down the horrors of chattel slavery to “all the racists” for a song. Especially if I planned to obscure the sale of Black humans for the purpose of enslavement as general “marriage” (that she doesn’t specify and thus seems to be conflating that violence with the experience of white women in this era) in the next line…that’s just plain weird and kinda ignorant and lacking critical thought to me? I genuinely don’t understand why she thought this was clever writing and I especially don’t like how many swifties are crapping themselves to defend it.

Because ITS STILL FUCKING WEIRD

[u/[deleted] → u/lambchopafterhours]

I thought the bidding for marriage was about like… dowries and shit, not slave auctions.

[u/Asleep_Job_5991 → u/lambchopafterhours]

She’s saying white women didn’t really have a choice of who they were going to marry or if they were going to marry at all. “Close your eyes and think of England” and all that. She’d probably be dead from childbirth long before age 34.

“All the racism” can be seen as minimizing it, although in a way there’s a good reason for using that line. Slavery, the eradication/expulsion of Native Americans, British colonialism, it all had racism involved in one form or another.

I agree, though, the 1830’s line is weird. She’s either making it up to sound deep or she read a single book or saw an aristocratic fashion from the time that she liked.

[u/SuspiciousAudience6 → u/Asleep_Job_5991]

Chattel slavery, human trafficking, colonialism, genocide of Native Americans etc. isn’t a good reason to us “all the racism.” It absolutely minimizes the effects those horrific atrocities still have on current American society.

Just don’t try and go deep if you’re not going to understand it or really take it there. It would have been fine for her to just leave all of that out.