my biggest takeaway from the "Miss Americana" documentary is how being told "don't be like the Dixie Chicks and alienate your conservative fans" from such a young age really fucked Taylor up but the Trump era radicalized her to begin finally pushing back against that conditioning https://twitter.com/taylorswift13/status/1266392274549776387

is she still sometimes a whole hot mess of a white girl

obviously

but she also has access to a vast audience the rest of us don't have access to - i.e. young people who are now, or will grow up to be, white voters in deeply conservative areas of America - so this is not nothing

if you read the replies to that tweet, it seems to be a lot of support and affirmation from young people, and a lot of outrage from their Karen moms

joke's on you, Karen, you've just made listening to Taylor Swift a thing your tween daughter gets to feel rebellious about now

Taylor Swift knows EXACTLY who she's talking to and it's not the Karen moms

sometimes, even when a person is not perfect, they are important as an example of how at any point, if we choose to, we can unlearn any of the false, toxic things we were brought up believing were truth beyond question

Megan Phelps-Roper is sort of the patron saint of this

Anne Lamott - a writer I really like - once tweeted something transphobic about Kaitlyn Jenner, and her son had a great thread about how educating his mom on why that wasn't okay was something he saw as his work, so trans people didn't have to perform that emotional labor, and -

he said something then which I think about constantly, in so many contexts, which was "for everything in your life that you now know, there was a time when you didn't know it."

which is different from saying it's OKAY that you had no idea, it just means that it's TRUE

and while it's fair for the people who have been trying to get your attention to say, like, "hi, yes, you're 40 years late to this party," the truth is that if oppression is not your own lived experience, then you had to learn about it from somewhere outside your own life

so I think a lot of the work of allyship is about being more deeply aware about the things going on in the world that are outside your own life, because that is the only way to atone for your past fuckups and prevent future ones, and it's also the only way to make a better world

and I think what we're seeing is that for a long time, Taylor Swift was not really paying deep attention to how bad things were, because she did not have to, because it did not touch her

because for everything she knows now, there was a time when she didn't know it

and you don't get a MEDAL for that, but you do get the responsibility of using that knowledge you now have to try and lift some of the emotional labor of educating other privileged people off the shoulders of oppressed people, so your reward is helping to make the world better