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CULTURE
Why Black People Don’t Want to Romanticize 1830s With Taylor Swift
Ignoring racism is not the same as confronting it
In her latest song, “I Hate It Here,” Taylor Swift portrays the 1830s as a picturesque scene of a simpler time. Her lyrics, dripping with nostalgia, recall a game where her friends would pick a time they’d rather live in. Taylor responds by saying, “The 1830s but without all the racists. And getting married off for the highest bid.” These words, however, reveal a perspective obscured by rose-tinted glasses, disregarding the grim reality of Black people and women during this era.
Behind the long, flowing, brightly-colored dresses of White women living in the South were the blood, sweat, and tears of slaves forced to harvest cotton. Even the sweet taste of their iced tea was tainted by enslaved labor used to harvest sugar. And the beauty and allure of their favored wedding venue — Plantations — were tainted by these homes doubling as forced-labor encampments. By romanticizing the past, Taylor Swift’s song risks whitewashing the experiences of Black people in this era, whose labor and contributions built this nation. Perhaps we should reflect upon what life was really like during the 1830s. Only then will it become clear why Black people cannot simply daydream away our nation’s nightmarish history.
The domestic slave trade defined American life during the 1830s, fueling the nation’s economy at the expense of enslaved Black people. During the 1830s, White enslavers imported 30,000 enslaved people into Louisiana during this decade, which historian Joshua D. Rothman noted was “nearly 80 percent more than they had in the 1820s.” Additionally, “cotton production in the state increased 63 percent between 1826 and 1834.” Sugar production skyrocketed by 150 percent. Slavery wasn’t just persisting during this period, it was accelerating.
The buying, selling, and trafficking of Black Americans reshaped the economic landscape of the United States, reducing people to commodities in a vastly-connected, unjust system. Thomas Dew, a pros-slavery law professor at the College of William & Mary, even suggested that Virginia was effectively a “negro-raising state for other states,” promoting the dehumanizing practice of forced breeding…
