Taylor Swift’s political awakening has kicked into overdrive over the past few weeks, with the previously quiet pop star declaring she would vote President Trump out of office and voicing support for Black Lives Matter amid ongoing protests against police brutality and systemic racism. Now, the sometimes New Yorker and Londoner is once again turning toward her home state of Tennessee, after she spoke out for the first time in 2018 to support two Democratic congressional candidates there. In a June 12 Twitter thread, she calls for the state’s racist monuments to be taken down, after protesters tore down a statue of white-supremacist publisher Edward Carmack outside the state capitol and the state said it would replace it. “As a Tennessean, it makes me sick that there are monuments standing in our state that celebrate racist historical figures who did evil things. Edward Carmack and Nathan Bedford Forrest were DESPICABLE figures in our state history and should be treated as such,†she tweeted, also invoking a widely criticized statue of Forrest, the KKK’s first grand wizard, in Nashville.
Swift called reinstalling the Carmack statue “a waste of state funds†later in the thread, and wrote, “Taking down statues isn’t going to fix centuries of systemic oppression, violence and hatred that black people have had to endure but it might bring us one small step closer to making ALL Tennesseans and visitors to our state feel safe — not just the white ones.†She concluded her plea, “You can’t change history, but you can change this.†At this rate, catch us tuning in next week for Swift’s explanation of defunding the police.