Taylor Swift released a splashy new music video last week — “Shake It Off,” a single from her forthcoming album, “1989.” The video features Ms. Swift trying her hand at a variety of dance styles — pointe, interpretive, break — to the tune of a brassy pop anthem about “players,” “haters” and “fakers,” a measurable departure from the soft-sung country love ballads that brought her worldwide fame.

Despite the anti-hater vibe of “Shake It Off,” the video has inspired considerable backlash. The controversy centers on a clip in which Ms. Swift appears to (attempt to) twerk alongside backup dancers scantily clad in stereotypical street wear — high-tops, gold doorknocker earrings, crop-top hoodies and shredded-denim shorts.

The rapper Earl Sweatshirt, of the Los Angeles-based hip-hop collective Odd Future, took to Twitter to air his particular grievances:

haven’t watched the taylor swift video and I don’t need to watch it to tell you that it’s inherently offensive and ultimately harmful — EARL (@earlxsweat) 19 Aug 14

perpetuating black stereotypes to the same demographic of white girls who hide their prejudice by proclaiming their love of the culture — EARL (@earlxsweat) 19 Aug 14

for instance, those of you who are afraid of black people but love that in 2014 it’s ok for you to be trill or twerk or say nigga — EARL (@earlxsweat) 19 Aug 14

The indictment echoes criticisms levied at Lily Allen’s “Hard Out Here” video and Miley Cyrus’s performance at the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards (and its antecedent, the video for “We Can’t Stop”) — that white-girl pop stars twerking, or singing about twerking, appropriates, objectifies and oversimplifies African-American culture.

“Miley and her ilk need to be reminded that the stuff they think is cool, the accoutrements they’re borrowing, have been birthed in an environment where people are underprivileged, undereducated, oppressed, underrepresented, disenfranchised, systemically discriminated against and struggling in a system set up to insure that they fail,” wrote Jezebel’s Dodai Stewart in an essay titled “On Miley Cyrus, Ratchet Culture and Accessorizing With Black People.”

“Why does every pop singer looking for a new, risqué look these days rely on allusions to black culture to render them sexy, daring and current?” asks The Daily Beast’s Amy Zimmerman. “‘Shake It Off’ might be Swift’s version of throwing an ethnically inclusive dance party, but her culturally insensitive stamp of approval is as superfluous as it is ignorant.”

But Everdeen Mason of Refinery29 doesn’t think that’s what’s going on here: “In each segment of dance in the video, including twerking, Swift danced with people of all races. In fact, in that infamous butt photo from the video, there are white legs and butts in it as well. No one here is a prop, unless every dancer, regardless of race or whether they’re booth-shakers or cheerleaders, is.”

To others, the image of a white girl twerking, even alongside black dancers, is still problematic. Grace Medford, who published a critique of “Shake It Off” on her pop-music blog, One of Those Faces, and on Vice’s Noisey vertical, insists the particular breed of cultural appropriation Ms. Swift engages in is less concerned with the objectification of black bodies (à la Lily and Miley) than the disparity of privilege afforded the respective pop cultures of white and black America. White pop stars “have so much on their plate and a buffet table of privilege at their disposal,” she writes, so “why is it so important for them to eat from everyone else’s plate too?”

The New York Times’s Brian Seibert, writing for ArtsBeat, thinks Ms. Swift is less interested in eating from everyone else’s plate than engaging in a little lightweight cultural criticism: “The moment when Ms. Swift crawls between the lined up legs of the twerking ladies, advancing through the colonnades of jiggling flesh as if she were the camera of Busby Berkeley, is very silly. A second later, when Ms. Swift breaks out in giggles, she is laughing at the absurdity of herself in that video genre, but also, I think, at the absurdity of the genre.”

But The New Inquiry’s Ayesha A. Siddiqi, writing for Vice, is skeptical of white America’s motives in critiquing black-dominated genres and the accompanying cultural trappings. In her assessment of “Hard Out Here,” she writes: “The video uses black bodies as the aggressors of Allen’s insecurities, juxtaposing them as physicalities Allen can’t replicate and thus finds worthy of ridicule.” The video made “rap music and its most visible participants” a “lightning rod” for the supposed moral bankruptcy of American pop culture — a deviation from its intended goal of anti-patriarchal subversion. In effect, a critique of twerking is inherently a critique of black bodies. Even when everyone else is doing it, too.

Ms. Swift’s video may not be as blatantly appropriative as a “Hard Out Here” or “We Can’t Stop,” but it’s evident her art direction strikes a nerve. And sometimes, to cross genres is to highlight deep-seated tensions between racially delineated genres of music.