Did Taylor Swift know that Kanye was going to rap, "I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex / Why? I made that bitch famous"? We've been talking about this since The Life of Pablo, the album on which the song "Famous" appears, dropped back in February. Taylor vehemently denied giving Kanye her blessing to move forward with the the lyric, releasing a message through her representative that, on the contrary, Kanye merely asked her to release the song via her Twitter account; she then used the Grammys as a platform to express her outrage. The flames were fanned again when Kim told GQ magazine that Taylor was a liar. "[Taylor] totally gave the okay," Kim said. "Rick Rubin was there." The Kardashian brand is managed and polished within an inch of its life. No child of Kris Jenner's is going to be caught in a lie in print. So when Kim also told GQ that she had that conversation on tape, we should all have known it was a matter of time before Kim, true queen of the Slytherin House, showed the receipts. And so here we are.

While much of the internet joined Kim and Kanye on their celebratory ultra-light beam and waited eagerly for commentary from the likes of Swift enemies Katy Perry and Calvin Harris, the tea was clearly a little too hot and bitter for some celebrities, who sanctimoniously pointed out that there are bigger problems in the world for us to focus on than a silly spat between famous people.

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There are more important things to talk about... Why can't people use their voice for something that fucking matters? — Selena Gomez (@selenagomez) July 18, 2016

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Everyone in this industry needs to get their heads out of a hole and look around to realize what's ACTUALLY happening in the REAL world — Chloë Grace Moretz (@ChloeGMoretz) July 18, 2016

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Take interest in the real problems going on. Spread love. ❤️ — Martha Hunt (@MarthaHunt) July 18, 2016

I can only assume that among the "more important things to talk about" and "real world" issues are the recent police shootings of unarmed and innocent black men and the ensuing protests that have swept the country. It's hard to say for sure if that's one of their concerns since many of the people complaining have never publicly said anything about Black Lives Matter, or even alluded to it, until it came time to jump to the defense of a blonde white woman.

They could also be talking about the coup in Turkey or the mess of a Republican National Convention — take your pick. But if BLM is one of the "more important things" these righteous celebrities are asking us to turn our attention to, they're right to do so: the movement is incredibly important. But it's also not unrelated to what's playing out here in La La Land, where an "angry" black man has been accused of bullying a white "victim" for years.

The image of a hulking black man terrorizing a young, innocent, Southern white girl is hardly new in American pop culture. The 1915 movie The Birth of a Nation, the D.W. Griffith silent film about the rise of the KKK in the Reconstruction-era South (commonly known as the first true blockbuster) captured that fear and capitalized on it. Mae Marsh's character was willing to throw herself over a cliff rather than let the villainous black man — played by white actor Walter Long in blackface — get his hands on her; for better or worse, it's an iconic Hollywood moment.

Americans have been conditioned to see black men as threatening for generations, and the consequences of this conditioning range from a pop starlet being able to paint a rapper as a villain for nearly a decade because she feels "bullied" to police officers shooting unarmed men in front of convenience stores because they felt "unsafe." Obviously Kanye's feud with Taylor is far less serious than any death by police shooting, but these cultural moments represent two ends of the same spectrum, a spectrum of systemic racism playing out in America.

Kanye West is, as the New York Times would say , "No angel." The "Famous" video, a seven-minute art piece in which a bunch of celebrities, Kim and Taylor included, appear naked in bed with Kanye, was weird. He's egotistical. He refuses to let Amber Rose live her life. That said, he's really no more threatening than that annoying and overly artsy kid who was in your black box theater club in high school. He's a lot less threatening than, say, producer and alleged sexual abuser, Dr. Luke. His VMAs stunt wasn't nice, no, but it also happened in 2009 and didn't really do any harm to Taylor (on the contrary, it wildly helped her career). But just as we're conditioned to see black men as threatening, we've also been conditioned to respond immediately to the tears and emotions of a white woman. (The defense of a white woman's virtue was once cause for literal lynchings.)

Whether Taylor knows it or not (and I suspect she knows it), if Kim hadn't released those Snapchats, there's a large portion of America that simply would have continued to take her word over Kanye's and believed that he was harassing her in the media out of spite. We're a country structurally set up to protect whiteness over blackness, and at least one reason 2016 has been the dumpster fire that it has been is because of the way America sees black men — and black people — in general. Blackness is threatening, even if the worst thing it's done to you is jump into your spotlight on a Grammys stage or try to sell you some loose cigarettes on the street. While Kim exposing Taylor isn't going to solve racism in America, she's not distracting from the narrative or "real issues" at all. She managed to say, "Keep my man's name out ya mouth," and highlight our country's macro social problems on a micro scale.

As the saying goes: Get you a girl who can do both.

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