In the early years of this decade, my friends and I came of age at the hands of the radio dial. We were four South Asian-American girls living in suburban Pennsylvania, who spent Sundays learning classical dance at the temple and the rest of our free time studying. None of us talked to boys until well into college. Which is precisely why we carved crushes out of 15-second encounters while we blasted pop music in the car. There were no Asian women on the radio to teach us how to grow into this complicated girlhood, and we ended up listening mostly to white singers—chief among them Taylor Swift, then still country-pop’s untouchable young queen. We pulled lyrics from her songs and shaped them around the specifics of our own lives. But our relationships to her music became more about our intricate world-building—and the friendships at the center of that world.

We made rituals out of Speak Now’s “Enchanted,” the line, “Please don’t be in love with someone else” banged in our chests as we relived interactions with strangers who smiled at red lights and calculus classmates who probably just wanted to copy our answers. Fearless’s “Fifteen,” about Swift’s first heartache as a high school freshman, had little to do with our very single lives, but we took personal pride when she sang, “In your life you’ll do things greater than dating the boy on the football team.” Swift’s reassurance that there were more important things than boys with social capital allowed us to imagine singleness as a marker of independence, not of undesirability.

As our emotions and hormones buzzed electric, most media portrayals of young women we saw suggested, again and again, that our anger was hysteria and our sadness was weakness. We found solace in Swift’s audacity to feel so much, and so publicly. Of course the people who hurt her (and us) deserved to be held accountable. At the time, we didn’t realize that as a white woman, she could weaponize her position as a victim when she felt wronged by people of color. Back then we didn’t have the language, let alone the life experience, to really understand how Swift’s racial privileges affected her music.

This has become increasingly obvious over the last few years. In 2015, when Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda” clip wasn’t nominated for Video of the Year at the VMAs, the rapper rightfully critiqued the MTV awards show for privileging music videos cast with thin bodies, undoubtedly a beauty standard with race-related undertones. Swift, whose “Bad Blood” video was nominated, took that commentary personally and told Minaj she was pitting women against each other (Swift later conceded that she missed Minaj’s point). Then, Swift’s ongoing feud with Kanye West reached a dramatic apex last year, when Swift claimed West didn’t have her permission to rap about her on “Famous”; this was later negated by Kim Kardashian West’s Snapchat video footage of Taylor and Kanye chummily discussing the lyrics by phone. In both situations, Swift claimed to be the victim of sexism from Minaj and West, using the latter incident to make a big feminist statement in an acceptance speech at the 2016 Grammys.

For all this talk about feminism and solidarity and girl squads, Swift went notably silent during last year’s election, while her peers like Katy Perry and Beyoncé went to bat for Hillary Clinton. By not denouncing Trump, it seemed to many people that Swift was tacitly condoning him. This emboldened right-leaning Swifties, including white supremacist fans and publications, who have since adopted Swift’s lyrics on social media and praised her as their “Aryan Goddess.”