As Taylor Swift prepared to bring the Eras Tour to Brazil, she was met with controversy as her fans launched a Twitter battle to get her tour t-shirt projected onto the Christ the Redeemer statue. The priest charged with making decisions about what gets to be projected onto the iconic statue that overlooks Rio de Janeiro received both desperate pleas and angry attacks from Swifties, as some accused him of hesitating to approve dressing the Savior in a “junior jewels” shirt due to his preference for Ariana Grande over Swift. In the end, the Swifties had their way, thus placing their idol among the ranks of the most revered deities in the universe.
It is surely understandable if Padre Omar was indeed a die-hard Arianator: Who can blame him for being partial to the culturally-Catholic Grande over Swift, whose upbringing was vaguely Protestant? Although neither pop star is overtly religious, their respective public personas and overall aesthetics speak to two vastly different cultural—even cosmic—paradigms.
And while both Swift and Grande are (technically…according to the contemporary usages of the term) both “white girls,” their public images speak to two distinct manifestations of “whiteness.”