I'd Say the 1830s But Without All the Racists

Submission 1,941

Part of a series on Taylor Swift's "The Tortured Poets Department". [View Related Entries]

About

"I'd Say the 1830s But Without All the Racists" refers to a lyric from singer Taylor Swift's song "I Hate It Here" from her 2024 album The Tortured Poets Department. Taken out of context, the lyrics went viral on social media as users posted memes about Taylor Swift being secretly racist and picking a bizarre decade, among other jokes referencing the line.

Origin

On April 19th, 2024, the singer-songwriter released her eleventh studio album The Tortured Poets Department. On the double version of the album, titled The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology,^[1] track 23 "I Hate It Here" contains the following lyric:

My friends used to play a game where
We would pick a decade
We wished we could live in instead of this
I'd say the 1830s but without all the racists
And getting married off for the highest bid
Everyone would look down 'cause it wasn't fun now
Seems like it was never even fun back then
Nostalgia is a mind's trick
If I'd been there, I'd hate it
It was freezing in the palace

On April 19th, numerous users on social media posted several lines from the verse out of context, with the lyric "I'd say the 1830s but without all the racists" going viral. Posts by X^[2]^[3] users @grohlsgf and @ghostijn, the latter captioned, "y’all..😭 there are so many wrong things about this," garnered over 3,200 reposts and 11,000 likes, and 39,000 reposts and 46,000 likes, respectively, in three days (shown below, left and right).

Spread

The lyrics spawned memes in the following days, with jokes implying that Taylor Swift is secretly racist and referencing her past relationship with singer Matt Healy.

For example, an April 19th, 2024, post by X^[4] user @faerieriver questioning the lyrics received over 12,000 reposts and 78,000 likes in three days (shown below, left). Later that day, parody X^[5] account @PobBase captioned the lyric card with a joke about Taylor Swift's fanbase, with the post gaining over 1,500 reposts and 14,000 likes in three days (shown below, right).

Several jokes referencing the Taylor Swift Jetting Everywhere meme went viral on X / Twitter in the following days (examples^[6]^[7] shown below, left and right).