Comment 5 for bug 854401

upstream says we should update our theme:

"This is not really a bug; in the previous versions of Nautilus, the color and
"shadow" effect (which is what makes the text readable on different background
colors) was all hardcoded.
As part of some cleanups to make Nautilus more theme-friendly, in 3.1.92 I
changed it to use theme colors for this, and added some style classes so that
themes can choose colors they like.

For instance, Adwaita now uses pretty much the same color scheme that was
hardcoded in Nautilus before, from the CSS [1].

Closing as NOTABUG. Feel free to contact me if you need help on how to
implement the theming part for your theme.

[1]
http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-themes-standard/tree/themes/Adwaita/gtk-3.0/gnome-applications.css#n26"