In early 2010, I came within a hair’s breadth of securing a rare interview with Morrissey myself, but he ultimately backed out. It was disappointing, because I had planned…to ask him if there was any valid reason for a black man like me not to swear off him and his music.
In a post for the Feminist Wire (reprinted at Racialicious), Joshua Ralston tries to figure out how to be a black Morrissey fan when the mope-rock icon has said so many things that sound, well…incontrovertibly racist.
Can you separate the art from the artist, and can you live with yourself if you do? What if the artist is Morrissey and he helped you accept your sexuality even as he called Chinese people “a subspecies”? What if the artist is Morrissey and his Latino fan base may very well outnumber his white fan base?
