Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Is Morrissey racist?

Yes.

You could read his remark that "You can't help but feel that the Chinese are a subspecies" as a description of unwanted feelings that arise when you think about the abuse of animals in China (his remark came after these words: "Did you see the thing on the news about their treatment of animals and animal welfare? Absolutely horrific"), but he has refused to distance himself from the feeling he described, and he has a history of this sort of thing. There's not much else to say except a) we probably all have racial prejudices of some kind, at some level, b) at least he denies being a racist rather than proudly or defiantly insisting on it, and c) the whole thing reminded me of "Curtain" by Chinese artists Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, which consists of "400kg lobsters, 30kg bullfrogs, 30kg snakes, 20kg eels, and iron wire." The animals were impaled live on the wire and left to die. But, of course, this is two people, not the whole nation of China, and other artists, from other countries, have done similar things. Yuck.

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