Morrissey claims he can’t be racist because “everyone ultimately prefers their own race”
Ever since coming out in support of the anti-Islam For England party, Morrissey has been dogged with accusations of racism. It doesn’t help that he says thing like Halal certifiers support ISIS, of course. In his latest defense against such labeling, however, Moz has claimed that he can’t be racist because “everyone ultimately prefers their own race.”
The remark was made in part of a new interview conducted by Morrissey’s nephew, Sam Etsy Rayner, for Moz’s website. Coming just a month after his bizarrely rambling statement defending his support of For England, the directly quoted interview finds the former Smiths frontman spouting some aggressive and rather dumbfounding rhetoric. When asked about his political leanings, for example, Morrissey said he has “never voted for anyone in my life,” and that while he knew “nothing about either” England’s left-wing Liberal Democrats nor Green parties, he threw his support behind For England.
“I think [For England leader] Anne Marie Waters is the only British party leader who can unite the left and right. I don’t know any other party leader who even WANTS to do this,” Morrissey said, immediately after admitting he knows nothing of the other parties. “The UK is a dangerously hateful place now, and I think we need someone to put a stop to the lunacy and to speak for everyone. I see Anne Marie Waters as this person.”
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Of course, he immediately contradicts the idea of speaking “for everyone” when he hits on that “race” question:
“If you call someone racist in modern Britain you are telling them that you have run out of words. You are shutting the debate down and running off. The word is meaningless now. Everyone ultimately prefers their own race… does this make everyone racist? The people who reduce every conversation down to a matter of race could be said to be the most traditionally ‘racist’ because everything in life is NOT exclusively a question of race, so why make it so? Diversity can’t possibly be a strength if everyone has ideas that will never correspond. If borders are such terrible things then why did they ever exist in the first place? Borders bring order.”
So it seems like Morrissey wants someone to speak for everyone… whose ideas correspond to his own. More proof that he my be missing the point came when Rayner asked about some journalists criticizing the singer’s white privilege. Rayner said it was more like “white disadvantage,” which is itself cringeworthy, but then Moz replied, “But to even slur someone for white privilege is in itself a racist comment! It’s all reached such silly proportions now.”
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The rest of the interview features a lot of vilifying of The Guardian newspaper (“When you start arguing with The Guardian you feel as if you’re trying to reason with people who are barely toilet-trained”) and his usual anti-meat propagandizing (“In the USA, most people die because of animal consumption, but it doesn’t ever seem to be a concern to the government because… it’s good for business to keep people on medication”). Read the whole thing at Morrissey’s website.
If you can look passed all the vicious opinionating and still appreciate Morrissey’s music for what it is, you can get tickets to his upcoming shows here.
Morrissey claims he can’t be racist because “everyone ultimately prefers their own race”
Ben Kaye
