There’s this thing where you can acknowledge something/someone is problematic and still like it. There’s nothing that excuses using that slur or that excuses the content of that song, obviously. But I still like their music.

It’s obviously really shitty they’d make a song called that, but it’s even more shitty in that the song is about when Stevie Nicks was poor and living on very little. So she basically equates being poor with being Romani… I mean, I’m sure she meant it as a metaphor, but it’s still messed up and just another stereotype associating poverty with Romani or being Romani with a life-style anyone can have, erasing the fact it’s an ethnicity and that Romani have their own identity and culture no one else can appropriate.

But you’d be hard pressed to find any musician who hasn’t done or said something problematic so if I made that a rule for what I listen to my itunes would be nearly empty. There are a lot of music, shows, movies, books, etc I like and even some celebrities who I know that are problematic. I don’t make excuses for them. If they did something shitty I will acknowledge it and it will lower my opinion of them—depending on how I feel about what they did, I might just give up on them altogether and dislike them as a person or stop engaging with their work. It would be wrong for me to defend their actions or to blame other people for boycotting them or bashing them for their actions. People have a right to react negatively to problematic material and avoid that material and no one is justified in telling them to do otherwise.

So I don’t know what you expect me to do. If you expect me to stop listening to music and reading books and watching shows and movies, that’s ridiculous. I engage with material and think critically about it. I listen to what other people have to say. I do stop engaging with the material sometimes or opt to never engage with it if the person who made it and/or the material itself is offensive enough to me and/or doesn’t have much value apart from that (like Miley Cyrus for instance). But again, you can separate your enjoyment of something from your critical appraisal of it. In fact, if more people realized that, there’d be less angry fans defending horrible shit out there. If they could separate their enjoyment of something and their love of a celebrity from their critical view, they would stop attacking people for voicing the truth about them and would be better critical thinkers and more decent human beings for it.