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Michael was held to an unfair double standard with "They Don't Care About Us"

kreen said:
For the longest time I thought the "kik* me, j*w me" lyric meant "I'm identifying with people who are called kik*s, or who are attacked because they're J*ws".

But thinking about it now, in the context of the song, and knowing that, in the black community, and especially in the world of black musicians, there is this phrase "you're j*wing me", which means "you're taking advantage of me financially", I think MJ might really have meant the words in a derogatory way against J*ws, meaning he cast himself as a black man being taken advantage of by J*wish record label executives and owners.

It's not very enlightened on MJ's part, but it does reflect a certain kind of antisemitism in the black community that comes from their impression of the world of business being dominated by white, J*wish people.
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I take it as "treat me like you treat jews" and nothing will convince me otherwise.
 
Moviefan2k4 said:
The notion that she would ever say such a thing nano-shocks the hell out of me...especially since she was raised as a Baptist. Could this statement have anything to do with her later conversion to the Jehovah's Witnesses? I'm not sure what that so-called "church" thinks of Orthodox Jews.
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I don't like the way you phrased that.
 
kreen said:
For the longest time I thought the "kik* me, j*w me" lyric meant "I'm identifying with people who are called kik*s, or who are attacked because they're J*ws".

But thinking about it now, in the context of the song, and knowing that, in the black community, and especially in the world of black musicians, there is this phrase "you're j*wing me", which means "you're taking advantage of me financially", I think MJ might really have meant the words in a derogatory way against J*ws, meaning he cast himself as a black man being taken advantage of by J*wish record label executives and owners.

It's not very enlightened on MJ's part, but it does reflect a certain kind of antisemitism in the black community that comes from their impression of the world of business being dominated by white, J*wish people.
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MJ actually criticized Jewish people in a private voicemail to his former manager Dieter Wisener. It was leaked in 2005, 10 years after "They Don't Care About Us" came out (pardon the offensive title of the video):
So, yeah, I think it's safe to say that the song was anti-Semitic.
 
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Spaceship said:
MJ actually criticized Jewish people in a private voicemail to his former manager Dieter Wisener, calling them "leeches" and saying that "they sucked". It was leaked in 2005, 10 years after "They Don't Care About Us" came out:
With that in mind, I think it's safe to say "They Don't Care About Us" was anti-Semitic, after all. I'm just surprised at how many people are saying MJ was right in the comments.
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He clearly said they "sucked like leeches". Entirely different to whatever you're trying to insinuate.

Guy was at his lowest point and beefing with evil business moguls behind the scenes, it's easy enough to understand what he may be meaning rather than simply what he's saying.
 
Mister_Jay_Tee said:
I don't like the way you phrased that.
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No offense meant, but I don't care - I'm a conservative Christian and about as far from being politically correct as anyone can get. I do my best to never force what I think on anyone, but I hate being expected to walk on eggshells all the time. Nothing good ever happens from constantly censoring yourself.
 
kreen said:
For the longest time I thought the "kik* me, j*w me" lyric meant "I'm identifying with people who are called kik*s, or who are attacked because they're J*ws".

But thinking about it now, in the context of the song, and knowing that, in the black community, and especially in the world of black musicians, there is this phrase "you're j*wing me", which means "you're taking advantage of me financially", I think MJ might really have meant the words in a derogatory way against J*ws, meaning he cast himself as a black man being taken advantage of by J*wish record label executives and owners.

It's not very enlightened on MJ's part, but it does reflect a certain kind of antisemitism in the black community that comes from their impression of the world of business being dominated by white, J*wish people.
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Ice Cube did it years prior MJ with "No Vaseline", where he dissed his N.W.A. ex-crew members and Jerry Heller, who was jewish. The track was seen as highly antisemitic in the jewish community, but Cube, at that time being with the Nation Of Islam, denied these accusations.
MJ was the easier target in the media for his relatively clean content as a pop artist. Rappers had always been controversial in the 90's. That was their goal.
 
Moonwalker1992 said:
Ice Cube did it years prior MJ with "No Vaseline", where he dissed his N.W.A. ex-crew members and Jerry Heller, who was jewish. The track was seen as highly antisemitic in the jewish community, but Cube, at that time being with the Nation Of Islam, denied these accusations.
MJ was the easier target in the media for his relatively clean content as a pop artist. Rappers had always been controversial in the 90's. That was their goal.
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Rappers in general seem to get away with way more than others.
 
Mister_Jay_Tee said:
Rappers in general seem to get away with way more than others.
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Hip hop in general had a different audience than old school mainstream genres. It was rebellion music for much of the younger audience that grew up with it. Gangsta rap is often about violent topics. Look at what was praised by several gangsta rappers, the movie Scarface with Al Pacino, not a heroic character at all. Suge Knight's label was called Death Row & Puffy's is Bad Boy. Some such as Eazy-E & Jay-Z were originally drug dealers. Snoop Dogg was in a murder trial early in his career. 50 Cent's publicity when he first debuted is that he got shot several times. They didn't have a clean cut Debbie Gibson image that might be seen as "square" by the cool kids. There was also the porno rap of 2 Live Crew & the more Afrocentric hip hop of X-Clan or Public Enemy. Hip hop made it popular to call women "ho's & b-----", even by many women themselves. Hip hop also popularized sampling, which started to be used more in other genres of music.
 
Spaceship said:
MJ actually criticized Jewish people in a private voicemail to his former manager Dieter Wisener. It was leaked in 2005, 10 years after "They Don't Care About Us" came out (pardon the offensive title of the video):
So, yeah, I think it's safe to say that the song was anti-Semitic.
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That's an MJ hate channel. Stop promoting them.
 
a Jew is whosever soul was present at the time the Torah was given on mount Sinai. The Jewish people are not white westerners as the OP suggested, but are in fact the only nation in existence since the ancient world and the culture itself doesn’t confirm to locality or race.

I can only imagine MJ is singing about this exact form of misconception.

Peace.
 
Can I just say that the sounds Michael used to obscure the controversial words (he didn't delete them, he just hid them!) are way cool? I love those sounds... they are so powerful.
 
It's true in general. When someone is racist or homophobic, there's outrage but no one loses a career or opportunities over that. People in the industry forget about it.

God forbid you slightly speak out against Israel, then you're antisemitic, your career is over, you're ruining the movie promo, you're a horrible human being.

Mel Gibson x Mark Wahlberg, for example. Not condoning Mel Gibson, what he did was awful.

Rachel Zegler. She's the only talented actor in the movie but she ruined the movie for speaking out against Israel.

Michael really was doing the same thing as John Lennon when he wrote that song, so...
 
Kanye East said:
Think about it. John and Yoko made "Woman Is The N****r of the World", and were they strongarmed into censoring it? No.
Eminem and a bunch of other rappers constantly threw around words like "F****t" in their songs well into the 2010s.
So why was Michael singled out, when TDCAU was explicitly making a point against discrimination?

As someone who is half-Irish, half-American, and a citizen of both countries, I strongly suspect that if he had said "kick me, mick me" ("mick" being a slur for the Irish) instead, there would not have been nearly the level of controversy that there was, and he wouldn't have been strongarmed into changing it, despite the fact that the Irish and the Jewish are both white Westerners who have suffered from genocide (Great Famine, Cromwell, Holocaust) and persecution (in fact, both groups were not legally emancipated in Europe well into the 19th century). It's the double standard that really irritates me.

Anyone who bothered to actually read the lyrics would understand that Michael, a black man, was denouncing prejudice, the same way Bob Dylan, a Jewish man, denounced prejudice in the song "Hurricane", which used the word "n****r". You have here an exact parallel...a black man using a derogatory term for Jewish to denounce prejudice and a Jewish man using a derogatory term for black to denounce prejudice, yet only one of them was intentionally taken out of context.
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Exactly. We (Black people in America) have ALWAYS been subject to a double standard.

It reference the stereotype labels groups use to express prejudicial beliefs. Just like other groups, Black folk have unflattering names for others. Doesn’t make it right, just real.

There is no way in hell a Black man with 6 bankruptcies, 5 kids by 3 wives would have ever been elected President. We have ALWAYS had to be twice as good, twice as smart to just noticed.

I don’t think it had anything to do with the record company since Mottola isn’t Jewish and MJ had a pretty decent relationship with the previous CEO.
 
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