Exactly and it was given to him to insult him, regardless of the fact some people in England and Australia are called *****. How any person can support that name for Michael is beyond me, when you realize that the name was never given to him until they added the W word to it. If it was just an endearment he would have been called the J word in Off the Wall or pre-thriller when he was an adult, because I see someone above wrote the J word is given to adults. I find it strange that some can't see the difference in calling Michael that word within the context it was applied, at the time in his career it was applied, and by the type of publication that did the name calling. To me, the context is everything. This name was not given to Michael Jackson because people in England and Australia call Jacksons the J word. When I go to England I don't hear the people on the tv saying J words, I don't see the papers with big headlines about a J person. How come that is the case? Aren't there thousands of people called Jackson in England? If that J word was so ordinary and used for all Jackson people, I would see the J word splashed all over the papers and spoken often on the tv. I have been going regularly to England since early 70s & went to college there for a term and never heard anyone calling the Jackson people the J word, but yet this is a typical word for Jackson people? I have seen the same people defend this name on this forum over the years and I still don't buy their explanations, in Micheal's case.
I just guess I will have to accept that some people will never understand what made the Michael Jackson name calling DIFFERENT and leave it at that.
DON'T ACCEPT IT. IT'S WRONG AND YES, IT'S RACIST-Michael and I are the same age and back when we were little kids there was a cartoon in the 60's about J****, this little mischievious monkey and I didn't know it was racist. But I bet Michael did-because his parents educated him.
Later on, when I started school (at an all white school)I saw prejudice myself for the first time when kids were making horrible jokes about black people and monkeys, etc. Even though by then we had the civil rights act, people were still fighting for equality. Rioting for civil rights was pervasive in the big cities. They finally had to force integration here in Houston with busing.
It was in elementary school when I got into biographies and history I learned about that English fighting monkey named Jacco. It's when I realized that not only was that cartoon racist, but so were many things that I used to watch like old movies with Al Jolson and even Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland wearing blackface was racist. Disney's "Song of the South" was considered racist by then, although I loved it when I was little.
When Michael became a huge power player and bought the Beatles catalog (and became a threat)it seemed to me that we went immediately from "We are the World" to hydrobaric chambers, Bubbles and Elephant Man bones. Michael was "turning white" and getting plastic surgery to look like Diana Ross.
At first, I just laughed it off because who would believe trash like that. But then I realized that people were actually believing it-and talking about it as if it was fact. Needless to say, when I first heard the term "W J" in 1987 I knew immediately what they meant. Especially coming from an English tabloid. They just lifted that term from that english monkey and all the implications that came along with it. And I was enraged.
Still am. I can barely write this. After Michael died, I had the TV on non-stop watching anything and everything that might have something about it. And one day they had a couple of young men standing in front of the '02, sobbing about how much they loved Michael and they had tickets to TII. And they called him J***o. My mouth dropped open because it was the first time that I realized that these kids were actually using this name as a "nickname". I was horrified-had their parents not educated them????
I don't care what anyone tries to tell you about this-it is not a common nickname in England, Australia or Canada. I believe Pippa Middleton (Prince William's sister-in-law) has been dating a guy named Jackson for about two years now and I have yet to hear anybody call him by that nickname. When I hear it or read it, then I might shut up about it. I doubt it, though.
People need to understand the meaning and the hatefulness that comes along with it. To me, it's as bad as the "n" word, which makes me throw up when I hear it.