This morning my son wanted me to review the PowerPoint he’s presenting today for a 7th grade class assignment. His subject: John Lennon (yes, they actually study him now). After adding a few points and correcting some punctuation, I started wondering what Lennon would have made of this moment in time, with America on the cusp of witnessing the sorry spectacle of its elected officials yet again demonstrating their tone-deaf boneheadedness when faced with the uncomfortable situation of a woman speaking truth to power.
In considering the daunting scope of Lennon’s work, probably the last song anyone would think about is a piece he and his wife Yoko Ono wrote in 1972 called "Woman Is the Nigger of the World.” It's not a “catchy” tune and for obvious reasons it was not considered “radio-friendly." Most radio stations simply refused to play it, and it stands as the lowest charting single Lennon ever released (including, of course, all his songs with the Beatles). But the National Organization for Women (NOW) awarded Lennon and Ono a ‘positive image of women" citation for the song's strong pro-feminist lyrics.
“This is a song about the women’s problem, it’s called "Woman Is The Nigger Of The World" and obviously there were a few people that reacted strangely to it, but usually they were white and male….[but] all my black friends feel that I have quite the right to say it, because they understand it.”
John Lennon on Dick Cavett.
The phrase “Woman is the nigger of the world” was coined by Yoko, and John admitted that it took him nearly two years of back and forth with her for him to accept it. When he had finally come to terms with it, he and Yoko set out to try to encapsulate the situation women face in this world, all within a three minute song.
The phrase "woman is the nigger of the world" was coined by Yoko Ono in an interview with Nova magazine in 1969 and was quoted on the magazine's cover. Literary analysts note that the phrase owes much to Zora Neale Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God,[1] in which the protagonist Janie Crawford's Grandmother says "De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see."[2][3] The song describes women's subservience to men and misogyny across all cultures.
Lennon and Ono performed the song on the Dick Cavett show in 1972. ABC forced Cavett to “apologize” to viewers for the song’s content in advance. After its performance about 600 protests were recorded, but none of them were about the lyrical content of the song. Instead, people criticized ABC for forcing Cavett to apologize. Here’s Cavett:
So [ABC] wrote this thing, and I went in and taped it in order to retain the song. About 600 protests did come in. None of them about the song! All of them about, quote: "that mealy-mouthed statement you forced Dick to say before the show. Don't you believe we're grown up..." Oh, God. It was wonderful in that sense; it gave me hope for the republic.[
The lyrics are about the pervasiveness of misogyny, the exact same kind of misogyny from the Republican Party and Donald Trump we have witnessed over the last two weeks:
Woman is the nigger of the world
Yes she is, think about it
Woman is the nigger of the world
Think about it, do something about it
We make her paint her face and dance
If she won't be a slave, we say that she don't love us
If she's real, we say she's trying to be a man
While putting her down we pretend that she is above us
***
We insult her everyday on TV
And wonder why she has no guts or confidence
When she's young we kill her will to be free
While telling her not to be so smart we put her down for being so dumb
* **
We make her paint her face and dance
We make her paint her face and dance
We make her paint her face and dance
As Dr. Christine Blasey Ford sits down today to face an inquisition from eleven Republican male Senators on the Judiciary Committee (and the female prosecutor they’ve chosen to blunt those sorry optics), over circumstances of being sexually assaulted by their chosen nominee to the Supreme Court, it’s clear that—at least for a certain class of men--nothing in the way they view women has changed. The sheer number of credible accusations against Brett Kavanaugh for his sordid sexual behavior seem to have made little or no impression upon a solid majority of these Republicans. We talk about the four or five potential “swing votes" among them in full knowledge that its a foregone conclusion 45-plus other members of the Republican Senate majority will vote to confirm this person for a spot on the country’s highest court, without thinking twice about the devastating impact of what he has done, not only to Blasey Ford but to all the women he’s apparently assaulted in his life.
That is simple misogyny, writ large.
We don't have anymore Lennons, someone with the stature and popular appeal to move the masses with a simple action, phrase or song, and that’s a tragedy. But millions of Americans are feeling today the same things he tried to express.
Lennon and Ono’s appearance on the Dick Cavett show, together with the segment where they explain the song’s intent, is below: