"Black artists weren't even on MTV. MTV denies this but MJ—the biggest global superstar—wasn't even shown on the channel at launch. To get 'Billie Jean' on MTV, the head of his label said he had to threaten to pull all their music videos."
"Dancing is really the emotions through bodily movement. And however you feel, you just bring out that inner feeling through your mood... Dancing is important, like laughing, to back off tension.”
- Michael Jackson
"In the world of pop music, there is Michael Jackson and there is everybody else."
— The New York Times
Setting The Standard
"With 32 million copies sold worldwide by the end of 1983, Thriller became the best-selling album of all time. It was the best-selling album worldwide of 1983, and was also the first album to become the best-selling in the United States for two
... years, in 1983 and 1984. The album broke racial barriers in popular music, enabling Jackson's appearances on MTV and meeting with President Ronald Reagan at the White House."
"It was among the first to use music videos as promotional tools; the videos for "Billie Jean", "Beat It" and "Thriller" are credited for transforming music videos into a serious art form. The album's success set the standard for the music industry with its songs, music ...
... videos and promotion strategies influencing artists, record labels, producers, marketers and choreographer."
"Thriller remains the best-selling album of all time, with sales of 70 million copies worldwide. It is the second-best-selling album in the United States and was certified 34× platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in 2021."
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Within the jungles of white supremacy exist a silver lining: They truly believe their encountering "inferior" races --monkeys. And, that's not necessarily a bad thing.
"Whenever Colin Powell is on the news, white people give him the same compliments: 'How do you feel about Colin Powell?', 'He speaks so well! He's so well spoken. I mean he really speaks so well!' Like that's a compliment.”
He speaks so well' is not a compliment, okay? 'He speaks so well' is some shit you say about retarded people that can talk."
“What do you mean he speaks so well? He's a fucking educated man! How the fuck did you expect him to sound, you dirty motherfucker?”
"We are a society that has been structured from top to bottom by race. You don't get beyond that by deciding not to talk about it anymore. It will always come back; it will always reassert itself over and over again."
— Kimberle Williams Crenshaw
(Thread) Abortion, Evangelicalism, and White Supremacy
Their FIRST “moral” crusade wasn't against abortion or homosexuals: It was against African American Christians.
“Race, not abortion, was the founding issue of the religious right”
“In 1971, two years before Roe v. Wade legalized abortion, the biggest white evangelical group in America, the Southern Baptist Convention, supported its legalization. The group continued that support through much of the 1970s. “
"The problem often lies in the failure to understand both the historical and the institutional dimensions of marginalization that African Americans have experienced."
"African American struggles in the United States could not be simply limited to how the US economy was entirely built on the shoulders of a people who were instantly turned into [racial] slaves and were accordingly deprived their history, culture, and ability to exercise ...
“If race disappears as a category of official division, as it has in most of the world, this will facilitate the emergence of a plural racial order where the groups exist in practice but are not official recognized - and anyone ....
... and anyone trying to address racial division is likely to be chided for racializing the population.”
— Professor Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists: #ColorBlindRacism