I want to say up front, I am 30 pages behind in this thread, and Vagabond, I quoted you and I'm replying to you, but I don't mean to single you out -- I am responding to the dozens of previous pages of this endless debate that I have slogged through while remaining silent. I have to say my piece about this, But I really hope there's a big Beatles announcement coming soon so we can move on.
I am in the middle of a career transition for reasons I don't need to get into; I am training to be a mental health counselor (a therapist, a "shrink," etc.). I relay this because I hope to explain some of the current thinking that might be behind this decision to leave "Woman Is..." off the new Lennon box. I'm doing to use a phrase that might outrage people in this thread even more than the n-word, but no one has said it plainly yet (as of Thursday), so I'm saying it. This situation is not about racism or feminism -- and it's also not about bravery vs courage, or free speech vs censorship. It's about white privilege.
Everything Vagabond said about John above is true. I was personally inspired by John's pro-woman stance, and it was literally because of his house-husband phase that I wanted to work from home and raise my kids -- which I did. But all of these good things John did can be true and laudable, while still having a blind spot as a privileged white man that caused him to make the poor decision to use that terrible word in a song, even if he was sincerely trying to make an important point.
But let's circle back to "white privilege" for a second, because there may be some blood boiling in the room. "Privilege" is not exclusively a "white" domain, but white privilege -- and specifically white male privilege -- refers to the pervasive and omnipresent systems that have existed for centuries to support white people, and especially white men. Considering this -- even if you reject the premise -- can be disturbing and upsetting. But this is not just a concern for "po-faced hipsters," overly "woke" Gen Z-ers, or professional online outrage manufacturers. It's a thing we all live with, whether we know it or not.
There's an exercise I've done several times, and for me it was incredibly eye-opening. It's called the "ADDRESSING" model, and it's a way to understand the areas of privilege where you do (or don't) benefit. Of the 10 categories, only one is about race. White people often feel defensive and unfairly attacked when confronted by these ideas; this is normal and understandable, especially when you have benefited from these unseen forces your entire life. For the exercise, you look at each of the 10 categories, and ask yourself if you are in the dominant group or not. It's not a trick or a trap, you just have to be honest:
A - Age (being between 30-60 years old)
D - Disability (developmental or intellectual)
D - Disability (later in life, like a debilitating disease, accident, etc.)
R - Religion (Christian or secular are dominant)
E - Ethnic and racial identity (European and European American are dominant)
S - Socioeconomic status (middle or upper class)
S - Sexual orientation (heterosexual is dominant)
I - Indigenous heritage (NOT having indigenous heritage is dominant)
N - National origin (if you live in the country you were born in)
G - Gender (male is dominant)
Believe me, it was humbling to sit in a classroom with so many students who were female, not white, LGBTQ+, from immigrant families, from poor backgrounds, etc. -- while I had to admit I was in the dominant group in all 10 categories. It has reshaped the way I think about the world, and other people. I'm explaining all this because I've read a ton of complaining about this one unfortunate song, and I'm sensing the same privilege-based blind spot that caused John to write it in the first place. (I know the phrase may have originally been Yoko's; she certainly had many fewer areas of privilege than John did ... but she still used that word carelessly and hurtfully.)
John Lennon was a complicated man. He was a seeker, a thinker, and he was willing to be outrageous in order to spread what he though were important messages. He went from endorsing domestic violence ("Run For Your Life") to repenting for it just two years later ("Getting Better"). He was a staunch feminist who also cheated on his wife on a whim, and almost destroyed his marriage. We can all be fans of him and his better angels, and still feel that he had no right to take that word, with its centuries of pain and oppression for Black people, and use it for his feminist song.
To call the decision to leave this song off the Power To The People box censorship is misguided. This is not about runaway "wokeism" (another woefully misunderstood term), or over-sensitive snowflakes. It's about acknowledging that the word is hurtful, and John probably hurt more people than he helped by using it -- surely not at all what he intended. Yes, it was reissued multiple times, from its first CD issue to various remixes and remasters -- but it's 2025, not 2010, or 2005, or 1990, or whatever. In the U.S. right now, Confederate memorials and names that had been rightfully scrubbed from existence (they did lose the war, and their slavery fight, back in 1865, after all) are being *restored* in the name of fighting the "woke mob" -- and the perpetrators of this disgrace are using the same wrong-minded rallying cries of fighting censorship and preserving history.
John Lennon wasn't a racist, as far as I can tell. He didn't have a racist intent when he wrote that song, as far as I can tell. But it was still a mistake, in my opinion. He was a rich white man, and he felt he could do and say what he wanted, especially if he was speaking out for a righteous cause. He was sensitive to the racism he had encountered in his relationship with Yoko, but he was not sensitive to the enduring pain he would cause Black people by using that word. That doesn't make him a bad person. It makes him a person who lived decades ago and wrote a song in 1972 that is hurtful today. He didn't think it would be, but it is. We didn't get the "no Pakistanis" version of "Get Back" in the Let It Be box for the same reason. It's not censorship; it's being sensitive to the feelings of others -- something we all believe the Beatles wanted to be.
I've read a lot of protests that "John wouldn't approve of this." No -- *you* don't approve of this, and you want John to back you up. (The global "you," not Vagabond.) Claiming to know what the long-dead would think today about anything is an intellectual fallacy and a trap, folks. Sure, maybe 85-year-old John might have dug in his heels and defiantly defended this song. But because he was a thinker, because he was a seeker, he also might have reflected on it in the past 45 years and decided that maybe it wasn't his best decision. Elvis Costello also has a song from the 1970s with that word in it; I'm sure he thought himself quite the provocateur when he wrote it. He stopped playing it live a couple of years ago.
I don't know, and we don't know. It's tragic that John isn't here to make that decision himself, but I trust that Sean, who is the only person left with the authority to try to guess correctly, made this decision thoughtfully and not carelessly.
POWER THE PEOPLE - Deluxe Box Set - Unboxing Video' 
this is it really! And the fact that, as I said before, the majority of people who are fervently complaining about that decision are, in truth, white men, says it all too. The privilege of “control” - that comes with all that Sean mentioned - and that they are not having this time because of the team’s thoughtful decision is evidently why they are not approving this.
