14 DAY TRIAL // To put it simply, Justin Bieber has seen better days in terms of media coverage. As if all that talk about how he was partying too much for his age weren’t enough, he’s now involved in a huge scandal with racist connotations, after a couple of videos of him using the N-word have emerged online.
The pop star has already apologized for them saying that, at the time he made them, he was too young and too inexperienced to be fully aware of the power of words. He was 14 or 15 then, by the way.
After the official apology, Justin has gone off the grid, presumably determined to wait this one out. His mentor Usher, the man who discovered him back in the day when he was just a young boy with a silly haircut and a guitar, and was uploading music videos on YouTube, is doing all the talking now.
Justin Bieber might be a lot of things, but he is definitely no racist, Usher says in a lengthy post on his Instagram page, which accompanies a photo of the two.
“At my core, I am a person that supports growth and understands without judgement, that growth often comes as a result of pain and continues effort. As I have watched Justin Bieber navigate difficult waters as a young man, I can tell you that he hasn't always chosen the path of his greatest potential, but he is unequivocally not a racist,” Usher writes.
It might be easy to judge from a distance, based on those two videos that saw the light of day recently, but we should not forget the circumstances in which these two videos were made, he continues.
Because, whether we like it or not, Justin was young.
“What he was 5 years ago was a naive child who did not understand the negative power and degradation that comes from playing with racial slurs. What he is now is a young man faced with an opportunity to become his best self, an example to the millions of kids that follow him to not make the same mistakes,” Usher says.
He’s not the only one speaking in Justin’s defense either: various of his friends and even people who don’t know him that well have addressed the scandal in their chats with the press. Most of them agree that Justin was too young to understand just how hurtful he was being on camera.
In one of the two videos, Justin tells a racist joke, while, in the other, he changes the lyrics to one of his own songs to include the N-word and a mention of wanting to join the Ku Klux Klan. In both videos he’s fully aware that he’s being filmed, he’s definitely having fun, and he’s finding his jokes terribly amusing, just as several other people (heard but not shown) also do.
Apparently, the videos have been out for some time and, for years, were used to blackmail Justin’s team, in exchange for juicy gossip and exclusive stories, by one of the biggest celebrity outlets out there.