The caste system is commonly used in some areas to classify people in levels of hierarchy to determine a person’s worth and status. The term ‘half-caste’ suggests that mixed race people aren’t deserving of a caste and are therefore the lowest rank of the hierarchy as if they’re not human which is what makes it so offensive. Here Agard is trying to satire this.

@Sam_Cumbley
Ah, you’re a clever student and I think we agree, Sam.
The opening is ironic. A double twist. The idiom ‘don’t have a leg to stand on’ is inverted here, so he does ‘have a leg to stand on’. So far so positive. But ‘standing on one leg’ is daft! Who does that? So it’s self-deprecating, an ironic self put-down, because the poem is about asserting himself, and he ends by demonstrating his intellect and ‘wholeness’. It’s the other guy who lacks a leg!

To widen it, someone may say the classic ‘forgive me I’m an idiot’, and then prove that he’s anything but. The other person, the one doing the put-down, is the idiot.

Agard is an extremely clever man as this poem goes on to prove.
Good debate.

@jillybirks The expression is indeed that. However, you have seemed to have missed the lack of the negative in the phrase in the poem. Agard is not saying “I don’t have a leg to stand on”; he has instead turned the idiom on its head: the exact quote is “standing on one leg”, instead of ‘not standing on one leg". Hence, because he is “standing on one leg”, he does have a leg to stand on. He is therefore saying that the message of the poem – racial equality – is true, and he can prove it because he “has a leg to stand on”.

Moreover, ignoring the grammatical debates, from a practical standpoint, why would Agard attempt to undermine his own argument by criticising it from the very start? He clearly feels very strongly about this matter (or else why would he go to the bother of writing a protest poem about it), as he himself experienced abuse through the use of ‘half-caste’ during his time in Britain.

@Sam_Cumbley
There is no idiom ‘one leg to stand on’. The expression is ‘one doesn’t have a leg to stand on’ meaning that one will lose or be undermined because of lack of knowledge or lack of justification. Agard is ironically being self-deprecating. He means the opposite.

@Aquarius_Ink136
The expression is ‘don’t have a leg to stand on’, meaning that a person will lose an argument or is set to fail. There is no expression ‘one leg to stand on’. So, here he is self-mocking; ironically saying ‘I don’t have a leg to stand on’, meaning the opposite.

The English idiom ‘to have a leg to stand on’ is used when you can prove a point/are correct. Therefore, his message about equality is also correct. He may also be mocking English quirks of speech as he is riffing on an idiom – this plays into the idea that he may use a phonetic spelling to alienate the white reader – lines such as ‘ah rass’ (‘my arse’) would be completely lost on a reader not of caribbean descent.

“standing on one leg”
The idiom ‘one leg to stand on’ means that you are in a situation where you cannot prove something. Therefore Agard foreshadows that in the rest of the poem he is going to try to prove that the term ‘half-caste’ is wrong to the reader however he feels that he only has one leg to stand on as the reader sees him as ‘half a person’.

That is also in Lewis Carol’s Alice in Wonderland with the Checire cat. (I don’t think that I spelled that right. Sorry 🤫)

This line directly addresses Pauls new double. It’s hard to leave his old life behind to pick up this new one but in the end, it all works out.

FUN doesn’t fit the typical formula for success in pop music. Nate is asking his bandmates to believe in their music. Even if they fail, they don’t lose anything.

It seems to me that he used to love doing what he’s doing but he’s worried that he’s sacrificed too much and he’s not sure he should keep doing it or if he should go home to his family and make one of his own.

Even though some nights he feels like he is either drowning in bad luck or stops Carin, in contrast the majority of nights, no matter what, he is still unsure of who he is.

I think there’s more at play with this verse. ‘Most nights’ he doesn’t know; for most, the night is a quiet, solitary time when even the most self-diluted can’t convince themselves of anything but the truth. It’s sounds like the singer understands this on a personal level – in that his professed beliefs and the perception he champions in the day, even he isn’t sure he believes when he’s alone, at night, with only himself to consider.

@ucheese & Rose, wtf does that gibberish mean?

No improvement, just a reflection on John’s personal growth as a human, first admitting & taking ownership of what he did, expressing regret & being sorry, then turning it around into something much more positive with his lifelong message of love & peace. It’s obvious why he was violent, he had been deeply hurt by his mother & his Aunt Mimi didn’t sound like the warmest person, he started to lash out at the world instead of trying to heal the hurt. I can relate unequivocally for some similarity in my own life.

This line is a reference to how john used to hit his wife

ello Jon pls complete the phrase “Women is the___”

John echoes the “fool, you fool” backing vocal from the first verse, showing how he realizes that by hitting women, he became the abusive authority figure he hated when he was in school.