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Released as a single in January 1990, the song was written after the band was criticized over Professor Griff's remarks. The lyric includes a reference to the Crucifixion. It also mentions the murder of Yusef Hawkins and the 1989 riots in Virginia Beach, and turns on black people too, with a line about the death of Malcolm X. Robert Christgau described the lyric as antisemitic, taking the words so-called chosen as a supposed reference to the chosen people and the last line as a reference to Jewish deicide.

The music uses several James Brown tracks and the guitar line from the Temptations' Psychedelic Shack. AllMusic's John Bush called it arguably the production peak of the Bomb Squad and one of Chuck D's best performances. The writer Garry Mulholland described the music as a boiling, undulating bluesy shudder that is not even recognizable as a riff. Pitchfork's Craig Jenkins wrote that Fear of a Black Planet made kindling of the previous summer's anti-Public Enemy sentiment.

Live

Saul Williams samples it in Tr[n]igger. It appears in 194 of the 311 logged setlists.