Michael Jackson: The Death Of A Black Man

When I read a text message this morning in Doha where I am currently visiting sent by my daughter in Atlanta that Michael Jackson had died I was aghast with shock. The soundtrack of a generation, including mine in far away Malawi where I grew up when Michael Jackson, the Motown child prodigy then teenage singing sensation who became a world mega superstar, has gone silent forever, although his music will of course live on. 

The death of Michael Jackson yesterday marks the passing of a moment, the era when American icons both black and white bestrode a mesmerized world on the mighty wings of American cultural and corporate globalization. He sold more than 750 million albums worldwide, a feat that will be hard for any musician to surpass.

The man and the music scaled to heights of unimaginable stardom, but his unrivaled celebrity gradually spiraled into a freak show as the idolized King of Pop mutated into the ridiculed Wacko Jacko, a perennial fodder for the sensational tabloids. Born in a working class household in Gary, Indiana, he amassed a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars which he eventually squandered through extravagant expenditures and poor investment decisions.

From the late seventies and early eighties when he broke from The Jackson Five later called The Jacksons and went solo, he reached the pinnacle of his phenomenal talents and career and churned albums and songs with a Midas touch that shattered all records, some of which are unlikely to be broken. His mega hit, Thriller, sold 65 million records, an accomplishment inconceivable in today's fragmented national and global music markets.

Then the demons began to surface peeling the gloss of success and innocence from the beloved superstar. There were the bizarre antics with Bubbles, the rumored oxygen tent, the dangling of his child from a hotel balcony, the pedophilia accusations one of which led to a damaging trial, the strange marriages to Elvis' daughter and his former nurse, the veiled children, the shopping binges in Las Vegas, behaviors that got weirder as the years passed, which overshadowed his music and his more charitable instincts and works.

Like some artistic geniuses, Michael Jackson was a troubled, tortured man, who projected personal ambiguities and reflected in an acutely sharp even deranged form prevailing social contradictions, which simultaneously served as the wellspring of his extraordinary musical gifts and drove him to his eventual downfall. The ambivalences of his sexuality, age, and race turned him into a malleable embodiment of identity performances that simultaneously attracted and repelled audiences.

My enthusiasm for Michael Jackson died slowly with his gradual metamorphosis from blackness into whiteness. His diehard supporters said he suffered from a rare skin disease called vitiligo. Whatever the merits of that, he clearly suffered from a much more common ailment called black self-hatred.

This condition manifests itself across the African diaspora and even within parts of Africa (and as I discovered recently in ‘colored' nations like India) in the obsession with lighter skin color, which many seek to acquire through skin lightening creams or 'improving' the next generation through interracial liaisons as I used to hear when I lived in Jamaica. This is because whiteness continues to carry a premium in societies deformed by the histories of European slavery and colonialism.  

Michael Jackson's physical transmutation represented an extreme form of the racialized self-hatred of the colonized native that Frantz Fanon wrote so memorably in Black Skin, White Masks and which many subsequent psychologists and sociologists of race have diagnosed. His was a breathtaking attempt at what used to be called passing for light-skinned African Americans in the harsh days of Jim Crow. Those who sought passing in those unhappy days were born with the necessary  physical attributes and often did so in secret, but Jackson sought to acquire white physiognomy through plastic mutilations in full public view.

His career and persona sought to bridge America's enduring musical, sexual, generational, and racial schisms, and he succeeded in some respects, but in the end he succumbed to their unquenchable demands. The costs were indeed high for him. He died a broke and broken man. Some say he was haunted by a lost childhood, which he sought to recover by refusing to grow up and surrounding himself with children, that he was a shy, fragile man who was hounded by the pressures of success.

The tragedy of his controversial, conflicted and caricatured life is also an indictment of a highly racialized society which feeds inferiority complexes among black youth that can engender in an even highly talented and successful artist the pathologies of racial death wish. The ambivalent relationship he had with the black community reflected both their understanding of his pyschic demons and revulsion at their grotesque manifestations.

Michael Jackson, the black man, died a long time ago. His music which brilliantly combined soul and pop and his hypnotizing dance moves which launched the video music industry attracted hysterical devotion and admiration from both black and white fans in the U.S. and many others around the world and shattered some racial barriers. But he failed to transcend his own racial barrier: find comfort in his blackness. That, ultimately, is the tragic lesson of his tumultuous and tormented life. One hopes the racial demons that haunted Michael Jackson will be buried soon for the social and psychic health of us all.

First written June 26, 2009