It’s Not Black or White

I haven’t been home this week, nor have I had much time to look at the television or Internet for news, but despite all this, I still haven’t been immune from the 24-hour coverage of Michael Jackson’s death. And while I intended to write this post as a plea to the mainstream media to just STHU about Jackson and get on to more important issues (There was a coup in Honduras this weekend! There are election demonstrations ongoing in Iran! And Sally Kern is still blaming everyone except herself for the way of the world!), I found three blog posts that are as thought-provoking and challenging as the Gloved One himself could be at times.

Juan Cole at Informed Comment found an intersection between pop culture, religion and global politics in the Michael Jackson narrative, particularly in rumors that Jackson had converted to Islam within the last year. The pressures of the last years of Jackson’s life, Cole says, which included a trial on charges of child molestation and efforts to manage his family life and music career, led him to seek spiritual and personal refuge in Bahrain, where he enjoyed both popularity and privacy. Cole  sees Jackson as an iconic figure in the increasingly globalized world:

Those who lived through the 80s will never forget the Michael of “Thriller” and other breakthrough videos.

But it seems to me that the iconic later Jackson is “Black or White,” which powerfully makes the points above about the fluidity of identity in a globalized world, and underlines the common humanity of us all, something that the eternal boy could see through the ravages of hurt that clouded his never-ending childhood. Young children don’t know about racial or religious prejudice. The great tragedy of Michael Jackson is that his childlike withdrawal from reality may have left him more vulnerable to himself and others, and never protected him from bigotry or, other human realities. After all, children shouldn’t die.

I will admit that Thriller was my favorite album when I was 11, and I enjoyed (and still do) several of his songs. I always thought the video for Black or White was groundbreaking, but more for the morphing effect at its end rather than the message of his lyrics. By this time, Jackson’s cosmetic surgeries and what I and the mainstream public had decided was his seeming quest for whiteness disturbed me (I’m sure I’m not the only one). He had become a carnival mirror, openly flaunting the societal and psychic wounds carved onto his celebrity skin.

But was it really a quest for whiteness? That was the simple answer I understood at the time, before I really started wondering about the complexities of race, and it’s an answer that many commentators in the days since Jackson’s death have brought up as they discuss the King of Pop’s life. I wonder now, what was he really trying to achieve?

Carmen Van Kecrkhove at Racialicious says that there was more than skin color at the heart of Jackson’s transformations. After all, she says, to the end, Jackson affirmed his place in the African-American community:

Apart from the changes to his physical appearance, there is little compelling evidence that Michael Jackson tried to distance himself from the African-American community.

From Wesley Snipes in “Bad” to Eddie Murphy and Iman in “Remember the Time,” Jackson consistently featured black actors and models in his music videos. He also collaborated frequently with black producers such as Quincy Jones, Teddy Riley, and Rodney Jerkins, as well as with black recording artists such as Stevie Wonder, Lionel Richie, and R. Kelly.

And unlike some other celebrities who express unease with racial or ethnic labels, there was never a parcel of equivocation when he talked about his racial identity.

In fact, during the same interview with Oprah, Jackson stated emphatically: “I’m a black American, I am proud of my race. I am proud of who I am.”

So was Michael Jackson a unique contradiction in terms? Is it possible to be filled with racial pride and self-loathing at the same time?

Of course it is. Race is a complicated thing.

Van Kerckhove is revealing something missing from mainstream commentaries on race in the U.S.: It’s not just about the way you look. It’s your community and your committments, it’s in your history and heart. Michael Jackson, she says, lived in the complex interstices of all of these things, and his plastic surgeries were more about his failure to achieve self-acceptance and comfort in his own psychic skin, not just about his physiological skin. The American Prospect’s Adam Serwer, blogging at Ta-Nehisi Coates’ blog at The Atlantic, reached a similar conclusion in his musing on Jackson’s ever-shifting appearance:

When I was in high school, the fact that I was lightskinned and had curly hair gave me a complex, partially because people couldn’t seem to stop commenting on it. My senior year I kept my head in cornrows because I was tired of hearing shit like “you have good hair” and “your daddy got some strong genes.” It wasn’t that I was ashamed of being biracial, I just wanted to be like everyone else around me. I didn’t want to be unusual, I didn’t want to be the exception, I didn’t want to be a freak. Sometime during college Danzy Senna and August Wilson convinced me I wasn’t actually the unique tortured snowflake I thought I was, and Anatole Broyard made me realize that denying or suppressing who I was in any way would only lead to creative misery.

In any case, I’m not trying to say I knew exactly what Jackson was going through. What I’m saying is that I don’t think Jackson wanted to be white. I think he wanted to be “normal”. Despite the peculiarities of my experience, I think everyone, especially teenagers, go through that at some level. Jackson, because of his psychological problems, acted in a more drastic fashion.

I think Cole’s commentary on Jackson’s death is particularly spot-on because he targets the truth about something we wrestle with in our societies today, the fact that there are no simple and visible benchmarks for declaring our identities as they shift from place to place, from moment to moment. We find them in our relationships, which as they grow blur and morph us just like the actors at the end of Jackson’s Black or White video. And I realized now that my discomfort with Jackson, was more about my own need for clear-cut answers and easily identifiable boundaries as I encountered them in my own struggles with my identity. If anything, Jackson’s death brings me to reflect again on these issues and how I navigate them to find my own way to get comfortable in my own skin. I hope that if I learn anything from Jackson, it’s that I learn them in my own way, without giving too much weight to public judgment, while still heeding the calls from my communities and loved ones so that I have a chance of remaining on an even keel.

Cole ends his musings on Jackson’s death with this video, which he calls “the height of hybridity” that really shows how crossable all our boundaries really are. Enjoy: