When Michael Jackson wrote the lyrics ”But if you’re thinkin’ about my baby / It don’t matter if you’re black or white” for his 1992 hit single Black or White, he could claim significant expertise. Jackson has had a fair crack at being both. First there was the African-American child star from Gary, Indiana (which became the most segregated city in the United States), who was the ethnic and aesthetic antithesis of the white-skinned, white-bread Osmonds.
Then came the raised cheekbones, thinned nose and lightened skin that transformed him into … something else. The surgeon’s knife did not make Jackson white, exactly, but it did not leave him looking black, either.
Instead he took on the characteristics of a transracial experiment, a combination of features that had never before been seen on one human being. In the process, Jackson proved that race was a construct by altering his face beyond all racial definition.
If his first attempt at racial conversion was cosmetic, his second, more recent one has been political. Only this time he is going in the other direction. In what may yet prove to be his boldest transformation, Jackson is trying to reinvent himself as black.
Under siege from both reporters and prosecutors following charges of seven counts of child molestation, Jackson has reportedly teamed up with black Muslim racial separatist organisation Nation of Islam. Among other things, it supports the creation of a separate country for black Americans and was founded on the principle that white people — literally born with tails and fur — are devils.
Jackson’s former spokesperson, Stuart Backerman, recently resigned, claiming that leading members of the Nation have begun making decisions for Jackson on strategy for his legal defence, business affairs and dealings with the media. The Nation’s chief of staff, Louis Farrakhan’s son-in-law, Leonard Farrakhan, is now working out of the Los Angeles office of Jackson’s lawyer, Mark Geragos.
”They … are basically brainwashing [Jackson],” one senior Jackson employee and friend, speaking on condition of anonymity, told The New York Times. ”They tried to do the same thing to Whitney Houston. They offer a false sense that they can control everything. Everyone is scared of them.” Another Jackson employee said: ”You’ve got a lawyer who is scared to throw them out. Michael doesn’t know what to do with them.”
Both the Nation and Jackson insiders deny the claim. ”Someone is spinning you,” said Geragos. ”Nobody has told me what to do and what not to do. Leonard, I believe, is someone Michael consults with, just like in excess of 25 [other] people.” But just a couple of days earlier, during a recent televised news conference, Benjamin Muhammad, a senior member of the Nation, was there, standing behind Geragos.
Quite how a celebrity who has been in flight from his racial features — let alone his racial identity — ended up in the arms of an organisation that is defined by race, is a moot point. Why a socially conservative institution committed to racial upliftment should open its arms to a man charged with child molestation is similarly baffling.
At the heart of it, however, lies not just Jackson and the Nation but three of the US’s most intense obsessions after terrorism: race, crime and celebrity.
The most generous explanation would be that, given the state he had got himself into, Jackson was once again in desperate need of new management and representation. The Nation has some experience in that field, as well as providing security, and was only too pleased to help. Its anti-white rhetoric has mellowed in recent years and it has been attempting to reach out to some communities it had previously alienated.
But because it remains self-sufficient and independent of the white power structure, the Nation is always there to catch prominent black people brought low by scandal, when no one else will touch them. Attend its large meetings and you will see Marion Barry, the former mayor of Washington DC, who was filmed taking crack with a prostitute.
Benjamin Chavis was fired as head of the Nation’s oldest civil rights organisation, the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, after he diverted £200 000 to settle a sexual harassment claim. Now he is Benjamin Muhammad.
Jackson, then, is just one more lost sheep coming back to the fold.
A more cynical theory is that this is one more black celebrity marriage made in opportunism. Forced yet again to explain himself out of a sordid hole, Jackson has fallen back on the defence of last resort: the hidey-hole of identity politics. He is being pursued not for what he has done, but for who he is.
Sadly, the latter interpretation is the more likely. Following the familiar pattern of the trials of both OJ Simpson and Sean ”Puffy” Combs, Jackson is yet another African-American celebrity whose interest in anti-racism has coincided with finding himself in trouble.
The handcuffs click and the rest of the story writes itself. They reach for Johnny Cochrane’s number (the first on the Rolodex when Simpson and Combs needed representation), then they start to circle the wagons, mobilising the broader community to protest their plight. Amid the noise, the gravity of the original charge — murder, manslaughter, paedophilia — gets lost.
It is not the first time Jackson has chosen to identify with the African-American community at moments more propitious for himself than for the fold. Eighteen months ago he rode through Harlem with the African-American presidential candidate, Al Sharpton, accusing record companies of being racist.
”The record companies … steal, they cheat, they do whatever they can. Especially against the black artists,” Jackson told an audience of 350 at Sharpton’s headquarters.
In a bitter denunciation of his record label, Jackson said of Sony chairperson Tommy Mottola: ”He’s mean, he’s a racist, and he’s very, very, very devilish.” Referring to one African-American artist, Jackson said, Mottola ”called him a fat, black nigger … And I can’t deal with that, you know. It’s wrong.” One wonders whether Jackson — rarely seen in Harlem before or since — had only just realised this, or whether the epiphany had anything to do with a flagging career.
Sony dismissed the comments as ”spiteful and hurtful”, implying that the campaign reflected Jackson’s own frustrations at the recent shrinking of the market for his work after his new album, Invincible, sold only two million copies worldwide — and Sony demanded that he pay back tens of millions spent on promoting the album.
And his accusation against Mottola was not the last time Jackson would use the word ”racism” to describe his treatment.
On the day when he was led in to the Santa Barbara court in handcuffs, his brother, Jermaine, called US television channel CNN and went live on air stating: ”This is nothing but a modern-day lynching.”
According to a report by the US Justice Department, if current trends continue, black men born in the US in 2001 will have a one-in-three chance of going to prison during their lifetime. Given such statistics, racism becomes a powerful rallying cry when any prominent black American stands before the law.
Jackson has clearly realised that no amount of celebrity can allow him to live the logic of his lyrics. In the US in the 21st century, it does matter whether you’re black or white. — Â