Michael’s Humanity

Michael Jackson’s metamorphosis opened up a debate on U.S. racial identity and the meaning of “reneging” on race. He was emblematic of contemporary times and embodied all of its paradoxes. He was the first to make a media event of Western sympathy for African famine victims: taking a humanitarian cause and transforming it into a global phenomenon spread by the entertainment world (fundamentally different from, just to give an example among many, the Bangladeshi concert which was more sophisticated, more intellectual and less massive).

If he somehow extended global sympathy for humanitarian action with “We Are the World,” he was also a person who inspired compassion, who touched others through his disfigured humanity and through all the tragedies that affected him. He had compassion for the victims of wars and catastrophes; while at the same time being victim of his milieu, a ruthless and inhuman environment that crushes lives, of which he is not the first nor will he be the last victim.

He was black and made himself white. Whether it was whitening treatment or disease, it matters little. The truth is that when you saw him dance to his song “They Don’t Care About Us,” with the multitudinous band Olodum in the streets of Salvador de Bahia, in a video produced by Spike Lee, it is clear that he always claimed blackness (whatever the intended meaning ), even though he might have whitened himself. The tributes in the Harlem Theatre in New York where he began his career, show that, despite the whitening, deep down, he was always regarded as an African American.

His metamorphosis has opened in the United States a debate on racial identify and on the meaning of “reneging” on one’s race: can one be black and at the same time want to be like Elizabeth Taylor? There is no definitive answer because what is interesting is that in these times of searching for unique identity features, of ultimate and pure racial essence, he demonstrated that it is possible to be black with white skin and a manufactured aquiline nose.

One is black when one’s parents recognize you as such, as Jamie Foxx pointed out when he paid tribute “to that black man,” in a kind of posthumous consecration of the racial status of the deceased.

More paradoxes: he was a multimillionaire but was broke: he earned $7.5 million a month, spent 8 and was thoroughly in debt. He could be both a symbol of masculinity (think of the “Bad” video produced by Scorsese), and at the same time he used makeup, was androgynous and extravagantly effeminate. He could be a symbol of physical performance; the ultimate ideal of the body carried to extremes of perfection in movement, speed, and plasticity; and at the same time concentrate all evils that such a tasks necessarily entail: pain, suffering, dissatisfaction generated by biological and anatomical limits of his humanity.

It is his dancing greatness that gives us an image emblematic of his best paradox: the moonwalk, the step that creates the illusion that one is advancing when in fact one is moving back. It is a great metaphor for the political moment in which we live.