DKcosmonaut: MJ & The Problem of the Color Line

I was just about to walk out of ballet class this evening, when my phone rang and it was Bobo yelling on the other end of the line: “Kilian, Michael Jackson died!” Do you know that feeling of ominous incredulity when you hear big tragic news like this and you can’t help but smile while passing the news to someone else? It’s not a smile of joy, but a smile of sensation, of knowing that this is so big you can’t quite comprehend its meaning as you inform your neighbor, text message your best friend, run to the computer and check the facts online, read all the tweets with the hashtag #RIP MJ. This smile persisted until the sadness sunk in while I watched a performance in a crumbling, dilapidated opera house, and it turned into a contemplative frown on my face, heavy and full of meaning-making.

This is not the first time I’ve tried to make meaning of Michael Jackson. The last paper I wrote at college, in late April of my senior year in 2001, before there was any talk of planes crashing into buildings, was about this man whom I came to know as the tragic figure of the 20th century. I wrestled with my topic about Michael Jackson’s transracial and transgender transgressions, at the trigger of America’s most deep-seeded hot buttons, exploding our precious and powerful post-chattel-slavery social codes around race, gender, beauty, genius and sexuality – all to backfire literally in his face.

We collectively created this monster/saint to live with us in our own homes. When I was 15, I plastered my room with pale-faced, chiseled images of the King of Pop, and I carefully preserved every magazine clipping I could find in immaculate ring binders. I cried when my mom suggested that the child molestation charges might be true. I defended his freedom of choice when my white friend complained about Michael’s betrayal of his own blackness. I was touched when he’d talk about the preciousness of our planet, and I was confused by his marriages, children, and shopping sprees. Little did I know that Michael Jackson triggers something – at least SOMEthing – in almost each and every one of us.

And little did I know that this something is so intrinsically linked to our collective legacies of violence, genocide, repression, exploitation, to our histories of power and greed; legacies and histories we keep reenacting with each other every single day of our lives. There is a violence in the jokes about how Michael Jackson turned from a black man into a white woman, a violence that he himself repeatedly – and self-destructively – punctured by his physical transformation, a violence that affects my House of Freak as well as yours.

While W.E.B. Du Bois forecast the problem of the 20th century as being the Problem of the Color Line, there’s been talk of our 21st century Obama-age as being post-racial, where color has allegedly lost its divisive significance. And I’m thinking of Michael Jackson’s passing in light of Barack Obama’s ascension, one freak of nature passing the torch to another freak of nature, both freakish in their genius and their appeal, one a victim, the other a victor.

The collective narcissism that has shaped and plagued us since the early 1980s when the King came of age infested this freak and ate him from the inside out, his face inscribed by our every social ill, with our undivided assistance. Now, the President is coming into his own in an age of transcendence, or so we hope. Who is whiter, Michael or Barack? And how has the meaning of this question changed between the time Michael Jackson started resembling a “white woman” in 1989 and the time the Obamas moved into the “white house” in 2009?

The pain and shock that prompted Bobo to call me as soon as the news broke is accompanied by our collective shame of having been unable to affirm Michael Jackson’s sensitive and transgressive being, besides making him the best-selling artist in the history of pop. His chart-topping success is only part of his brilliance – most of all, he’s been the man in the mirror of our world, beautiful, inspiring, sick, falling apart, and ready to be reborn.