September 2001 was allegedly witness to one of the strangest road trips in history: Michael Jackson, Elizabeth Taylor, and Marlon Brando driving from New York to Ohio in an attempt to get home [to California] following the 9/11 terrorist attacks…
The saga is now being dramatised in a one-off special for Sky Arts, starring Joseph Fiennes as Jackson, Stockard Channing as Taylor, and Brian Cox as Brando.
(London Guardian, January 26, 2016)
Unsurprisingly, this casting of a white actor to play Michael Jackson has incited viral outrage. Never mind that Michael would probably have been every bit as flattered by a white actor playing him as Rachel Dolezal would be by a black actress playing her.
Of course, the outrage her “passing” incited has already been lost in the black hole of hashtag protests. No doubt the outrage this casting incited will be in short order too.
But at least Rachel is honest enough to admit she’s doing all she can to look black because she does not want to be identified as white. By contrast, Michael maintained the charade of saying, I’m black and I’m proud.
Except that he never looked more dishonest, if not delusional, than when he said this during that famous 1993 interview with Oprah Winfrey.
Oprah questioned him about reports that he wanted a white child to play his younger self in a Pepsi commercial. Michael protested that the very thought of this was “stupid … ridiculous … horrifying … crazy.”
He protested too much, methinks. Not least because those words unwittingly described the racial metamorphosis Michael was undergoing at the time, which would soon see him get “whiter than white” and even produce white children to play his own … in real life.
The most manifestly troubling aspect of Michael’s personal life was his role as a father. In addition to many other Freudian questions, I wonder about the psychological impact on his three lily-white children of having this black man (notwithstanding his appearance) insist that he is their biological father.
Just imagine the psychological defect (self-hate?) or physical dysfunction that led Michael to choose the sperm of a white man, instead of using his own (or that of a black man), to inseminate the (white) surrogates who gave birth to his designer babies.
(“Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, Is Dead,” The iPINIONS Journal, June 27, 2009)
Frankly, it was as plain as the nose on his face that Michael hated features that made him look black. Perhaps that’s why his fake nose kept falling off every time he lied about this. In any event, the racial self-hate he personified evoked in me sadness bordering on pity, so much so that I still find it impossible to listen to his music with unbridled joy.
Sociologists have proffered the notion of “complex personhood” to explain the psychopathology of blacks bleaching themselves white. But, no matter how nuanced or complicated the psychology that causes this pathology, there’s no denying the racial abnegation involved.
No great poet has ever been afraid of being himself…
But this is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America – this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American [i.e. white] as possible…
I am ashamed … for the colored artist who runs from the painting of Negro faces … because he fears the strange unwhiteness of his own features.
(Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” 1926)
Mind you, given that Michael cast a white man to father his children, one can hardly blame producers for casting a white man to play him. They clearly hope the casting’s the thing wherein they’ll catch viewers for this macabre farce.
Incidentally, it bears pointing out that September 2001 was allegedly witness to an even stranger trip: the FBI helping 14 Saudis flee from Kentucky to Saudi Arabia following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. This, I respectfully submit, is far more worthy of dramatization.
Meanwhile, MLK famously preached that people should “not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” Michael famously sang that “it don’t matter if you’re black or white.”
But it clearly mattered to him. What’s more, he practically compelled us to judge him not by the content of his character, but by the color of his (bleached) skin.
Not to mention that if you’re black or white has always mattered. And we did not need #BlackLivesMatter or #OscarsSoWhite to throw this into stark relief.
That said, it’s not the artistic license producers are taking that troubles me. After all, if a black man can play Thomas Jefferson in the hit Broadway musical Hamilton, surely a white man can play Michael Jackson in a TV tragicomedy.
Except that Jefferson had no psychological defect that made him want to be black, notwithstanding his sexual penchant for black female slaves. Therefore, the producers of that musical cannot be accused of wantonly exploiting the psychopathology of racial self-hate. The same cannot be said of the producers of this farce.
Related commentaries:
Rachel Dolezal…
MJ: the kid’s not my son…
OscarSoWhite…
BlackLivesMatter…
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