Michael Jackson - American Bogeyman
The Role of Racism in Media Portrayals of the King of Pop
Jul 22, 2009
Michael Jackson, once lauded as a talented musician and all around boy wonder - spent much of his adulthood being treated as a freak by the American news media, who hounded him relentlessly with accusations of child abuse, molestation and bizarre rumors about his private life. The hoard of speculations about the allusive and mysterious man have remained for the most part unsupported by evidence one way or the other. Certainly, one must take into consideration the amount of wealth Jackson possessed and the influence it could have had in his favor in both the legal courts and the court of public opinion. It is possible that Jackson is in some ways the monster that he is believed to be and that the lack of evidence is really a reflection of his money and influence.
However, considering the vastness of that very influence, the attitude of the media and their relentless pursuit of each and every oddity of his life seems contrary to what one would expect. More frequently than not, the details of lives of the very rich are hidden from our view.
The meat and potatoes of the tabloids are those who are rich and famous enough to be of notice, but not rich enough to be able to buy silence. We do not, for instance, hear very much about Bill Gates, who is one of the most well known men in the world and also very wealthy. Donald Trump, a man always in the midst of marriage or divorce, is sometimes mentioned, but the emphasis is always on the new women in his life.
Men of that sort of wealth and prestige do not often generate the frenzy of intrusive and accusatory stories that Michael Jackson did. With Jackson, nothing seemed off limits to the press. Speculations, for instance, about his marriage to Lisa Marie Presley, seemed impossible to corroborate and completely baseless, seemingly spurned by little more than the fact that the couple held hands in what some in the media deemed too chaste a fashion.
Why Michael Jackson was the Exception to the Rule
Why Michael Jackson was targeted by the media so constantly isn’t instantly obvious. Michael Jackson was certainly an exceptional man in terms of his musical talents and resulting fame and wealth but from what little we know about the man’s life that isn’t tabloid speculation, there are few meaningful ways that he deviated from the celebrity norm. Picking unusual names for one’s offspring, getting married and quickly divorced or wearing attention getting clothes is par for the Hollywood course, after all. Later in his life, he took to covering his children’s faces with veils in order to hide their identities, which is understandable for a former child star, even if it may seem unusual.
The more one peers into the depths of Michael Jackson’s life, the less we find that explains why the media would hound him in such a constantly negative and obsessive fashion, or why the American public would be so eager to dethrone their once adored idol. But when one steps back, a very obvious and unsettling possibility inevitability comes to mind. One thing made Michael Jackson very obviously unique - he was a man who chose to defy racial definition.
A Black Man Obliterated
In a society where so much of our thinking relies on categorization, he rapidly became uncategorizable. More so, in his transition of appearance from a boy clearly identifiable as being a person of color to a man completely and ambiguously devoid of any stereotypical appearances of race, he shook the very foundations of ideas of race in this country.
In a society where ideas of race as innate still predominate hand and hand with a conversely equal reliance on what is visible and superficial, a Black man who could no longer be identified visibly as such defied comfortably unquestioned assumptions and ideas that lie at the very foundations of our culture. This could have resulted in more societal dialogue, an exploration of a new perspective but instead the media as a whole treated the man with fear and disgust.
A Casualty of Racist Conformity
Perhaps part of that reaction could have been the result of some deep and unexplored guilt. In a society where people of color are encouraged to make themselves as white as possible in order to make themselves acceptable to the mainstream, one man mutilated his body in the most blatant ways until it met that norm. The world may never know why Michael’s skin turned the color of snow, or what his conscious motivations for surgically reducing his nose were, but the constant presence and visibility he experienced because of his fame ensured that no one would ever forget his face.
Jackson was a blatant casualty of racial oppression who could not be ignored, so instead he was demonized, transformed from victim to predator so that the American people would not question why a man would go to such lengths to erase his blackness, and the mainstream media
 |
