Why We Love to Hate Michael Jackson

Why We Love to Hate Michael Jackson

Am I the only one who's grown weary of the incessant Michael Jackson jokes on late-night tv? After his raging but brief popularity in the mid-80s, Michael has become the public figure everyone, it seems, loves to hate. Whether it's Michael the too-white black man, Michael the kook, or Michael the child molester, everything from Michael's physical appearance to his private behavior is fodder for the public grist mill. But why? Why is it Michael, even after his recent acquittal, can't seem to buy a break? And why, after so many months and years, hasn't Michael-bashing gone out of fashion? After all, there are lots of kooks in Hollywood, and more than a few of them have faced legal allegations. Why on earth should we care so much about him?

The real reason Michael Jackson is so widely reviled is the same reason the boy who plays with Barbies is tormented on the playground: Jackson refuses to conform to cultural notions of who he ought to be. For one thing, Jackson's pale skin refuses to play the game by conforming to fixed categories of race. Whether, as has often been asserted, Jackson has vitiglio (a skin disease that causes loss of pigmentation) or whether he has bleached his skin, there's no doubt that Michael has become lighter over the years. The young Michael, the kid of the Jackson 5, was definitively black and, like the rest of his family, fit well into American ideas about race, about what constitutes the Successful Black. The Successful Black was (and still is) one who entertains whites, either through sports, music, or tv. But what about the black kid who metamorphoses into someone white? What does that do to racial categories and their attendant expectations? Michael, because he's famous, doesn't just pass. He destabilizes the categories of race entirely, shows them up for what they are: falsely constructed categories based on that slipperiest of criteria, appearance. Why else would so much energy have been expended on whether or not Michael's transformation is a result of deliberate cosmetic treatments or is "not his fault"?

Consider the assumptions at work here. If Jackson's light skin and many plastic surgeries *are* deliberate, then we can "blame" him--but for what? Implicitly, for his ability and willingness to transgress racial boundaries. How many people would sneer at a white person who, afflicted by skin-darkening disease, took steps to keep from looking Black? It wouldn't even make the news. But how many would sneer at a white who deliberately became Black, as John Gibbons did in the 50s to test the notion of separate but equal? As we recently saw in New Orleans, there is still widespread racial inequality in America, despite the pablum about equality that so many people (mostly self-accepting whites) love to believe. But if our ideas about race are firmly planted on a banana peel, what then? What if all those black, inner-city residents could one day become white? More horrifying still to most white Americans, what if white privilege suddenly went away? What if we were forced to face the music of our longstanding participation in a socially unjust system? Michael raises these and other unconscious cultural anxieties, which, I submit, is part of the reason he continues to be much more popular among African Americans than among whites.

As if his refusal to act out racial stereotypes weren't bad enough, Michael also refuses to perform gender correctly. Maybe we could handle his transformations of appearance--his lightening skin and famous plastic surgeries--if he at least acted macho. But Michael, soft-voiced and lavishly dressed, professing his love for children, could not be more antithetical to American notions of masculinity. Whatever the reason, whether he's transgendered or simply unusual, Michael's performance of gender looks more stereotypically female than male. Michael the black-white power-lifter? We could handle that. Heck, the American public could even handle Ru Paul, albeit briefly. But Paul looks black, acts black, and makes no bones about cross-dressing in high, fabulous style. We revile Michael because his status is far more ambiguous. He deconstructs notions of race and of gender simultaneously, acting more like a Virtuous White Female than her historical foil, the Scary Black Male. What's more, unlike Ru Paul, Michael does it all without saying so explicitly. This makes him impossible to categorize in the same way that Ru Paul is categorized--the high-fashion cross-dresser being a by-now-familiar, if only tepidly accepted, American icon.

Then there are Jackson's interactions with children: multiple child molestation charges and the infamous baby-dangling episode, not to mention the now nearly-forgotten paternity suits of the early and mid-80s. Don't get me wrong, here: I don't condone child molestation or abuse in any form. I have no idea whether Michael is guilty some or any of the charges leveled at him over the years. But I do know that his unconventional attitudes toward children, not to mention his own deliberately-cultivated childish demeanor, violates yet another set of cultural norms. Michael refuses to acknowledge the firm dividing line between adult and child. Never mind that in other cultures, adults are not regarded as threats to children, and the dividing line between serious adult and inner child is a more organic one. To Americans, anyway, black adult male=potential sexual predator; white female girl=perpetual slasher-film victim. Since Michael is supposed to be the former, but presents himself more like the latter, is it any wonder that he's been the target of so many lawsuits and jibes? Would we really raise an eyebrow if Michael were a white woman who allowed unrelated children to sleep over in her bed? Wouldn't that make Michael more like Mia Farrow than John Wayne Gacy?

Moreover, it's interesting to note that the charges against Michael have gotten weirder as his skin has gotten lighter. In the 1980s he was being accused of fathering children out of wedlock and then abandoning them, a charge frequently levelled at black men. More recently, the child-molestation charges and baby-dangling episode have made the news night after tedious night. It doesn't seem to matter that the charges were dubious at best, or that he didn't actually drop the baby. In the narrow American psyche, anyone that "weird" must be a threat to children.

Michael's unconventional presentation of adulthood also hits another cultural nerve, though: the one that says being an adult requires sacrificing the "irresponsibility" of childhood to the venal duties of adulthood. Sure, Jim Baker's amusement park may have raised eyebrows and become the brunt of jokes, but at least he did it for profit and not for the thrill of riding the roller coaster. Our discomfort with Michael's personal amusement park, his famously-lavish perpetual childhood, plays into deep-rooted convictions that hard work and suffering are essential for both spiritual redemption and the realization of the American Dream. The fact that Michael doesn't "have" to face up to adulthood, doesn't "have" to sacrifice his inner child on the altar of economic necessity, evokes a deep, smoldering rage among many Americans. Why should someone who refuses to conform to the rules of Blackness, the restrictions of masculinity, and the drudgery of adulthood be able to "get away with it" all on such a lavish scale?

In this sense the cultural rage toward Michael Jackson parallels the lingering rage toward OJ. Nevermind that Michael hasn't been accused of murder or brutality or domestic violence, that the alleged crimes are hardly parallel. Both are rich black men who have been able to "get away with" (supposed) crimes that would have sent any poor black man to his death. While OJ's death sentence might well have been delivered by the courts, Michael's would more likely have come in a dark alley at the hands of a homophobic attacker. Maybe that's why the late-night jokes about both of them refuse to go away. Prevented from doing real physical harm to Michael, the American public has to settle for the unsatisfying spectacle of public skewering.

But what if we were to embrace Michael's nonconformity as a sign of inner strength rather than weakness? If we were to adopt him as a model of how to resist reductive stereotyping, how to remake harmful attitudes about blackness, gender, and adulthood? Isn't Michael's insistence on being himself a hallmark of a true American? Instead our resentments continue to fester, a fact that reveals more about our own cultural anxieties than about Michael himself. Perhaps we should turn this critical gaze inward, on our own prejudices. To those with nothing but derision for Michael-the-weirdo, my answer is this: America, heal thyself.