some thoughts

1.

The female elders tell us what to look out for. Staring straight ahead, they usher us past the Starlite Lounge, in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, and whisk us across the street as soon as they see “one of them faggots” emerge from the neon-lit bar. This one—he’s brown-skinned, like nearly every one else in that neighborhood, and skinny—has a female friend in tow, for appearances must be kept up. And as the couple run off in search of another pack of cigarettes, the bar’s door closes slowly behind them, but not before we children hear, above the martini-fed laughter, a single voice, high and plaintive: Michael Jackson’s.

It’s 1972, and “Ben,” the fourteen-year-old star’s first solo hit, is everywhere. The title song for a film about a bullied boy and his love for a rat named Ben (together they train a legion of other rodents to kill the boy’s tormentors; eventually Ben helps kill his human companion), the mournful ballad quickly became Jackson’s early signature song—certainly among the queens at the Starlite, who ignore its Gothic context, and play it over and over again as a kind of anthem of queer longing. For it was evident by then that Michael Jackson was no mere child with a gift. Or, to put it more accurately, he was all child—an Ariel of the ghetto—whose appeal, certainly to the habitués of places like the Starlite, lay partly in his ability to find metaphors to speak about his difference, and theirs.

2.

The Jackson Five were America’s first internationally recognized black adolescent boy band. They were as smooth as the Ink Spots, but there was a hint of wildness and pathos in Michael Jackson’s rough-boy soprano, which, with its Jackie Wilson– and James Brown–influenced yelps, managed to remain just this side of threatening. He never changed that potent formula, not even after he went solo, more or less permanently, in 1978 at the age of twenty. Early on, he recognized the power mainstream stardom held—a chance to defend himself and his mother from the violent ministrations of his father, Joe Jackson (who famously has justified his tough parenting, his whippings, as a catalyst for his children’s success), and to wrest from the world what most performers seek: a nonfractured mirroring.

After “Ben,” the metaphors Michael Jackson used to express his difference from his family became ever more elaborate and haunting: there was his brilliant turn as an especially insecure, effete, and, at times, masochistic scarecrow in Sidney Lumet’s 1978 film version of the Broadway hit The Wiz. There was his appropriation of Garland’s later style—the sparkly black Judy-in-concert jacket—during the 1984 “Victory” tour, his last performances with his brothers, whose costuming made them look like intergalactic superheroes. And there were the songs he wrote for women—early idols like Diana Ross or his older sister, Rebbie—songs that expressed what he could never say about his own desire. “She said she wants a guy/To keep her satisfied/But that’s alright for her/But it ain’t enough for me,” Jackson wrote in the 1982 Diana Ross hit song “Muscles.” The song continues: “Still, I don’t care if he’s young or old/(Just make him beautiful)…. I want muscles/All over his body.” The following year, Jackson wrote “Centipede,” which became Rebbie Jackson’s signature song. It begins: “Your love/Is like a ragin’ fire, oh/You’re a snake that’s on the loose/The strike is your desire.” In bars like the Starlite, and, later, in primarily black and Latin gay dance clubs like the Paradise Garage on Manhattan’s Lower West Side, the meaning was clear: Michael Jackson was most himself when he was someone other than himself.

Ross was more than an early idol; she served as a kind of beard during a pivotal period of Jackson’s self-creation. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, as he moved away from being a Jack- son but was not willing to forgo his adorable child star status, Jackson “dated” a number of white starlets—Tatum O’Neal, Brooke Shields—but once those girls were exhibited at public events two or three times, they were never seen with him again. Ross, on the other hand, was a constant. Gay fans labeled her as the ultimate fag hag, or sister, who used her energetic feline charm to help sexualize Jackson. But intentionally or not, the old friends perverted this notion in the 1981 television special Diana. In it, the two singers wear matching costumes: slacks, shirt, and tie. The clip was shown over and over again in the clubs: Jackson dances next to Ross, adding polish to her appealingly jerky moves; he does Ross better than Ross.

The anxiety of influence is most palpable on the spoken-word introduction to his 1979 album Off the Wall, the first of his four collaborations with the producer Quincy Jones. Here, Jackson can be heard struggling against his own imitation of Ross’s breathy voice (a voice canonized in Diana, her brilliant Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers– produced 1980 album featuring the militaristic hit “I’m Coming Out,” which has subsequently become a gay anthem of sorts). It was during this period that a number of black gay men began to refer to Jackson as “she” and, eventually, “a white woman”—one of the slurs they feared most, for what could be worse than being called that which you were not, could never be? As his physical transformations began to overshadow his life as a musician, Jackson’s now-famous mask of white skin and red lips (a mask that distanced him from blackness just as his sexuality distanced him from blacks) would come to be read as the most arresting change in the man who said no to life but yes to pop.

3.

The chokehold of black conservatism on black gay men has been chronicled by a handful of artists—Harlem Renaissance poet Bruce Nugent, playwright and filmmaker Bill Gunn, James Baldwin, and AIDS activist and spoken word artist Marlon Riggs among them—but these figures are rare, and known mostly to white audiences. In black urban centers across the US, where Jesus is still God, men who cannot conform to the culture’s edicts—adopting a recognizably heterosexual lifestyle, along with a specious contempt for the spoils of white folk—are ostracized, or worse; being “out” is a privilege many black gay men still cannot afford. Bias-related crimes aside (black gay men are more likely to be bashed by members of their own race than by nonblacks), there’s the bizarre fact that queerness reads, even to some black gay men themselves, as a kind of whiteness. In a black, Christian- informed culture, where relatively few men head households anymore, whiteness is equated with perversity, a pollutant further eroding the already decimated black family. So, in their wretchedness, and their guilt, the black gay men who cannot marry women, and those who should not but do, meet on the “down low” for closeted gay sex and, less often, love and fraternity.

During Jackson’s childhood in Gary, Indiana, black conservatism would have reigned. Among US cities with a population of 100,000 or more, Gary—a steel town twenty-five miles southeast of downtown Chicago—has the highest percentage of black residents, mostly Southern transplants, mostly Christian, and steadfastly heterosexual. Both of Jackson’s parents’ roots were in the South. His mother, Katherine, was a devout Jehovah’s Witness. She suffered Joe’s various infidelities and cruelties to their nine children with the forbearance of one whose reward will come not in this world, but the next. (Joe Jackson has never adopted his wife’s faith.) In her 2006 study, On Michael Jackson,^[*] the critic Margo Jefferson discusses this split in parenting, the fractured mirroring in the home:

Katherine Jackson’s pursuit of her faith was analogous to what she had been doing all along: housekeeping. Dirt and disorder were the enduring enemy in the household. Germ-free spiritual cleanliness was the goal in her religion. The Witnesses say you are not pure in heart unless you are pure in body. You must follow scriptural condemnation of fornicators, idolators, masturbators, adulterers and homosexuals…. So while Katherine works to lead their souls to God, Joseph works to bend their minds, bodies and voices to his will for success. Not that Katherine objects: she has her own suppressed ambitions. The boys become singing and dancing machines. And little Michael becomes a diligent Witness.

For her children ever to have raised the issue of Katherine Jackson’s complicity with her husband’s drive for his sons’ stardom (and thus his own), and with his various cruelties—Jefferson writes, “He put on ghoulish masks and scared his children awake, tapping on their bedroom window, pretending to break in and standing over their beds, waiting for them to wake up screaming”—would have meant the total loss of family: she was the only emotional sustenance they knew. And who would object to the riches Joe Jackson’s management eventually yielded, despite his hard-line style? Three years after his fifth son, Michael, began to sing lead in the family band in 1966, they were signed to Motown Records, where they would remain for more than a decade. And despite their uneven career paths, none of the Jackson children would ever lack for financial security again.

4.

In his 1985 essay “Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood,” Baldwin wrote of Michael Jackson:

The Michael Jackson cacophony is fascinating in that it is not about Jackson at all. I hope he has the good sense to know it and the good fortune to snatch his life out of the jaws of a carnivorous success. He will not swiftly be forgiven for having turned so many tables, for he damn sure grabbed the brass ring, and the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo has nothing on Michael.

Baldwin goes on to claim that “freaks are called freaks and are treated as they are treated—in the main, abominably—because they are human beings who cause to echo, deep within us, our most profound terrors and desires.” But Jackson was not quite that articulate or vocal about his difference, if he even saw it as such after a while. Certainly his early interest in subtext —expressed primarily by wordplay and choice of metaphor—receded after he released his synthesizer-heavy 1991 album, Dangerous. That album gave us “In the Closet,” where an uncredited Princess Stéphanie of Monaco pleads, at the beginning of the song, for the singer not to ignore their love, “woman to man.” (It’s another link in the chain of influence; she sounds like Jackson doing Diana Ross.) In a later part of the song, Michael pleads: “Just promise me/Whatever we say/Or whatever we do/To each other/For now we’ll make a vow/To just keep it in the closet.”

But this would be his last engagement of this kind. Unlike Prince, his only rival in the black pop sweepstakes, Jackson couldn’t keep mining himself for material for fear of what it would require of him—a turning inward, which, though arguably not the job of a pop musician, is the job of the artist. After Dangerous, Jackson became a corporation, concerned less with creative innovation than with looking backward to recreate the success he had achieved more than ten years before, with Thriller. In contrast, over a career spanning roughly the time of Jackson’s own, Prince has released more than thirty albums, not all of them great, but each reflective of the current permutation of his musical mind, with its focus on sex and religion as twin transformative experiences. When not content to sing as himself, Prince has created an alter ego, Camille, to explore his feminine side, and thus help promote his stock in trade: androgyny (which is Prince’s freakishness, along with his interest in bending racial boundaries without resculpting his face). For Jackson to have admitted to his own freakishness might have meant, ultimately, being less canny about his image and more knowledgeable about his self—his body, which was not as impervious as his reputation.

James Baldwin did not live long enough to see Jackson self-destruct. And the most interesting aspect of his essay in light of Jackson’s death is Baldwin’s identification with Michael Jackson, another black boy who saw fame as power, and both did and did not get out of the ghetto he had been born into, or away from the father who became his greatest subject. But the differences are telling. While Baldwin died in exile, he did not presumably die in exile from his body, and while Baldwin died an artist, Jackson did not. After 1991, Jackson’s focus was his career—which is work, too, but not the work he could have done. And his tremendous gifts as a singer and arranger, and as a synthesizer of world music in a pop context, became calcified. He forgot how to speak, even behind the jeweled mask of metaphor.

In the end, the chief elements of his early childhood—his father, his blackness, the church, his mother’s silence—won, and the prize was his self-martyrdom: the ninety-pound frame; the facial operations; the dermatologist as the replacement family; the disastrous finances; the young boys loved, and then paid off. Michael Jackson died a long time ago, and it’s taken years for anyone to notice.

THE comforting thing about each “national conversation on race” is that the “teachable moment” passes before any serious conversation can get going.

This one ended with a burp. The debate about which brew would best give President Obama Joe Six-Pack cred in his White House beer op with Harvard’s town-and-gown antagonists hit the front page of The Wall Street Journal. Had Obama picked a brand evoking an elitist whiff of John Kerry — Stella Artois, perhaps? — we’d have another week of coverage dissecting his biggest political gaffe since rolling a gutter ball at a Pennsylvania bowling alley.

You can’t blame Obama if he’s perplexed about the recent events. He answers a single, legitimate race-based question at the end of a news conference and is roundly condemned for “stepping on his own message” about health care. It was the noisiest sector of the news media that did much of the stepping. “Health care is bad for ratings,” explained one cable anchor, Dylan Ratigan of MSNBC, with refreshing public candor. What a relief, then, to drop dreary debates about the public option and declare a national conversation about black-white fisticuffs. Especially when this particular incident is truly small beer next to the far more traumatic national sea change on race that will keep sowing conflict and anger long after Henry Louis Gates Jr. finishes his proposed documentary on racial profiling.

I’ll return to the larger picture, but before the battle of Cambridge fades entirely, let’s note that the only crime Obama committed at his news conference was honesty (always impolitic in Washington). He conceded he did not know “all the facts” and so wisely resisted passing judgment on “what role race played” in the incident. He said, accurately, that “separate and apart from this incident” there is “a long history” of “African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcing disproportionately.” And, yes, the police did act “stupidly in arresting” — not to mention shackling — “somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home.” If Obama had really wanted to go for the jugular, he might have added that the police may have overstepped the law as well.

The president’s subsequent apology for his news-conference answer was superfluous. But he might have used it to acknowledge the one exemplary player in Cambridge, Lucia Whalen, the white passer-by whose good deed of a 911 phone call did not go unpunished. In his police report, Sgt. James Crowley portrayed Whalen as a racial profiler by saying she had told him that the two men at Gates’s door were black. She denied it, and the audio tape of her original call backs her up: she had told the dispatcher (only when asked) that one of the men “looked kind of Hispanic” and that she couldn’t see the other. Yet Whalen, who was pilloried as a racist because of Crowley’s report, received no apology from him and no White House invitation from Obama. That’s stupid behavior by both men.

It’s also stupid to look at Harvard as a paradigm of anything, race included. If there was a teachable moment in this incident, it could be found in how some powerful white people well beyond Cambridge responded to it. That reaction is merely the latest example of how the inexorable transformation of America into a white-minority country in some 30 years — by 2042 in the latest Census Bureau estimate — is causing serious jitters, if not panic, in some white establishments.

Ground zero for this hysteria is Fox News, where Brit Hume last Sunday lamented how insulting it is “to be labeled a racist” in “contemporary” America. “That fact has placed into the hands of certain people a weapon,” he said, as he condemned Gates for hurling that weapon at a police officer. Gates may well have been unjust — we don’t know that Crowley is a racist — but the professor was provoked by being confronted like a suspect in the privacy of his own home.

What about those far more famous leaders in Hume’s own camp who insistently cry “racist” — and in public forums — without any credible justification whatsoever? These are the “certain people” Hume conspicuously didn’t mention. They include Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich, both of whom labeled Sonia Sotomayor a racist. Their ranks were joined last week by Glenn Beck, who on Fox News inexplicably labeled Obama a racist with “a deep-seated hatred for white people,” presumably including his own mother.

What provokes their angry and nonsensical cries of racism is sheer desperation: an entire country is changing faster than these white guys bargained for. We’ve been reminded repeatedly during Gatesgate that Cambridge’s mayor is a black lesbian. But a more representative window into the country’s transition might be that Dallas County, Tex., elected a Latina lesbian sheriff in 2004 (and re-elected her last year) and that the three serious candidates for mayor of Houston this fall include a black man and a white lesbian.

Even Texas may be tinting blue, and as goes Texas, so will all but the dwindling rural minority of the Electoral College. Last month the Census Bureau released a new analysis of the 2008 presidential election results finding that increases among minority voters accounted for virtually all the five million additional votes cast in comparison to 2004. Black women had a higher turnout rate than any other group, and young blacks turned out at a higher rate than young whites.

It’s against this backdrop that 11 Republican congressmen have now signed on to a bill requiring that presidential candidates produce their birth certificates. This bizarre “birther” movement, out to prove that Obama is not a naturally born citizen, first gained notice in the summer of 2008 when it was being advanced by the author Jerome Corsi, a leader of the Swift boat assault on Kerry. That it revved up again as Gatesgate boiled over and Sotomayor sped toward Senate confirmation is not a coincidence.

Obama’s election, far from alleviating paranoia in the white fringe, has only compounded it. There is no purer expression of this animus than to claim that Obama is literally not an American — or, as Sarah Palin would have it, not a “real American.” The birth-certificate canard is just the latest version of those campaign-year attempts to strip Obama of his American identity with faux controversies over flag pins, the Pledge of Allegiance and his middle name. Last summer, Cokie Roberts of ABC News even faulted him for taking a vacation in his home state of Hawaii, which she described as a “foreign, exotic place,” in contrast to her proposed choice of Myrtle Beach, S.C., in the real America of Dixie.

Bill O’Reilly and Ann Coulter have condemned the birther brigades and likened them to “the truthers” who accused the Bush administration of engineering the 9/11 attacks. But those conspiracy theorists couldn’t find 11 congressmen willing to sponsor a bill supporting their claims. Even Liz Cheney has publicly refused to dispute the libels on Obama’s citizenship.

One of the loudest birther enablers is not at Fox but CNN: Lou Dobbs, who was heretofore best known for trying to link immigrants, especially Hispanics, to civic havoc. Dobbs is one-stop shopping for the excesses of this seismic period of racial transition. And he is following a traditional, if toxic, American playbook. The escalating white fear of newly empowered ethnic groups and blacks is a naked replay of more than a century ago, when large waves of immigration and the northern migration of emancipated blacks, coupled with a tumultuous modernization of the American work force, unleashed a similar storm of racial and nativist panic.

As Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post and Helene Cooper of The Times have pointed out, a lot of today’s variation on the theme is class-oriented. Some whites habituated to a monopoly on the upper reaches of American power just can’t adjust to the reality that Obama, Sotomayor, Oprah Winfrey and countless others are now at the very pinnacle, and that they might sometimes side with each other just as their white counterparts do. Threatened white elites try to mask their own anxieties by patronizingly adopting working-class whites as their pet political surrogates — Joe the Plumber, New Haven firemen, a Cambridge police officer. Call it Village People populism.

Sometimes the most revealing expressions of this resentment emerge in juvenile asides — Bill Kristol (on The Weekly Standard’s blog) ridiculing Gates for writing a flowery travel magazine article about his privileged vacation home of Martha’s Vineyard, or Heather MacDonald (in National Review) mocking Gates as a “limousine liberal” for his supposedly hypocritical admission that he has a “regular car service” and a “regular driver” to fetch him at the airport. Who does Henry Louis Gates Jr. think he is, William F. Buckley Jr.?

The one lesson that everyone took away from the latest “national conversation about race” is the same one we’ve taken away from every other “national conversation” in the past couple of years. America has not transcended race. America is not postracial. So we can all say that again. But it must also be said that we’re just at the start of what may be a 30-year struggle. Beer won’t cool the fury of those who can’t accept the reality that America’s racial profile will no longer reflect their own.