Black or White

In the grab bag of oddities that is the second half of Michael Jackson’s biography — the seclusion at Neverland, the child molestation charges, the short-lived marriage to Lisa Marie Presley, the dangling of an infant over a balcony parapet, the illnesses, the addictions, the money problems, the unlikely friendships with Arab sheikhs — none is weirder and more troubling to some than Wacko Jacko’s increasingly deracinated physical appearance.As the young star of the Jackson 5, Jackson — the enigmatic and reclusive megastar who died yesterday of cardiac arrest at the age of 50 — began his career with medium-brown skin, African features and a flowing natural hairstyle, the very picture of a handsome young black male. Sometime in the early 1980s, however, Jackson’s skin began to grow lighter, and within a few years he appeared as pale as Robert Pattinson’s vampire in Twilight. At the same time, he underwent a series of plastic surgeries, including several rhinoplasties — which whittled away his nose until, by the end, it barely existed — and the addition of a cleft in his chin. His lips grew noticeably thinner, and his brow and cheekbones also appeared to have been surgically altered. For many, the overall effect of these changes was to make Jackson appear more Caucasian than African American. It was difficult not to suspect that his ongoing physical transformation reflected a desire to escape his racial identity. This was particularly disturbing to many blacks, for whom the specter of internalized racism remains an ongoing concern. Fats Waller’s 1929 jazz standard “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue,” later featured in the musical Ain’t Misbehavin’, was a pointed and poignant reminder of how the racism from outside can turn inward: “I’m white inside / but that don’t help my case / ’cause I can’t hide / what is on my face.” In Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama — a close contemporary of Jackson’s — writes about being shaken by a Life magazine article featuring a black man who had tried to bleach his skin white.Jackson knew exactly what was being said about him, and he went out of his way to refute it. In his 1988 autobiography, Moon Walk, he admitted some of the plastic surgeries but denied others, attributing his evolving facial structure to, among other things, hairstyle changes and stage lighting. Far from bleaching his skin, as was widely rumored, Jackson later claimed to suffer from vitiligo, a condition that disrupts skin pigmentation; his paleness, he said, was caused by treatments for the disease and makeup used to even out its blotching effects. In addition, he said, he had been diagnosed with lupus, which, combined with the vitiligo, resulted in a vampiric sensitivity to sunlight.