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So, the King of Pop is dead.
On the one hand, 50 is not very old, especially for someone who can afford the very best medical treatment money can buy. On the other hand, we have become accustomed to celebrities dying early deaths; for every centenarian Bob Hope, there are a half-dozen Marilyn Monroes or James Deans, to say nothing of Princess Dianas.
We have become used to the Whole World Stopping for a global paroxysm of mourning - or, at least, those parts of the world that regularly appear on TV. From the weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth, you'd think Mr. Jackson had been Mahatma Gandhi or Mother Teresa, perhaps both.
Others have written of this strange imbalance between fame and accomplishment and what it says about our society. Our question, alas, is far sadder. Let's consider what actor Jamie Foxx had to say about the legacy of Michael Jackson:
We want to celebrate this black man - he belongs to us - and we shared him with everybody else. [emphasis added]
What?! Michael Jackson was no man's property. He belonged to himself. He did as he pleased, perhaps a little too much so.
His music, on the other hand, belonged to the world - his recordings have been loved by people of all colors, nations, and languages for decades - even fighting to enjoy his music without paying financial homage to the recording industry moguls who own the copyrights.
Imagine the reaction if, in an Elvis tribute, Brad Pitt were to say that we wanted to celebrate this white man who belonged to white people everywhere, and which we generously shared with the world. Or said that about the Beatles. Or Beethoven. Having a hard time imagining such a thing? Point made.
Music is colorless; it belongs to every performer, and every listener, without regard to race, creed, color, tongue, religion, or national origin. You may love Mr. Jackson's art or you may hate it; that is entirely your choice. His race has nothing to do with it.
When Mr. Foxx brought up the subject of Mr. Jackson's race for no good reason, he denied something that's as plain as the nose on Mr. Jackson's face once was: if there was one thing Michael did not want to be, it was a black man.
His rumored fourteen plastic surgeries turned him from a clearly black teenager, complete with Afro, into a caricature of an androgynous white person. Nobody held his head under bleach; nobody tied him to the operating table. He had himself changed of his own free will.
The same is true of his personal relationships. Both of his wives were white women, and his children, insofar as anyone has ever seen them, are what you'd expect from such unions: namely, not black.
There is nothing wrong with any of these choices; Mr. Jackson had a perfect right to do as he pleased with his own body, to marry whomever he pleased, to have children with whomever would agree to bear his children. If ever a young boy had a bizarre childhood certain to cause permanent psychological scarring, it was he; who knows what demons haunted his life? Perhaps he was, in the accusation of the old Black Power movement, a self-hater; we all have our hang-ups and neuroses.
Does it honor his memory to revel in the blackness he spent his life running from? For all his faults and questionable choices, Michael Jackson never hated anyone.
The man who sang "It don't matter if you're black or white" was all about love and unity, not revenge, race, Balkanization, or even grammar. "A black man" is positively the last thing he would have wanted to be remembered as:
I'm not going to spend my life being a color.
It's a great shame that a man who spent his life trying to bring the world closer together has been revoltingly misused by the usual mob of politically-correct race-baiters to try to tear our nation further apart. On some level, even Mr. Foxx realized this:
It don't matter what he looked like ... what his nose looked like ... it was what he sounded like.
Precisely. Show some respect. The racial identity circus should listen to the words of their stolen idol and do as he said:
I'm starting with the man in the mirror, I'm asking him to change his ways. [emphasis added]