With due respect to ...

[blamebrampton]

... those of you who are mourning him, I am probably going to bite the next person who tells me that Michael Jackson was a revolutionary figure in the fight for equality by African Americans. I hasten to add that this has so far been three in real life and double the number of media foik: my flist has been a bastion of sanity.

Aesthetic irony aside, it belittles genuine revolutionary figures. And I am not even talking about political giants like Dr King; there were many entertainers who walked a far more difficult path earlier and with more grace and charity, such as Ella Fitzgerald, Paul Robeson, Josephine Baker, Sammy Davis Jnr and Nina Simone.

I'm all for people loving the heroes they choose, but I would love a bit of perspective at times like these. And perhaps a little sense of history.

Flistees who are just missing the singing and dancing, I apologise for intruding on your sad day. 

Comments

[theburningboy.livejournal.com]

It kind of totally sucked for him, that he grew up in a society where anything but white was fug and then he grew old in a society that giggled at his freakishness for swallowing the indoctrination.

I'm not sure if anybody is a position to judge him for that. (Though I feel kind of safe in judging him for other stuff.)

[pir8fancier.livejournal.com]

Agree with that assessment entirely. This country is racist as all hell and there is NO WAY TO WIN or even get parity.

[potteresque_ire]

I don't dislike him for choosing to change his looks to imitate white features; it really is his choice, and if he was luckier in picking his plastic surgeons the outcome would have been very different. But it does tell me is that his strength in his artistic talent and his courage to explore new frontiers in his art doesn't extend to his personality ... in a way, I do feel sorry for him, for clearly having something that's haunting him that only he, and the few who are close to him, may see. But as Brammers wrote in the post, I can't see him as a revolutionary figure for that reason. I don't think of him any less—it's just, that role isn't him, and to put him in it does belittle the figures that really belongs, even if, in the end, MJ's impact on breaking racial barriers may be no less significant.

Mmmm. Do I make sense?

I actually don't see him much of a freak. I see him as someone who's half crazed with loneliness and obsession.

[theburningboy.livejournal.com]

I didn't say you thought of him as a freak. I was talking about society.

I do think it's kind of easy to sit back and judge him, but people REALLY thought that being African American was being ugly, stupid, poor, uneducated, every negative thing in the book. I don't think we can just brush this off as, "That was his choice. He was a coward for not standing up for himself."

The courage to explore = Win? Not always.

I don't see him a Revolutionary person himself, but I think many people used him, their love for his craft, his persona, to do revolutionary things. MJ was not MLK Jr, but for some people MJ was the gateway to MLK and that's not something I can dismiss that easily.

[blamebrampton.livejournal.com]

that he grew up in a society where anything but white was fug

I'm a bit younger than he was, but the Black is Beautiful idea (slogans, badges, hair care and all) predates me, and he didn't start changing his looks radically until the 80s and 90s, by when there were many acclaimed African-American beauties, both male and female.

I think he may well have believed this, but I don't think that society at large is to blame.

[theburningboy.livejournal.com]

We're still having those issues. In this day and age we're still talking about "bad" hair (people getting fired over wearing their hair "ethnically") and too wide noses and creams to make skin lighter, and photoshoping Beyonce to make her look latte instead of espresso. The slogans may predate you to Ali-times, but it's not something people can overcome in such a relatively short amount of time. Tyra Banks is not that old (is she?) and she still had to deal with being PoC and not measuring up to the white standards of beauty.