Hue and cry

Michael Jackson would have turned 60 this week and who knows what he’d have looked like now. Dangerous, 1991’s overlooked album, encapsulated the king of pop’s racial paradox — as his skin got lighter, his music became more politicised

For a figure as enigmatic as Michael Jackson, one of the more fascinating paradoxes about his career is this: as he became whiter, he became blacker. Or to put it another way: as his skin became whiter, his work became blacker. To elaborate, we must rewind to a crucial turning point: the early 1990s. In hindsight, it represents the best of times and the worst of times for the artist. In November 1991, Jackson released the first single from his Dangerous album: Black or White, a bright, catchy pop-rock-rap fusion that soared to No 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and remained at the top of the charts for six weeks. It was his most successful solo single since Beat It. The conversation surrounding Jackson at this point, however, was not about his music. It was about his race. Sure, critics said, he might sing that it “don’t matter if you’re black or white”, but then why had he turned himself white? Was he bleaching his skin? Was he ashamed of his blackness? Was he trying to appeal to every demographic, transcend every identity category in a vainglorious effort to reach greater commercial heights than Thriller?

To this day, many assume Jackson bleached his skin to become white — that it was a wilful cosmetic decision because he was ashamed of his race. Yet in the mid-’80s, Jackson was diagnosed with vitiligo, a skin disorder that causes loss of pigmentation in patches. According to those close to him, it was an excruciatingly humiliating personal challenge, one he went to great lengths to hide through long-sleeve shirts, hats, gloves, sunglasses and masks. When Jackson died in 2009, his autopsy definitively confirmed he had vitiligo.

However, in the early ’90s, people were sceptical. Jackson first publicly revealed he had vitiligo in a 1993 interview with Oprah Winfrey. “This is the situation,” he explained. “I have a skin disorder that destroys the pigmentation of the skin. It is something I cannot help, OK? But when people make up stories that I don’t want to be what I am it hurts me … It’s a problem for me that I can’t control.” Jackson did acknowledge having plastic surgery, but said he was “horrified” that people concluded that he didn’t want to be black. “I am a black American,” he declared. “I am proud of my race. I am proud of who I am.”

For Jackson, then, there was no ambivalence about his racial identity and heritage. His skin had changed but his race had not. In fact, if anything his identification as a black artist had grown stronger. The first indication of this came in the video for Black or White. Watched by a global audience of 500-million viewers, it was Jackson’s biggest platform ever; a platform, it should be noted, that he earned by breaking down racial barriers at MTV with his groundbreaking short films from Thriller.

The first few minutes of the Black or White video seemed relatively benign and consistent with the utopian calls of previous songs (Can You Feel It, We Are the World, Man in the

For Jackson there was no ambivalence about his racial identity and heritage. His skin had changed but his race had not

BLACK LIKE ME Michael Jackson and the black panther used in the video of his song ‘Black or White’. The violent ‘panther dance’ caused an uproar but should be seen not as a publicity stunt but as a cry of black outrage.