MARLON JACKSON ON US PRESIDENT, I fear for kids with Trump in charge
THERE’S a message in a Jackson Five song one of the famous pop family is desperate for Donald Trump to heed. Before it’s too late. In their huge hit Can You Feel It? the boys sang “all the colours of the world should be lovin’ each other wholeheartedly”.
Yet nearly 40 years on, Marlon Jackson suspects those words have fallen on deaf ears.
Today many fear the work done to rid the world of prejudice and hate is being unravelled by the new US President.
As Trump vows to ban Muslims, build a wall to keep out Mexicans and boost America’s nuclear arsenal,the worried singer tells the Sunday People: “If I could speak to him it would be about unifying the world instead of dividing it.
“I’d tell him we spend more time studying war than we do studying peace.
“He needs to understand the power he has been given.”
Asked i f he felt Trump understood the responsibility of that power, Marlon replied “No”.
As a member of an iconic African American family, he hears people say Trump’s victory has set US race relations back decades.
It is 50 years since Marlon, Tito, Jermaine, Jackie and the late great Michael l anded their first recording contract – in the midst of the civil rights battle and a year before the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King.
Sickened
Yet Marlon says: “The world was a far better place when we started than it is today.”
And he believes it will get worse. The star’s fears have grown after Trump’s victory appears to have galvanised white supremacists.
The tycoon has not always had an easy relationship with African Americans.
He once infamously declared “laziness is a trait in blacks”.
And on the campaign trail he said: “It is a disaster the way African-Americans are living, in many cases.
“We’ll get rid of the crime. You’ll be able to walk down the street without getting shot.”
His comments sickened Marlon. “That was almost stereotyping the African American race – that in the neighbourhoods where we grew up there is so much violence and gang violence and shooting. That’s not the case,” he says.
Marlon, who has three children with his wife of 41 years Carol Ann Parker, is now worried what kind of society his five grandchildren will grow up in.
He’s also concerned for his twomonth-old nephew Eissa Al Mana – son of sister Janet, 50, and her husband Wissam Al Mana.
“He’s the latest generation of the Jackson family,” says Marlon. “And I wonder what type of world that generation will be living in 25 or 30 years from now.” Janet’s husband is a Muslim. When asked if she had converted to Islam, which Trump has been accused of targeting, Marlon said: “I know she practises the religion. But the way I see it is that it’s like any other religion I see in life.
“We were all created by the same creator and it’s not about teaching such things as hatred against other religions, its about coming together.”
The father of three says his own faith helped him come to terms with superstar brother’s Michael’s death at 50 in 2009.
It was a loss all the brothers felt greatly – and made all the more raw last month when Michael’s daughter Paris, now 18, claimed she thought her father was murdered.
The teenager told Rolling Stone she doesn’t believe her dad died from an overdose of anaesthetic drug propofol given him by his doctor Conrad Murray, who was convicted and sentenced to two years for involuntary manslaughter.
Instead she described his death as a “set-up”, saying: “It’s obvious. All arrows point to that (him being murdered).
“It sounds like a total conspiracy theory and it sounds like bulls***, but all real fans and everybody in the family knows it.” She added that “a lot of people” wanted her dad dead.
But Marlon says: “I am not going to drift down that lane for a few reasons. It’s pretty painful for me. I’m