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Michael Jackson and the American Imagination

Friday, June 26th, 2009

Just months after our President proved that you can be born black in America and achieve the highest heights, the life of Michael Jackson offers a very different narrative: he is someone whose cultural legacy shaped his success, but did not provide a path to inner peace.

Michael Jackson seemed crushed under a weight of identity: black/man/star/brother/father/son. Add philanthropist/media-victim and -manipulator/accused pederast/primate owner/fashionista and dancer. Owner of, and now perhaps a returnee to, Neverland.

Back in 2003, I wrote a piece asking what happened to the brownskinned boy who stole my heart and those of girls my age across the world. Why did he shed his color, and the sincerity of his smile?

As people gathered today on Twitter to share stories, sift the real news from the fake, and mourn, I saw reporter Lisa Ling post, “RIP Michael Jackson, My First Boyfriend.” I felt the same way. It wasn’t just a childhood crush. Over time, I felt like I was one of millions of people who wanted Michael Jackson to succeed. MTV at first refused to play his videos because black artists, no matter how successful, didn’t fit their idea of their format. Of course Michael, with the help of Quincy Jones, went on to become the King of Pop and the king of music video.
In the intro to Thriller, Michael says “I’m not like other guys” and “I’m different”… and then proceeds to transmogrify into a werewolf.

Pop cult from “Twilight” to “Harry Potter” has taken feelings of alienation and packaged them for wide consumption. Michael was one of the first masters of our modern era to do that well.

But what he could not seem to do is seize control of his own transformation and find his own center as a man, not just a creator. After all, the trope of successful transformation is that the hero becomes something else, but can return to his or her human emotions if not human form.

John Landis, the director of “Thriller,” has called Jackson a “tragic figure.” And that brings me, personally, back to race. Race added a very specific prism to the failed transformation of Michael Jackson. His plastic surgery bordered on pathology and racial caricature. His need for the spotlight brought him, arguably, into clashes with both the law and public opinion. I am thinking specifically of the charges of his treatment of children… others’, and his own.

Would he have felt freer to pursue his own alternative identity if we had not also wanted him to be what he could not seem to be… an adult black man who provided fodder for the fantasies we cherished when he was a child?

In the prelude to the Thriller video, Michael Jackson speaks to the black, bobbysox-wearing girl who is his love interest and says, “You know I like you… And I hope you like me the way I like you.” Sigh.

We always loved you, Michael. I hope you found peace in just being you, whoever you were, and despite what we all wanted you to be.

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Farai Chideya’s new novel Kiss the Sky, is about a black rock star struggling with fame. She is the founder of PopandPolitics.com.

This article is also cross-posted on The Grio.

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BREAKING: Gov’t Buyout, AIG, & Obama’s “Brand Black”

Wednesday, March 18th, 2009

Obama 2008

WOW.

Things are moving even faster than I thought in the re-ordering of the American economy. It’s four PM on Wednesday 3/18/09. Although many people don’t know or don’t yet understand, the link between government and finances has been totally changed.

Yes, we had AIG (see below), and the foreclosures.

But now… check this…. the U.S. government is buying a TRILLION DOLLARS in mortgaged backed securities in order to create instant liquidity in the markets (read: cash you can borrow to buy a home or a market.) I never thought the hip hop chant to “make money money, make money money mon-EEE” would become so literal.

Yes, I am a news geek; and a politics geek; and I am astounded. I linked from the NYT to this handy dandy URL you can share with your friends. tinyurl.com/USmakes-fakes-Money.

I wrote the article below earlier this morning. Already it seems dated. But bear with me as I breathe.

F

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I’ve been guesting on WNYC’s syndicated morning show The Takeaway with John Hockenberry. (Adaora Udoji is on maternity leave.) We’ve been talking a lot about branding. Some folks told us about the brands they missed (”Bit ‘o Honey” and the “Reggiebar” candy bars each got a vote).

Other folks talked about what they would rename/rebrand “too big to fail/too small-minded to give up the multimillion dollar bonuses” insurer AIG as…

Amigos in Gold

Amateurs Implementing Guile

Anti Inflammatory Geeks

A**holes Invoking God

As If God

Appalling In Greed

(And that’s just from the journalists!)

Listeners wrote, among others:

Absolutely Insufferable Greed

Angry Investor Gross

But let me take a turn here.

Yesterday, I was invited to address the US Mission to the United Nations, now led by Ambassador Susan Rice. I was part of a panel that examined how and why then-Senator Obama won the Presidency; and what lay ahead. I spoke about Brand Black, or blackness as a mature political brand, just as hip hop is now a mature media brand. Every product/entity/person who wants market share starts out in the experimental, spaghetti against the wall.

Of all the people who start blogs, relatively few keep it up and even fewer find a longterm audience. If they do find an audience—not just bloggers but political candidates, preachers, musicians, etc.—then they enter the brand-building phase. They try to bring on a core constituency first, then expand that constituency. For hip hop, the core constituency was urban blacks/Latinos, adding graf artists, b-boys and b-girls, streetcorner wisemen…. and then multicultural urban youth… and then multicultural global youth. As hip hop has become a mature brand, you see stars like Ice Cube and Queen Latifah moving into mainstream family-oriented film; P. Diddy and Russell Simmons crossing onto Broadway; Simmons into philanthropy and spirituality; and Jay Z into the economic CEO/Beyonceed celebrosphere. My argument in the speech, which I will elide, concerned the use of hip hop as a feedback loop that helped make blackness a culturally mature brand that had political capital.

Since this is a blog post and not a dissertation, peep this:

First, check out Jay Z solo.

Then, Obama on the stump.

Then the remix:

When Obama first made the gesture, it split the world into three camps: people who thought he actually had dirt on his shoulder (maybe three people or less worldwide); people who got the intent of the gesture (back up off this; you don’t matter); and people who got the specific reference to hip hop and the 2003 hit by Jay Z.

The use of hip hop signifiers and metaphors, as well as support from the hip hop community, really drove the Obama campaign at first. The hip hop generation (or at this point, really two generations) were the “early adopters” of Brand Obama. The Civil Rights generation were later adopters of Brand Obama. And Brand Obama stood on…. the shoulders of the Civil Rights generation, who took blackness from an exiled/discredited “brand” among anti-integrationist whites to a nearly-mature brand that lacked one thing… the sense that a black man could be president.

I didn’t know that Obama would win. No one did. But Obama used hip hop to leverage early youth support, which in turn built numbers for what political scientist William Jelani Cobb of Spelman calls “The Black History Month Massacre” (Obama winning 10 Dem primaries and caucuses in a row), which in turn helped justify Civil Rights generation political figures/superdelegates like John Lewis switching their allegiance from Sen. Clinton to Sen. Obama.

In the end, Brand Obama leveraged hip hop to take the White House… a final signal that “Brand Black” is mature and thriving. What happens next? I don’t know. But I’m eager to see, hear, and write more, especially now that politics has a soundtrack.

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Blackbird: A Browser for Black People. Huh?

Monday, December 8th, 2008

Yes, it’s true. It’s called Blackbird (powered by Mozilla) and it was designed by African Americans for African Americans (kind of like FUBU). The free browser was developed with these Pew Internet 2004 findings in mind: “(1) there are 20 million African Americans online who need tools to build and foster community now more than ever, (2) 85% of African Americans prefer online news and information from the Black perspective, and (3) African Americans are twice as likely to be among the first to discover new trends and use advanced technology compared to the general population.”

Blackbird’s goal is to make it easier for black people to find African American news and relevant content online, interact with members of the African American community, share stories and comments, and watch videos through the browser.  The video section features content from online TV sites like DigitalSoulTV, NSNewsTV, UptownLiveTV and ComedyBanksTV. To me, the best part of the browser idea is the ‘Give Back’ program, which gives donations to several nonprofit organizations. Blackbird also plans to give ten percent of its 2009 revenues to their nonprofit partners, which seems pretty generous.

This browser opens up an interesting conversation around “what is black content?” Is the content provider black? Or is it content written with black people in mind? And by the way, who is considered black? Will content by and for people of multi-ethnic and bi-racial backgrounds be included? Hmmm..

In addition to the questions surrounding a “black browser,” I’m not entirely convinced black people needed a “separate” black browser. (Maybe I just love my Firefox one.)  Who knows? It might be just what my life was missing.

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How Bitter Racists Continue to Marginalize the Republican Party

Monday, November 17th, 2008
courtesy Staten Island Advance

courtesy Staten Island Advance

It’s been almost two weeks since Barack Obama was elected the first black U.S. president, and since then there have been “hundreds” of documented racial crimes across the country, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, reported by the Associated Press.

Documented in the AP article are burned crosses in Apolacan Township, Pennsylvania and Hardwick, New Jersey; racist graffiti in Staten Island, Los Angeles and Kilgore, Texas; and a “Osama Obama” assassination prediction pool in Standish, Maine.

In Springfield, Massachusetts, a church under construction to house a black congregation was burned to the ground in the early morning after the election. While investigators have concluded the fire was caused by arsonists, they have no evidence it was racially motivated. The church’s leader has made up his own mind.

“I’ve seen segregation. I’ve seen Jim Crowism,” Bishop Bryant J. Robinson Jr. told the Boston Globe. “We’ve come quite a ways, but we’re not that perfect union yet. There’s obviously a remnant of that kind of behavior still being practiced, for whatever reason.”

Even more frightening, the splintered and ineffectual white supremacist movement has seen interest surge in the wake of the election. Two white nationalist Web sites have crashed because of heavy traffic, and a secessionist site has also had interest skyrocket.

These attacks follow on the heels of the racial epithets yelled at John McCain and Sarah Palin rallies during the waning days of the campaign.

Throughout the campaign, the Obama camp stayed away from discussing race, and the candidate had to convince his aides it was OK to give a major speech on race after the Reverend Jeremiah Wright issue came to a head. But while there may not have been a true dialogue between the candidates about race, some voters had to reconcile previously held beliefs.

In Levittown, Pennsylvania, and other cities in the western part of the state, voters overcame concerns about Obama’s race that had been present until the final days of the campaign. But in other counties that straddle the Appalachian Mountains, and down through the deep South, racial questions led to increases in support for John McCain. Voter analysis by the New York Times found that less than a third of white voters supported Obama in the South, compared to 43 percent of whites nationally. In Alabama, 18 percent of whites voted for John Kerry. Only nine percent voted for Obama.

If some upset voters have no trouble expressing their frustration by writing the N-word on parked cars, others don’t object to speaking their minds to a reporter. In the Times article, voters compete for the Most Racist Quote Award.

“I think there are going to be outbreaks from blacks. From where I’m from, this is going to give them the right to be more aggressive.” — Gail McDaniel

One white woman said she feared that blacks would now become more “aggressive,” while another volunteered that she was bothered by the idea of a black man “over me” in the White House.

Conservative commentators like Rush Limbaugh are crowing that the country is still more red than blue, ignoring the fact that the number of solidly conservative counties is steadily shrinking. And while Limbaugh says liberals “organize in little communes and cliques and cities and so forth and only want to hang around with each other and themselves,” he ignores places like Blount County in northern Alabama, where 84 percent of voters picked John McCain.

David Brooks, as moderate a Republican there is, worries the traditionalist arm of the GOP will cater to the base with more fear-mongering and suffer even more defeats on the national stage. An increased number of hate crimes can hardly be called a good start to rehabilitating the Republican image.

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Race in America: SWM Befriends SBM

Tuesday, October 28th, 2008

Devin Friedman wants white people and black people to be friends. Instead of lecturing from the soapbox, however, he leads by example and tries to make a new black friend of his own.

In an article in the November issue of GQ, the senior correspondent writes that he looked around at a cocktail party he and his wife were holding at his house and realized how white his life had become, so he placed an ad in Craigslist asking a black person to be his friend.

The 7,500 word story that ensued provoked a flurry of responses, many of them positive, though he did get a few knocks. How, for instance, could he support such blatant tokenism? He doesn’t, though he argues that it’s okay to count your black friends (”I couldn’t handle walking around knowing that I have the same number of black friends as George W. Bush,” he writes).

But Friedman would be the first to tell you the article’s not just about him trying to find a new pal with skin darker than his own. What is it, then?

(more…)

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