| Michael Jackson the singer is not just another pretty face. Behind those beautifully sculpted eyes modelled by a skilful plastic surgeon to resemble the inimitable violet orbs of Elizabeth Taylor, behind the carefully crafted nose with its chiseled nostrils, beneath that gently bleached skin masking his original skull, is a gifted black trapped within the acquired body of white. |
| Like the comedian Peter Cook who once admitted to being Jewish rather than a Jew (“I only go half the hog!”), Michael Jackson has gone half the hog so far as his race and sex are concerned. He has not made the irreversible leap from one side of the sex barrier to the other, unlike many others who have endured disquieting doubts about their true physical nature, nor has he been able to detach himself entirely from his ethnic background and blend into the white society of his yearning. The need for his expensive metamorphosis is understandable. It must have come as much of a shock to him to have realized, as his fellow-Negro the writer James Baldwin put it, that as a black American in a world of Gary Coopers, he was a Red Indian. [EXTRACT] |
Published in THE NATION 2 July 1992, and reprinted in THE ARMLESS QUEEN (1994). |
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