In the early evening of June 25, a small headline in the news read that former Charlie’s Angels actress and hairstyle icon Farrah Fawcett had died. Her death was not particularly surprising, as she was after all 62 and had been struggling with cancer for some time. An hour later when I went to the computer, a much bigger headline stated, “Is the King of Pop dead?” with a huge picture of Michael Jackson in the background. The question was answered shortly afterwards: Jackson had indeed passed away in unknown circumstances, and fans were already gathering outside the hospital to which he had been taken.
While Michael Jackson was a celebrity who received an enormous amount of media attention, it has been said that nobody truly knew him. Indeed, questions about the man linger on. For example, did he or did he not sexually molest the young boys with whom he kept company? He was accused of doing so on two separate occasions, but in the first case he reached an out-of-court settlement with the purported victim’s family and in the second he was acquitted. The jury’s decision was somewhat equivocal: though they could not exclude the possibility that he might have sexually abused children in the past, in this particular instance he did not. I strongly suspect that the accusations against Michael Jackson were part of the wave of child sexual abuse hysteria that swept through the United States and that led to many people being charged on dubious grounds.* However, the real truth will probably never be known.
Even before that Jackson’s sexual identity was always the subject of much speculation. It was sometimes hard to tell by his appearance whether he was a woman or a man. A rumour in the 1980s had it that he was intending to undergo a sex change operation because he could no longer silence the “woman in me,” but either the rumour was untrue or Michael Jackson changed plans because nothing became of it. Similarly his sexual orientation was unclear in the minds of many. In his youth he was said to have romantic relationships with actress Brooke Shields and his co-star in the Thriller video Ola Ray. A number of observers suggested that these publicized romances were just for show and that these women served as a so-called “cover” for his true sexual orientation. No media report, though, was ever able to pinpoint any relationship he may have had with another man. He did marry women twice and father two children, but comments about his actual sexual proclivities continued.
Michael Jackson’s greatest ambiguity lay in his racial identity. To quote one of his most popular songs, was he black or white? Pictures of him as a child and young man show him with clearcut African features: a large Afro hairdo and a typical “Black” nose. By the time Thriller rolled around, however, he had obviously undergone a nose job, and his hair was curly rather than kinky. At the time of his death his hair was completely straight. But the biggest question had to do with his skin colour, which became progressively lighter over the years. Jackson himself claimed that the lightening was the result of a medical condition that made his skin lose colour. Such conditions do exist (the mother of an African-American friend of mine had one), but given Michael’s apparent attempts to “Caucasianize” himself (the nose operation, the hair straightening), doubts on the veracity of his explanation will persist.
Of course like many American Blacks Michael Jackson had non-African ancestry as well. One of his ancestors was a White man, another an American Indian. Nonetheless, according to America’s “one-drop rule” Jackson and his family would definitely be considered Black. Some Black activists lamented his various “Whitening” endeavours, seeing them as a sign of racial self-hatred. Jackson, though, never claimed to speak for the African-American community. Indeed, his music was loved by people of all colours throughout the world, so he might have feared losing or alienating some of his fans by embracing a particular ethnic identity. In his song “Black or White,” he appears to disavow any racial allegiance – although many observers noted that for a man who proclaimed it didn’t matter whether you were Black or White he seemed to do everything in his power to be White himself.
An autopsy done on Jackson’s remains was inconclusive. As of now (June 28) the cause of his demise has yet to be determined. In death, as in life, the man remains an enigma. And perhaps that is how he would have wanted it to be.
* Here I do not mean to imply that the sexual abuse of children does not exist or that it is not a serious crime. However, starting in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s there was a trend of attributing seemingly unusual behaviour in children to sexual abuse and fingering adults with whom they had come in contact with molesting them.
A general in the Indonesian army, Suharto (like many Indonesians he used only one name) took power in 1965 after conducting an anti-Communist purge and deposing then-president Sukarno. During his thirty-two-year leadership Suharto greatly industrialized the country and reduced its poverty. He gained the support of the United States, who saw his “New Order†administration as a bulwark against the spread of Communism in Southeast Asia. On the other hand, his regime was known for its corruption and brutality. Hundreds of thousands of people, mainly real or suspected Communists, were tortured by the police, kept in prison for long periods without trial, made to “disappear,†or killed outright. The Suharto administration’s invasion and annexation of West Papua (Irian Jaya) and East Timor (now an independent nation) and repression of the independence movement in the province of Aceh drew condemnation from international human rights organizations. Though Indonesia was the recipient of aid from the US and other Western countries, much of it went into the pockets of Suharto himself and his family members. There were discussions after his resignation in 1998 about prosecuting him for embezzlement, but he was never formally charged in a court of law.
Suharto’s treatment of different ethnic groups challenges the simplistic notion of a world made up of Whites on one hand and “people of colour†on the other. Ironically, this vision is shared by two factions who otherwise appear to have nothing in common: White Supremacists and leftists of all racial backgrounds. The latter tend to see non-Whites as victims of European colonialism – or American imperialism – and expect them to band together against the White oppressor. But this was hardly the case in East Timor, even if both that country and Indonesia at one time fell under European powers (Portugal and the Netherlands respectively). Though the West was rightly accused of turning a blind eye to Indonesia’s persecution of the Timorese people, the fact is that most of the human rights violations in Timor were committed not by Europeans or Americans but by Indonesians. East Timorese freedom fighter Constancio Pinto writes in his book East Timor’s Unfinished Struggle: Inside the Timorese Resistance that while not perfect, Timor’s former Portuguese overlords were far more humane than the Indonesians who came after them. And contrary to White racists’ idea of a vast anti-White conspiracy by “hordes of colour,†Timorese activist Xanana Gusmao has actually expressed solidarity with the people of Poland and the Baltics – at whose struggles for independence White “progressives†have often scoffed. Nor within Indonesia itself did Suharto love his Chinese subjects as fellow Asians.
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