Watched by an unprecedented 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 indication of this came in the video for Black or White. In fact, if anything his identification as a black artist had grown stronger. His skin had changed but his race had not. I am proud of who I am.”įor Jackson, then, there was no ambivalence about his racial identity and heritage. 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 have a skin disorder that destroys the pigmentation of the skin. Jackson first publicly revealed he had vitiligo in a widely watched 1993 interview with Oprah Winfrey. However, in the early 1990s, the public were sceptical to say the least. When Jackson died in 2009, his autopsy definitively confirmed he had vitiligo, as did his medical history. According to those close to him, it was an excruciatingly humiliating personal challenge, one in which he went to great lengths to hide through long-sleeve shirts, hats, gloves, sunglasses and masks. Yet in the mid-1980s Jackson was diagnosed with vitiligo, a skin disorder that causes loss of pigmentation in patches on the body. 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. 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? The conversation surrounding Jackson at this point, however, was not about his music.

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