Yes, thank you, I heard. Michael Jackson is dead.

It’s amazing, really, how much media coverage this event has generated. One man, one tragic death, yet people die tragically every day, everywhere in the world, with barely a ripple. Certainly Jackson was an incredibly talented performer, musician, dancer. But still, just one man, one tragic death.

It brings to mind celebrity, and racism.

A documentary that aired recently talked about how celebrity, at one time, was important to the survival of human beings. Humans would strive to win the favour of those in the group who possessed the attributes for survival. These survivors would be the people who were revered, sought, watched, followed. Now we hang around mesmerized by celebrity, often to the detriment of human survival.

People are encouraged to focus on whether Brad and Angelina are getting along, or if one teenaged star or another is thrilled about her pregnancy, or which celebrity has had the most magnificent mammary magnification, all the while being distracted and anesthetized from tackling the real issues that require human thinking and action.

Michael Jackson was a special kind of celebrity, however. He and his family had to fight racism to become successful professionally and financially, but what a toll it took.

He was a tender soul. His music had central themes including ‘changing the world’ and ‘discrimination is making me crazy.’ While Michael could be dismissed as a weird freak, his very public attempts to transform himself through surgery into anything but a black man gave a painful glimpse of just how impossible it was, and still can be, to be a black man in the U.S. – or elsewhere in the world.

Amid the incessant media coverage last week of Jackson’s death, I had a visit from friends who were heading across Canada. They had brought along their nanny to help care for their large brood.

As I attempted to get to know her, she matter-of-factly told me her tale of incredible pain and sacrifice.

She has two children of her own, eight and 10, who live in the Philippines, where she’s from. She left them there six years ago because her family wasn’t surviving on what they could earn. She looks after children in Canada so she can send money to her own family in the Philippines. She phones her children once a week and hopes to be able to have them join her in Canada one day. Her eyes fill with tears when she talks about how hard it was to leave them.

Here in Canada, her heroism goes unnoticed. She’s a quiet brown woman who efficiently and invisibly carries out her work.

Yet her situation is not a product of bad luck or misfortune; it’s a product of imperialism and racism that has damaged her country. For her and Michael Jackson, and millions of people of colour throughout the world, racism has taken and continues to take its toll.

If only every person could realize that each is a star in their own right. Each has the power, individually and together, to set the world right, but it will take conscious thought and effort and a move away from the mind-numbing distraction that celebrity culture offers.