Editorial — Jackson — celebrity and racism
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Updated: July 07, 2009 3:50 PM
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 core themes including ‘change the world’ and ‘oppression is driving 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.
—Martha Wickett,
Salmon Arm Observer
(Black Press)
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