It does not matter if you are black or white?
The first thing that I want to explore is the issue of race and I want to use the King of Pop, whatever this term means. Before we begin discussing MJ, let define what we mean by race. How do we define race? If this is a course on the history of African Americans then a clear definition of race becomes important and significant to our study. So let me have it. What are your definitions of race? Does MJ represent a clearly defined image of an African American male? I will have more to say about this later but lets hear your comments.
Black or White
This entry was posted on Saturday, July 4th, 2009 at 8:01 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
on July 6, 2009 at 8:33 am Kris wrote:
Humans like to have control of their environment. We like to catagorize and compartmentalize everything around us, giving each item a designation and a varying degree of importance. If we really are all “cousins” then racial or ethnic distinctions should be unnecessary. It’s also important to remember that many of the markers we use to define Caucasion, African, Oriental, were determined by Western Europeans, who saw things through their own biases.
on July 6, 2009 at 8:43 am howard wrote:
But what does it mean to be black or African American? How about Obama? Is he an African American? Why or Why not?
on July 6, 2009 at 1:21 pm Zach Prozanski wrote:
Race is a group that is related by common descent. Since it is such a vague definition, it leaves room for one to have their own thoughts on race. Personally, I only view race as where are ancestors originated from but either way, we all have ended up in similar places. Michael Jackson does not fit the usual profile for an African American male. For obvious reasons, his skin resembles someone of caucasian descent. If you place him next to other African Americans in todays public eye, you would realize drastic differences.
on July 6, 2009 at 7:47 pm Gail wrote:
I agree that race is related to common descent. The federal goverment insists that we be classified by race for all sorts of reasons. I was totally intrigued by a thought-provoking PBS special called Guns, Germs and Steel by a gentleman whose name escapes me at the moment. His philosphy about how races evolved and why really gave me something to think about and for me explained at least to a significant degree why europeans advanced as a culture faster and more pronounced than other races and why they seem to feel superior to all others. So I agree that race is defined by descent. I also think if a person is white and black, caucasians will categorize him in the least favorable terms – that being black (i.e. Obama). Michael Jackson does not fit into the stereotypical definitions of an African American man, which I believe is by design. I think he spent his life trying to escape from that definition. If you give classification to race beyond that of human, then you necessarily assign a value to it, and that is where we are and why we can’t seem to get past it.
on July 7, 2009 at 12:57 pm Kris wrote:
Americans use genetic markers to catagorize race (skin color, hair texture, facial features) If a person is born with certain markers that Americans have compartmentalized into a specific race, that person will be defined by those markers for the rest of his life. President Obama has genetic markers which have been catagorized as “African-American”. He had no choice but to accept that label.
Accepting a racial label means accepting the history that is attached to that label. I believe President Obama has accepted, willingly, the history of black people in America.
With Michael Jackson its a little harder to define. His lifelong attempts to radically change his appearance would suggest he hated “the face in the mirror”, however it has also been suggested that he was trying to be an “everyman”; neither black nor white, male nor female. Instead of accepting any labels, he chose to redefine himself physically.
on July 10, 2009 at 9:49 am Sarah wrote:
I agree with everyone else who has said that race is “having common descent” – though humans seem to make things a little more complicated by categorizing it even further by features (skin color, eye color, hair type). I think that because President Obama does have some qualities to make him African-American (obviously more than any other president before) – he is forced to carry the “First African-American President” title and everything that comes with it.
Michael Jackson is a little bit more difficult to categorize. If we consider race at birth to be the primary factor in assigning someone’s race, he would still be considered African-American. I actually read somewhere (or perhaps it was on the Martin Bashir documentary) that he himself still viewed himself as an African-American male. While his features seemed to more recently look more caucasian, I think because he was originally an African-American male, though to whatever skin disease or plastic surgery help on his part, he still is. This obviously isn’t the clearly defined image, but in a way, it gives a sense of race evolving and changing (somewhat literally in this case).
on July 21, 2009 at 1:00 pm James Kettinger wrote:
To agree with the others, race is often defined by having common descent. However, I also believe that race has a social aspect to it as well. In which people might also define their race by those whom they associate most or are most comfortable with. In our society, it seems that race is most commonly defined by appearance.
As for Michael Jackson, he is quite possibly one of the most difficult people to define, because he obviously does not share many of the physical characteristics of an African American, yet he was raised by a black family. Although he looked different, it seems like the appropriate way to define his race would be to focus upon his pre-surgery appearance and the genetic race of him and his family.