Decline Of Michael Jackson Says Much About America

Farai Chideya of AlterNet.org has written an open letter to Michael Jackson following the singer’s child molestation charges. “I remember you. Your lips were full and your nose was wide and your face was brown,” she writes. “This only rates mentioning because it is no longer true. So untrue, in fact, that sometimes I wonder if I imagined you as you once were. I’m sure at night, as a child, I dreamed of the boy with the Afro who sang and spun on his heels like a miniature James Brown. I wish that boy had become a man. That wish seemed reasonable all the way through ‘Off the Wall,’ when your nose grew narrower and hair more lank, but you were still visibly black. With every subsequent album your relationship to your original appearance grew fainter and fainter, until you were no longer even an echo of yourself. But the further you fled from black masculinity, the more international crowds lionized you. Today you are a grotesque.”