Music

In 1931 the Harlem Renaissance contrarian George S. Schuyler finished Black No More, a mix of sci-fi and social satire that stings even today.

The lead character, a Dr. Junius Crookman, has invented a machine that turns customers from black to white. Business is booming, and before all is said and done everyone from W.E.B. Du Bois (thinly veiled as Shakespeare Agamemnon Beard) to Marcus Garvey (or Santop Licorice) have undergone the treatment. Crookman becomes a rich man, and the country's arbitrary racial pecking order, more pronounced then than now, is turned on its ear.

Dr. Crookman and his amazing deracinating machine flashed through my mind as soon as I heard about Michael Jackson's death. A pop supernova who spent his adulthood blurring his ethnicity could have simply stepped up to the good doctor and gotten it all over with in an instant. Instead, the man who sang, "It doesn't matter if you're black or white," in his final years, looked neither black nor white nor mixed race, but almost post-human.

Jackson suffered from vitiligo and lupus, both of which required medical treatment and altered his appearance. Such hardships never stopped the jokes or skepticism, nor do they fully account for his visage. As Brooks Barnes wrote in Friday's New York Times, Jackson's "whitened face" long ago joined his sequined glove and moonwalk in the "cultural firmament."

Skin color has long been a source of fascination in the African-American community and elsewhere. We don't want it to matter. We say it doesn't. But our ideals rarely mesh with reality.

Literature is rife with tales of black people "passing" for white, thus denying a part of their identity. Toni Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye, tells of a little black girl desperate to meet the blue-eyed, blond-haired standards of beauty ingrained in her by the world of mass consumption. (She shares a last name, Breedlove, with the woman who made a fortune selling hair and skin products to African-American women, Madame C.J. Walker. Walker is also among those parodied in Black No More).

What, then, do we make of Jackson? Looking at portraits of the King of Pop as a young man, you're struck not just by his caramel complexion but the robustness of his face: the nose, recently sliced down to a fine point, sits proudly above the mouth, seemingly permanent. Of course, in the age of nipping and tucking of the face as art project, nothing is permanent.

Not even race.

The best thinking of the day holds that race is but a social construct. There is no black "race" or white "race," just the prejudices and privileges that we attach to one group of people or another. But if race is a social construct, skin color is its most visible manifestation. And there's still something jarring about seeing a black R&B star become white before our eyes.

In the end, however, Jackson may have been right, at least concerning his legacy. Judging from the outpouring of sympathy and mourning, of posthumous adulation, it may not have mattered if he was black or white.

Hip-hop stars still shout him out: Nas, in his 2006 song "Can't Forget About You," reminisces about "Mike when his talk was live/Or when he first did the moonwalk on Motown 25." He misses the old Michael, but he doesn't sound bitter about the later, post-black version. His mind's eye still sees Jackson pre-whiteout, pre-erasure.

Perhaps it's less painful that way.

Movie critic Chris Vognar has been on a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University, focusing on issues of race and ethnicity in America.