But however much Jackson wanted to transcend race, it has always been at the core of his celebrity, from those vitriolic sellout accusations to his resurrection as a kind of black superhero after his 2009 passing. In the 1980s, Jackson became progressively lighter-skinned (he later blamed it on the skin disease vitiligo), and a battery of cosmetic surgeries warped the look of his nose, his chin, and the shape of his face. Having long internalized Motown’s crossover-success ethos, Jackson may have even wanted to look like a crossover. Exploding sales records with Thriller and breaking the color barrier on MTV, Jackson emerged as a bona fide hero to black America, blazing a trail for the future success of icons like Tiger Woods and Barack Obama. ![]() In “Black or White,” Michael Jackson’s 1991 pop plea to transcend divisive racial thinking, the famous lyric goes: “If you’re thinking about my baby/ It don’t matter if you’re black or white.” Ironically, though, Jackson’s unprecedented career success had almost everything to do with race, as he forever altered the parameters for black achievement.
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