As for Michael Jackson, why wasn't I sad for months when an equally groundbreaking musician, John Lennon, died when I was in my twenties? Maybe because I'm now not so much mourning Jackson as my own youth. His music, embedded as it is in the texture of my younger years, triggers memories. As a preteen, I loved the bubble-gum sounds of the Jackson Five, but more importantly, Michael was my first boy band crush. And he was black. I remember him for that as much as for his God-given talent. Growing up in all-white suburb, he was my first experience of having feelings for a boy of a different race, and young as I was, on some level I was aware of that.
Years later, the rock-infused Thriller became merged in my mind with music videos on TV and my own young adulthood.We who were then 20-something remember exactly where we were when we saw MJ moonwalk on Motown’s 25th anniversary show, the same way we remember the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show when we were kids or the moon landing in 1969. Also, Michael's televised moonwalk was one of the last widely shared pop culture moments, before cable television and then the Internet splintered our collective attention.
So I do mourn still for Michael, but quietly and alone, or with black friends. Black women over 30 are Jackson’s biggest fan base. When white people disparage the attention paid to Michael's death, they are failing to recognize—and respect-- the nostalgia gap between black and white America on this topic. When Spike Lee held a Jackson memorial birthday bash in Brooklyn in August, or intellectuals met for a Michael Jackson panel at NYU, these events seemed to be endorsed and attended mostly by African Americans, many of whom believe that people like Jackson paved the way for Obama. Tracy Morgan of 30 Rock, who attended the birthday party, declared, "Michael Jackson was everything. I don't even remember life without him." But many whites see all this attention as idolization and overcoverage of a man who had slowly and sadly gone crazy.
