Deja Oliver Core Response #3--Michael Jackson and Paul Robeson

The first reading touches on how people view not only masculinity in general but masculinity especially as it pertains to blackness. If a black man is not the hypermasculine aggressive stereotype (or any variant of that) then he is sexually ambiguous and androgynous. “Jackson’s sexuality and sexual preferences in particular have been the focus for such public fascination” as the sexuality of black men often is. People are literally obsessed with the black body in an aggressively sexual paradigm. In the reading about Paul Robeson “by the end of the play “Othello ceased to be a human and became a gibbering primeval man’” in the 1930 performance, but in the later performances Robeson’s emphasis on Othello’s humanity and dignity weren’t well received by white critics.

Robeson as Othello

One such critic lamented the absence of the “vision of Chaos come again” in Paul Robeson’s Othello performance which is exemplary of how people view black men. During the course of the play Othello is never “chaos” but we expect him to “revert” to an innate brutality present in all black men (and black people in general) or else the “savagery is not believable”, as stated by another Robeson critic. 

Dyer was discussing Paul Robeson as Yank in The Hairy Ape in when he stated “black stands for animal vitality and white stands for frayed nerves”, this statement can also explain Michael Jackson’s perception as Peter Pan or “the lost boy”. When the Thriller album was released, Jackson’s complexion had lightened and his hair texture was considerably altered. While in hindsight this seems like a minor difference, audiences then were used to Jackson with deep brown skin and a large afro—he looked like all the other Jacksons. Seeing whiteness on a black man could only serve to heighten people’s anxieties about his emotional stability as a black man. If whiteness means “frayed nerves” on white people than what does it mean for black people?